Page 1 - Week2

Week 2 reading

A history lesson (continued)

The viable birth of science
S ince science suffered a stillbirth even in early medieval Arab civilization and since
it was a self-sustaining enterprise by the late seventeenth century, this implies that
its viable birth should be sought in a relatively brief period. The “received” view
has now been for the last three hundred years that science arose like a phoenix during the
Renaissance whose spokesmen rescued Greek science from a thousand-year-long neglect.
Jaki argues that this view has derived “derived partly from the reformer’s scorn for
medieval Catholicism and partly from the hostility of the leaders of the French
Enlightenment to anything Christian.” Both groups had a vested interest in painting the
Catholic Middle Ages as dark as possible.
As a result neither the secularist nor the Protestant world of scholarship was ready to
take notice of the monumental studies of Pierre Duhem, beginning with his two-volume
Les origines de la statique (1905–1906) and continued with his three-volume Etudes sur
Léonard de Vinci (1906–1913). As Jaki shows in his magisterial studies on Duhem, those
two works had more than amply revealed the crucial debt owed by Copernicus and Galileo
(and indirectly by Newton) to some medieval scholars at the Sorbonne. Studied slighting of
those works anticipated a similar attitude towards the publication, in the 1950s, of the last
five volumes of Duhem’s ten-volume Le système du monde, possibly the greatest scholarly
feat by a single individual in modern times. This was the series which first showed the
medieval period not as a dark age for science but rather its very cradle. In fact, as Jaki
shows, the almost forty-year delay of the publication of Le système du monde is a proof of
that “scholarly” resistance to plain evidence. Jaki’s criticism does not spare, in that respect,
Catholic scholarship which has still to realize the crucial importance of Duhem’s heroic
efforts. For Jaki it is emphatically not “a freak happening of history that science was born
in a Europe that was living through its centuries of faith.”
The key point, according to Jaki, is that Jean Buridan anchored his impetus theory
(which implies a beginning for any particular motion) in the beginning of all motion in
the first moment of creation. Buridan’s creative scientific thinking owed much to his keen
awareness of the solemn definition, at Lateran IV, of the age-old doctrine of creation out
of nothing and in time. Also most important for Buridan was the condemnation, on 7
March 1277, by Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, of 219 “Aristotelian” propositions,
some of which seemed to restrict the freedom of the Creator to create the universe solely
in its actual form. The overall aim was to “safeguard the abilities and exclusive rights of
the Creator against any compromise dictated by a narrow rationalism.” Bishop Tempier
outlawed such notions as the perennial recurrence of things every thirty-six thousand
years, a view of the world as eternal, the view that the celestial orbs are like organs in a
human body, and the idea that stars determine individuals from the moment of their birth.
The decree showed that Christians were willing to distinguish, within the received Greek
corpus, what was contrary to a Christian belief in Creation from what could be accepted

1