Scientific Revolution of the XVII Century
I would like to start with the events that happened in the XVI century, but proved to be very important for the development of science in the XVII century. Especially the information about these events will be needed when we start to speak about Galileo and Descartes. The matter is that the Catholic Church, to which Galileo and Descartes both belonged, took a certain position in relation to the hypothesis of Copernicus, namely, it negatively treated the heliocentric system of the world proposed by Copernicus. If the question of the Church’s attitude is put on the agenda, we should analyse what had happened within the Catholic Church, and what were the events of the Church history of that time. In order to perform this analysis with due precision I will share with you some information about what happened after Martin Luther provoked the so called Reformation by nailing his 95 theses against the indulgences to the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg on the 31 of October 1517. These events and the reaction to them were to some extent although indirectly connected with Galileo’s condemnation, as we shall later show. Luther’s demonstration in Wittenberg was the first in this chain of events.
And of course this event (Luther’s demonstration) changed the political and religious face of Europe. Later the map of Europe was also changed. I don’t know what exactly Luther hoped for, may be he hoped that his demonstration would produce some beneficial reforms in the Church and his ideas would be accepted by the Church and by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (at that time it was Maximilian I). But the Church did not follow Luther, so Luther founded his own Church, which is now called the Lutheran Church. It is quite a big establishment, it exists till now in Germany, Sweden and some other countries.
There appeared also another branch or another kind of Protestantism. It was formulated by Jean Calvin and the adherents of it were called Huguenots, or Reformers, or just Calvinists. And this kind of Protestantism gained foot in France (you perhaps remember the Huguenots from the novels of Alexandre Dumas). Calvinist ideas penetrated also into the Anglican Church, which was also the product of the Reformation. Even now Calvinism is prominent in Switzerland, in Hungary and in the USA. Nevertheless the Catholic Church, although deeply wounded, continued its existence and reacted to these challenges by anathemising Luther in 1521 and by convening the Church Council, known as the Council of Trent, that started in 1545 and ended in 1563, so it lasted for 18 years under different Popes. The Catholic Church thus tried to analyse what happened. And after the Council of Trent we can speak about a formal break between two creeds of Christianity. Later, in the XVII century, of which we’ll speak in much detail, this schism provoked a bloody war, which was called a Thirty Years War. This war started in 1618 and ended in 1648. The war ended with the so called Peace of Westphalia, according to which the religion of the people living in a certain country, was determined by those who ruled the country. In Latin this principle is formulated as “cuius regio, eius religio”. It is not a freedom of religion as we understand it now, or as it was understood by the fathers of American Constitution. The world was different, and we should keep it in mind. And speaking about Counterreformation as a certain intellectual movement we should mention not only the Council of Trent, but also the emergence of a new religious Order – the Jesuit Order. Why were they called the Jesuits? Their official name was the Society of Jesus. And “Jesuits” was a nickname, a derogative one, coined by those who didn’t like them, possibly by Protestants. But somehow it stuck, and now we more or less understand who the Jesuits are.
Well, sometimes while teaching in MIPT, I came across some very talented students who didn’t know who the Jesuits were. It is because history in Russian secondary schools is taught in such a way that some important events that had happened in Europe were ignored. I hope that now you understand who the Jesuits are. They played an important role in the development of science, there were some scientists who were Jesuits, e.g. the Italian Francesco Grimaldi, who was the first to describe the phenomenon of the diffraction of light. I’ll later mention some other Jesuit scientists. But what is important for us now, is that the Jesuits, especially Cardinal Bellarmine, played significant role is so called “Galileo case”. In order to understand better the psychology of Bellarmine, Grimaldi, Christopher Clavius (the Jesuit astronomer and professor of the Roman College, with whom Galileo was in active correspondence) we should dwell a little upon the circumstances in which the Jesuit Order was born. It was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish nobleman and warrior, a man originally far from science and academic pursuits. Ignatius was badly wounded on 20 of May 1521 during the Battle of Pamplona, and while recovering from his wound read a lot of pious books, seemingly the only books available to him in his castle.
So he began reading lives of the saints and underwent a conversion, or as people now use to say, got religion. He was not a man of Academy, but when he underwent conversion, he started preaching, but the Church didn’t like it, because lay people are not allowed to preach in the Catholic Church, so he was even arrested and spent a couple of months in prison. Eventually he was released, and the inquisitors suggested him to enter a university. So in 1526 he went to the university of Alcala and then moved to Paris, where there was a famous university with a theological faculty. There he found his first followers among his peers, who were much younger than he was and some of them were very bright. It should be kept in mind that at that time Paris university was a battleground on which Catholics and Protestants daily crossed their arms. One could find among the students of Paris university a certain Jean Calvin, who later became one of the chief ideologists of Protestantism. In 1533 there followed a crackdown on Protestant sympathizers in the Paris university, Jean Calvin had to flee France and eventually found himself in Geneva. So Ignatius of Loyola's studies in Paris, which ended in 1535, coincided with a period of turmoil.
Ignatius of Loyola very well understood that his talent of an organizer and a military man were needed, so he founded a new monastic order, which had an aim of converting Protestants to Catholic faith and re-establishing the power of the Catholic Church, which seemed to be shattered. The second important feature of the Jesuits was the attention that they paid to the educational institutions. They eventually succeeded in developing a new type of such institutions, namely, the Jesuit College.
What were the main features of a Jesuit College? Before we spoke about medieval universities and renaissance academies. So now with a Jesuit College we have a new type of institution. Before there were colleges within universities, e.g. Sorbonne College within the Paris university. In the idea itself of a college there is nothing new. The name “college” comes from Latin word “collegium”, which means gathering of people in one place. The Jesuits proposed a new idea of college. It is not a university college, uniting people according to their nationality or topic of study, but an independent educational institution (also for children) run by Jesuits. Prototypes of such colleges for children started to appear before the Jesuits took them as their principal educational model. For example Michel Montaigne received education in College of Guienne in Bordeau, which was founded in 1533, before the creation of the Jesuit Order. The difference was not so much in the name, but in the aim of education. The purpose of the Jesuits in founding colleges was to reach the children in their still tender years, when they are still prone to accept authority, and give them not only intellectual, but also physical, moral and spiritual formation. Jesuits put the stress not only on the intellect, but also on the will. Ignatius of Loyola himself was more a man of strong will, than a mere intellectual. Of course he was smart and wise, but he had a certain dislike for pure academic pursuits and pedantry. His contemporaries remember that his knowledge of Italian language was far from perfect and that when he was preaching in Rome he mispronounced almost every second Italian word. And his disciple Pedro Ribadeneira, who knew Italian very well, once said to him: “Father, you are mispronouncing Italian words”. And Ignatius humbly asked him: “Well, take a pen and a sheet of paper, and mark my mistakes, so that I can learn from them”. And after trying to do it in this fashion, Pedro Ribadeneira complained: “Father, you are making mistakes in almost every word!” From this episode we can conclude, that Loyola didn’t pay much attention to the form. The main thing for him was to transmit the idea.
Among his principles there was one that I consider very important: “Not abundance of knowledge satiates the soul and satisfies it, but it is necessary to feel and taste the thing internally”. In other words you should not accept knowledge by your mind, but also by your heart. You should taste the truth as you taste wine. You should have a liking, a personal attitude to the things you study. Of course what he meant first of all were the articles of faith. But you can easily apply it to scientific truths. They also can be felt emotionally. For example Einstein said to George Lemaitre: “Your idea of an expanding universe is abominable!” Also Copernicus had a liking to the idea, that the Sun is situated in the centre of the world. It seemed beautiful to him. Yes, sure, science as itself presupposes more aloof attitude in order to escape biases. But history of science provides us with lots of examples to the contrary. Scientists can be and are indeed very emotional. They are enamoured with their ideas, intuitions and hypotheses. They sort of “feel” the truth.
Now let’s return to the topic of the Jesuit colleges. They appeared in many European countries. But the most important one was the Roman College. It became not only an educational, but also a scientific institution. In this college worked Christopher Clavius, the celebrate astronomer, who was also a Jesuit priest. He was considered one of the best astronomers of Italy, and when Galileo in 1610 made his first telescopic observations, he wrote a letter to Christopher Clavius, asking him for confirmation and support. I’ll later speak about Galileo in more details, but now I want to underscore the high reputation of the Roman College and similar scientific and educational institutions run by the Jesuits. So this new monastic order had already begun to influence science. Among the members of the Jesuit order was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. His tomb is in Rome in the Church of Saint Ignatius. Later the Catholic Church proclaimed him a saint.
Bellarmine was first of all a theologian famous for his polemics with Protestants. But he was also interested in what was going on in science. When Giordano Bruno was arrested in Venice and brought to Rome, Bellarmine proposed him to repent of his heresies. But Giordano Bruno declined the proposal, denied all the accusations, and was declared an unrepentant heretic and as such burnt at the stake in Rome at Piazza dei Fiori on the 17th of February 1600. This is the first time we meet the name of Bellarmine in connection with the history of science.
Next time the name of Bellarmine appears in the history of science in connection with his letter to the astronomers of the Roman College (whom he call mathematicians), written on April 19, 1611, in which he asked them to confirm the veracity of the discoveries of Galileo. He posed five very precise questions: (1) were there really a multitude of stars in the Milky Way invisible to the naked eye? (2) was Saturn composed of 3 stars? (3) did Venus have phases like the Moon? (4) was the lunar surface really rough and uneven? (5) did Juppiter really have 4 sattelites revolving around it? These questions seem to be very smart and they show that Bellarmine managed to grasp the essence of what was happening in astronomy. The astronomers of the Roman College also possessed telescopes, so they were able to confirm independently the discoveries of Galileo and answered the questions of Bellarmine in the positive. Later a Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner even claimed that he had observed the sunspots earlier than Galileo. This fact can prove that Jesuit astronomers were at that time quite advanced.
Galileo paid very much attention to the question of priority. He wanted his contribution to science to be fully recognized. This discussion with Scheiner perhaps led to certain cooling down of Galileo’s relations with the Jesuits. What I want to stress is that Jesuits were not just obscurantists as they were sometimes portrayed, but were in certain respects at the same level as Galileo. That’s why Jesuits are important. Without some necessary information about them you cannot understand what was happening in science.
Now, when Bellarmine heard that Galileo was a proponent of the Copernican system, he was disturbed by this news. Why? Because he also heard that Galileo proposed some allegorical interpretations of the Bible, especially those verses that speak about the immobility of the Earth and the movement of the Sun. For example in the Book of Psalms we can find Psalm number 19. It starts with the phrase: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork”. In this Psalm there is the verse that speaks directly about the motion of the Sun: “In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race”. Galileo insisted that this verse (and other similar verses in the Bible) should be interpreted allegorically, the more so, that this Psalm uses poetical metaphors when speaking about the Sun as a living being endowed with emotions and will. So some allegorical interpretation is certainly needed, and the Church recognized it. Bellarmine of course understood it, but nevertheless he insisted that the words about the motion of the Sun should be taken literally (to be continued).