Europe: A History (103 page)

Given the persistence of religious pluralism in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Poland-Lithuania, it is erroneous to view Europe in this period in terms of a simple division between the ‘Protestant North’ and the ‘Catholic South’. The Irish, the Belgians, and the Poles, among others, have every right to insist that the North was not uniformly Protestant. Both Orthodox Christians and Muslims have good reason to object to the South being classified as uniformly Catholic. The Protestant-Catholic divide was an important feature of Central Europe, and of Germany in particular. But it cannot be applied with any precision to the Continent as a whole. Attempts by Marx or Weber to correlate it with later divisions based on social or economic criteria would seem to be Germanocentric to a fault. One might as well ask why the Protestant God was so successful in endowing his followers with coalfields.

One thing was clear. Senseless bloodletting in the name of religion inevitably sparked off a reaction in the minds of intelligent people. The Wars of Religion offered fertile soil for the fragile seeds of reason and science.

The Scientific Revolution
, which is generally held to have taken place between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, has been called ‘the most important event in European History since the rise of Christianity’.
¹⁸
It followed a natural progression from Renaissance humanism, and was assisted to some extent by Protestant attitudes. Its forte lay in astronomy, and in those sciences such as mathematics, optics, and physics which were needed to collect and to interpret astronomical data. But it changed mankind’s view both of human nature and the human predicament. It began with observations made on the tower of the capitular church of Frombork (Frauenburg) in Polish Prussia in the second decade of the sixteenth century; and it culminated at a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College in London on 28 April 1686.

The difficulty with the Scientific Revolution, as with any fundamental shift in human thought, lies in the fact that its precepts did not accord with prevailing ideas and practices. The so-called ‘age of Copernicus, Bacon and Galileo’ is a misnomer: in most respects this was still the age of the alchemists, the astrologers, and the magicians. Nor should modern historians mock the achievements of those whose theories were eventually proved mistaken. It is fair to say that the alchemists misunderstood the nature of matter. It is not fair to say that researchers who have seen the constructive aspects of alchemy are ‘tinctured by the lunacy which they try to describe’. It would be hard to find a more ‘whiggish interpretation’ of scientific history.
¹⁹

Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus, 1473–1543), who had studied both at Cracow and at Padua, established that the Sun, not the Earth, lay at the centre of the solar system. His heliocentric ideas coincided with the common astrological habit of using the sun as the symbol of unity. But the point is: he proved the hypothesis by detailed experiments and measurements. Son of a German merchant family from
Thorn (Toru) and a loyal subject of the King of Poland, whom he had actively defended against the Teutonic Knights, he lived for thirty years in Frombork as a canon of the province of Warmia (Ermeland). He was employed by the King in the pursuit of monetary reform; and his treatise
Monetae cudendae ratio
(1526), about ‘bad money driving out good’, expounded Gresham’s Law thirty years before Gresham. His theory of heliocentrism, first advanced in 1510, was fully supported with statistical data in
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
(On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1543). It was published on the initiative of a mathematical colleague from Lutheran Wittenberg, G. J. von Lauchen (Rheticus), dedicated to Pope Paul III, and delivered to its author on his deathbed. At a stroke it overturned reigning conceptions of the universe, dashing the Aristotelian ideas about a central, immobile, and unplanetlike Earth. Its immediate impact was much reduced because a fearful editor replaced Copernicus’s introduction with a misleading preface of his own.

The Copernican theory gestated for almost a century. The Dane Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) rejected heliocentrism; but through observing the pathways of comets he destroyed another ancient misconception, namely that the cosmos consists of onion-like crystalline spheres. Brahe’s colleague in Prague, Johann Kepler (1571–1630), established the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, and enunciated the laws of motion underlying Copernicus. But it was the Florentine, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), one of the first to avail himself of the newly invented telescope, who really brought Copernicus to the wider public. Fortunately for posterity, Galileo was as rash as he was perceptive. Having discovered that ‘the moon is not smooth or uniform, but rough and full of cavities, like the earth’, he exploded the prevailing theory of ‘perfect spheres’. Moreover, he defended his findings with scathing comments on his opponents’ biblical references. ‘The astronomical language of the Bible’, he suggested to the dowager Duchess of Tuscany, was ‘designed for the comprehension of the ignorant’. This, in 1616, earned him a summons to Rome, and a papal admonition. And Galileo’s praise for Copernicus put Copernicus onto the Index. When Galileo persisted, however, and published his
Dialogo dei due massimi Sistemi del mondo
(Dialogue on the two main world systems, 1632), which expounded the superiority of Copernicus over Ptolemy, he was formally tried by the Inquisition, and forced to recant. His supposed parting comment to the inquisitors,
Eppur si muove
(Yet it does move), is apocryphal,
[LESBIA]

Practical science remained in its infancy during the era when the Copernican theory was in dispute. Some important assertions were made, however, by the sometime Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the father of scientific method. In his
Advancement of Learning
(1605), the
Novum Organum
(1620), and the
New Atlantis
(1627), Bacon stated the proposition that knowledge should proceed by orderly and systematic experimentation, and by inductions based on experimental data. In this he boldly opposed the traditional deductive method, where knowledge could only be established by reference to certain accepted axioms sanctioned by the Church. Significantly, Bacon held that scientific research must be complementary to the study of the Bible. Science was to be kept
compatible with Christian theology. ‘The scientist became the priest of God’s Book of Nature.’ One of Bacon’s ardent followers, John Wilkins (1614–72), sometime Bishop of Chester and a founder member of the Royal Society, wrote the curious
Discovery of a World on the Moon
(1638) containing the idea of lunar travel: ‘The inhabitants of other worlds are redeemed by the same means as we are, by the blood of Christ.’
²⁰

Important advances, too, were made by philosophers with a mathematical bent, notably by the two dazzling Frenchmen, René Descartes (1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–62), and their successor, Benedictus Spinoza (1632–77). Descartes, a soldier-adventurer who witnessed the Battle of the White Mountain (see p. 564), lived much of his life in exile in Holland. He is most associated with the uncompromising rationalist system named after him (Cartesianism) and elaborated in his
Discours sur la méthode
(1637). Having rejected every piece of information which came to him through his senses, or on the authority of others, he concluded that he must at least exist if he was capable of thinking:
Cogito, ergo sum
, ‘I think, therefore I am’, is the launch-pad of modern epistemology. At the same time, in a philosophy which divided matter from spirit and which delved into everything from medicine to morals, Descartes emphasized the mechanistic view of the world which even then was taking hold. Animals, for example, were viewed as complex machines, as were human beings.

Pascal, a native of Clermont-Ferrand and an inmate of the Jansenist Port-Royal in Paris, took the mechanical ideal to the point where he was able to produce the first ‘computer’. His
Lettres provinciales
(1656) are still quoted in Jesuit literature as a cup of poison. Yet his collected
Pensées
(1670) are a delectable blend of the fashionable rationalism and of sound common sense. ‘Le coeur a ses raisons’, he wrote, ‘que la Raison ne connalt point’ (the heart has its reasons which Reason cannot know). Or again: ‘People are neither angels nor beasts. Yet bad luck would have it that anyone who tries to create an angel creates a beast.’ Amidst growing hints about the conflict between science and religion, he proposed his famous gamble in favour of Faith. If the Christian God exists, he argued, believers will inherit everlasting life. If not, they will be no worse off than unbelievers. In which case, Christian belief is worth the risk.

Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew and a lens-grinder by profession, had been expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for heresy. He shared Descartes’s intensely mathematical and logical view of a universe formed by first principles, and Hobbes’s concept of a social contract. He was a pantheist, seeing God and nature as indistinguishable. The highest virtue lay in restraint guided by a full understanding of the world and of self. Evil derived from a lack of understanding. Blind faith was despicable. ‘The Will of God’ was the refuge of ignorance.

In England, the advocates of ‘experimental philosophy’ began to organize themselves in the 1640s. An inner circle, led by Dr Wilkins and Dr Robert Boyle (1627–91), formed an ‘Invisible College’ in Oxford during the Civil War. They joined together in 1660 to found the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Their first meeting was addressed by the architect Christopher Wren. Their early membership included a number of magicians, whose influence was not overtaken by the new school of scientists, such as Isaac Newton, for another twenty years. With Newton, modern science came of age (see Chapter VIII); and the example of the Royal Society radiated across Europe.

As always, old ideas mingled with the new. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Europe’s leading thinkers were largely agreed on a mechanical view of the universe operating on principles analogous to clockwork. Galileo had divined the principle of force—the basic element of mechanics; and force, as applied to everything from Boyle’s Law of Gases to Newton’s Laws of Motion, could be precisely calculated. At last, it seemed, the universe and all it contained could be explained and measured. What is more, the laws of nature, which were now yielding their secrets to the scientists, could be accepted as examples of God’s will. The Christian God, whom Aquinas had equated with Aristotle’s ‘first Cause’, was now equated with ‘the Great Clockmaker’. There was to be no more conflict between science and religion for nearly two hundred years,
[MAGIC] [MONKEY]

Europe overseas
is not a subject that starts with Columbus or the Caribbean. One experiment, in the crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land, was already ancient history. Another, in the Canaries, had been in progress for seventy years. But once contact had been made with distant islands, Europeans sailed overseas in ever-increasing
numbers. They sailed for reasons of trade, of loot, of conquest, and increasingly of religion. For many, it provided the first meeting with people of different races. To validate their claim over the inhabitants of the conquered lands, the Spanish monarchs had first to establish that non-Europeans were human. According to the Requirement of 1512, which the conquistadors were ordered to read out to all native peoples: ‘The Lord Our God, Living and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth, and one man and woman, of whom you and I, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants …’
²¹
To confirm the point, Pope Paul III decreed in 1537 that ‘all Indians are truly men, not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith, but… exceedingly desirous to receive it’.
²²
[GONCALVEZ]

The earlier voyages of exploration were continued and extended. The existence of a vast fourth continent in the West was gradually established by trial and error, some time in the twenty years after Columbus’s first return to Palos. Responsibility for the achievement was hotly disputed. Columbus himself made three more voyages without ever knowing where he had really been. Another Genoese, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot, 1450–98), sailed from Bristol aboard the
Matthew
in May 1497 under licence from Henry VII; he landed on Cape Breton Island, which he took to be part of China. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), once the Medicis’ agent in Seville, made three or four transatlantic voyages between 1497 and 1504. He then obtained the post of
piloto mayor
or ‘Chief Pilot’ of Spain. It was this fact which determined, rightly or wrongly, that the fourth continent should be named after him. In 1513 a stowaway, Vasco NÚñez de Balboa (d. 1519), walked across the isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific. In 1519–22 a Spanish expedition led by the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480–1521) circumnavigated the world. It proved beyond doubt that the earth was round, that the Pacific and Atlantic were separate oceans, and that the Americas lay between them,
[SYPHILUS]