Scope:
The Protestant Reformation ushered in a period of political struggle and intellectual revolution that marked the beginning of modernity. Through the 16'" and into the 17th centuries, Europe was beset by a series of wars that pit Catholics against Protestants and new economic and social forces against established structures. This also was the time of the Scientific Revolution, associated with such figures as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, through which a radically new picture of the cosmos and the "natural laws" that structure it took hold of European intellectual culture. These achievements led Rene Descartes and other philosophers to rethink the nature of intellectual authority and, thus, to seek new foundations for human knowledge in reason rather than tradition and revelation.
Outline
I. Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517, but until 1540, efforts were made to prevent the church from splitting. After that point, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants became more and more intractable, and the stage was set for more than a century of conflict and chaos in Europe.
A. In 1545, Catholic bishops met at the Council of Trent; there, over a period of 20 years, some reforms were made, but fundamental church doctrines regarding justification and penance were reasserted, repudiating all Protestant ideas.
B. The breakup of Christendom and the consequent series of alliances between political states and either Protestantism or Catholicism led to a series of conflicts we have come to call the "religious wars."
C. By the mid-17th century, many were demanding new ways to think about relations among religion, politics, and society.
II. One reason Hobbes was able to forge a political theory based on human behavior rather than metaphysics and theology is that the achievements of the Scientific Revolution were beginning to work with a conception of nature separate from theological considerations.
A. With Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, we find the gradual articulation of a conception of the universe as guided by laws that give it the precision and predictability of a machine.
B. This established a new stage — which in large part is definitive of modernity — in human conceptions of the cosmos, one that had been in the works since the nominalists and the Reformers challenged the classic Catholic view of the High Middle Ages.
III. As this new, modern cosmology emerged, so did a new conception of human knowledge and new distinctions among different kinds of knowledge, such as science, philosophy, and theology. Rene Descartes' articulation of these distinctions was influential.
A. Descartes was writing in a context in which what had been the main source of intellectual, moral, and metaphysical authority for centuries in Europe — the Christian tradition no longer offered a unified picture. This situation produced a crisis of authority.
B. One of the major steps Descartes took in addressing this problem was to elevate human reason, rather than divine revelation, to the status of primary intellectual authority.
Suggested Reading:
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism.
Descartes and Moriarty, Meditations on First Philosophy.
Lindberg and Numbers, When Science & Christianity Meet.
Stout, The Flight from Authority.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why should we consider Thomas Hobbes as one of the key shapers of the modern worldview?
2. How does the concept of "nature" for thinkers of the Scientific Revolution differ from earlier views on nature?
Lecture Four — Transcript
Scientific Revolution and Descartes
Our previous lecture on late medieval Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation stressed two broad themes. First, we saw that the nominalism of the Late Middle Ages and the thought of Protestant Reformers such as Luther and Calvin both portrayed a radically transcendent God isolated from nature and inscrutable in his absolute power. This dualism of nature and grace results in a new picture of the Christian cosmos — one very different than that conceptualized by Aquinas, for whom nature and grace were much more integrally related.
Second, we considered the Reformation's radically new vision of Christian life and Christian community, as articulated by Luther. This vision focused more on the faith of the individual and the individual's direct relationship with God than on the Church's role in mediating God's grace. It stressed the authority of the Bible over the authority of Church tradition.
In the present lecture, I'll start with a brief consideration of how the split between Protestants and Catholics was made permanent in the course of the 16th century, and how the Catholic Church responded with some reforms of its own — even as it rejected the basic ideas of the Protestants. I will then turn to a discussion of three developments—in politics, in science, and in philosophy—that helped give birth to modernity. On the political side, the split between Protestants and Catholics led to a century of conflict that we generally refer to as the Wars of Religion.
These wars, in turn, inspired some to rethink traditional views on the relationship between religion and politics, and to argue for their separation. One of these thinkers was the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and I will briefly discuss his seminal work. The 16th and especially the 17th centuries were also the period of the Scientific Revolution, and I will discuss how new astronomical findings by figures such as Copernicus and Newton helped to establish the empirical and theoretical grounds for the idea of nature as a self-enclosed system that could be understood without any reference to God. Finally, by looking at the work of philosopher Rene Descartes, we will also see how human reason, rather than religious tradition or divine revelation, becomes established as the dominant intellectual authority in early modern Europe.
So, I begin with a brief account of the split between Protestants and Catholics and its aftermath. Luther, you' ll recall, posted his NinetyFive Theses in 1517. In 1520, he published three treatises attacking the Church and laying the theological foundation for his revolution in Christian thought: These were entitled On the Freedom of a Christian, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In that same year, Pope Leo X warned Luther that unless he retracted a large number of his claims, he would be excommunicated. Then, Luther was summoned before the General Assembly of the Holy Roman Emperor to answer to his controversial ideas—and when,on April18 of 1521,he was asked to recant his heresies, he refused with the words, according to legend at any rate: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen." As a result, Luther was declared a heretic, and his writings were banned. From Luther's Wittenberg, then, the Reform Movement spread throughout Europe.
In 1534, England's Henry the VIII split from Rome and established the Church of England — or the Anglican Church. In Switzerland, Reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva established Protestant churches that were allied with Luther's, but in many ways also were quite distinctive. From about 1520 to 1540 or so, various attempts were made to hold the Catholic Church together, to prevent the Reformers from actually splitting from the Church, but these efforts ended in failure. By 1540, it was pretty clear to all that the unity of Western Christianity was irrevocably fractured. In 1545, Catholic bishops met at the Council of Trent, and this Council met intermittently until 1563. This Council was called by the pope, and many who attended were hopeful that the Council would pass the sweeping reforms of the Church for which many had lobbied since long before Luther had burst onto the scene.
But the pope and his supporters were able to successfully resist any radical reform. The Council did result in two significant achievements. First, it resulted in an almost complete repudiation of Protestant Doctrine on faith, sacraments, and penance. The bishops reaffirmed the authority of Church tradition, the seven sacraments, and the idea that the Eucharist is the actual repetition of the sacrifice of Christ. They did acknowledge that the practice of "indulgence" had been abused, but they affirmed that the practice was doctrinally sound. The Council did pass some modest reforms, mostly having to do with the responsibilities of the bishops and the way that they were appointed.
The pope did agree to limit his power — somewhat — in order to give the bishops more autonomy with respect to their own diocese, and new rules were instituted to make sure that the bishops used this power responsibly — especially with respect to their support for the moral and religious life of their flocks. But these reforms of the Episcopate on the local level of the diocese were not matched by reforms in the Vatican or the Papacy. It's also interesting to note that the a number of 20th-century Catholic thinkers have argued that during this period, the late 16'" century, opposition to the views of the Protestant Reformers, in fact, led many Catholic theologians to undermine Aquinas's view of the close connection between nature and grace, and so in some respects to actually follow the Reformers in constructing a new theological rationale for the split between the natural and the supernatural.
Finally, at the same time, the Catholic response to the Reformation, in rejecting Protestantism's individualism and in refusing to give up the power of the penitential system, set the Church on a course that would leave it as an enemy of modernity through the middle of the 20th century. We' ll have occasion to discuss this further in later lectures. With Christendom in Europe now split between Catholics and Protestants, and with the Protestants by no means unified, Europe entered a volatile and violent period of transition. The breakup of Christendom and the consequent series of alliances between political states and either Protestantism or Catholicism led to a series of conflicts we have come to call the "Wars of Religion."
During this period, we find Catholics persecuting Protestants in France, Protestant Netherlands seeking to free themselves from Catholic Spain, and the Thirty Years War in Germany between 1618 and 1648. The persecution and the imposition of religion came from both sides. Although Luther stressed the freedom of the Christian, this was a spiritual freedom — a freedom from the sacramental power of the Church and f'rom the need to prove one self-righteous. Yet Luther, like almost all religious leaders at the time, thought that the worldly power of the princes and the monarchs should be used to ensure and compel religious conformity. In that sense, Luther was no more liberal than the popes.
It should also be noted, however, that this whole idea that these conflicts were only about religion, that these were just wars of religion, is misleading because religion was by no means the only thing at stake here. Certainly much of the violence was due to religious conflict. But with far-reaching changes also underway in Europe in terms of political organization — you have the emergence of the nation state — economic power — the emergence of capitalism, European society and culture was in a state of great flux as old ways of life were threatened, and centers of power were shifting.
By the mid-17th century, the specter of so much bloodshed over issues of faith had sickened and exhausted Europeans and were leading many to demand new ways of thinking about the relation between religion, politics, and society. One step toward a resolution came about through a pair of treaties that together are referred to as the "Peace of Westphalia" — which, in 1648, brought to a close the Thirty Years War in Germany and the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands.
The signatories of these treaties, which included many of the most powerful political figures in Europe, agreed, first, that each sovereign would have the right to determine the religion of his own state — the options being Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism; and, second, that Christians living in these states, whose form of Christianity was not established by the sovereign, would be guaranteed the right to practice their faith.
Another — and in many respects more far-reaching — response to the conflict came in the form of new political philosophies. Most important among these was the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose book, Leviathan, published in 1651 offered radically new views of both religion and politics. The book does two things relevant for our discussion here. First, Hobbes treats religion naturalistically — that is, not as a set of truths and moral guidelines handed down by God, but as a human creation rooted in human psychology and social life. Hobbes also treats politics as a human endeavor — not as something based in God's law or in God's promise for a redeemed world, but something that develops between people. Hobbes presents a hard vision of human nature: We are confused and frightened creatures — frightened in particular of other human beings. As a result, our natural condition is one of war, in which life is, in Hobbes's famous phrase: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
It should also be noted, however, that this whole idea that these conflicts were only about religion, that these were just wars of religion, is misleading because religion was by no means the only thing at stake here. Certainly much of the violence was due to religious conflict. But with far-reaching changes also underway in Europe in terms of political organization — you have the emergence of the nation state — economic power — the emergence of capitalism, European society and culture was in a state of great flux as old ways of life were threatened, and centers of power were shifting.
By the mid-17th century, the specter of so much bloodshed over issues of faith had sickened and exhausted Europeans and were leading many to demand new ways of thinking about the relation between religion, politics, and society. One step toward a resolution came about through a pair of treaties that together are referred to as the "Peace of Westphalia" — which, in 1648, brought to a close the Thirty Years War in Germany and the Eighty Years War between Spain and the Netherlands.
The signatories of these treaties, which included many of the most powerful political figures in Europe, agreed, first, that each sovereign would have the right to determine the religion of his own state — the options being Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism; and, second, that Christians living in these states, whose form of Christianity was not established by the sovereign, would be guaranteed the right to practice their faith.
Another — and in many respects more far-reaching — response to the conflict came in the form of new political philosophies. Most important among these was the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose book, Leviathan, published in 1651 offered radically new views of both religion and politics. The book does two things relevant for our discussion here. First, Hobbes treats religion naturalistically — that is, not as a set of truths and moral guidelines handed down by God, but as a human creation rooted in human psychology and social life. Hobbes also treats politics as a human endeavor — not as something based in God's law or in God's promise for a redeemed world, but something that develops between people. Hobbes presents a hard vision of human nature: We are confused and frightened creatures — frightened in particular of other human beings. As a result, our natural condition is one of war, in which life is, in Hobbes's famous phrase: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Human beings, on this view, create ideas about gods and religion so as to comfort themselves in the face of the difficulties and the threats of this dangerous life. But ultimately, Hobbes thought, religion makes things worse, not better — in part because religion separates human beings from one another and causes more conflict, thereby increasing the dangers of life. So for him, the only sensible thing to do in this situation is to establish agreements — contracts — with other human beings in an effort to create some order where they will feel relatively safe from the passions and desires of others. We see here the beginning of modern political theory in the idea that social relations are matters of contract between individuals. But Hobbes also thought that real security would only be possible if there was an absolute, earthly power that would keep people in line — what he called an "earthly god," or in the title of his book, the "leviathan."
Hobbes's main criticism of the mixing of Christianity and politics that had characterized the medieval period is that it led to fanaticism and violence: When people based their political views in God' s revealed word and believed their eternal life depended on carrying out God's will, they would do almost anything to those who disagreed with them.
Hobbes's sovereign, the leviathan, by contrast, grounded political organization not in divine revelation, but in human psychology and social reality. For Hobbes, this became the basis for politics, and speculation about metaphysical realities were to be considered out of bounds. Later political theorists would work with Hobbes's ideas about the importance of contractual relations between people and accept his view that theology and Christianity should stay out of politics, but they also would reject his reliance on absolute sovereignty and champion more representative forms of government — and here, we find the source of modern liberal political theory.
One reason that Hobbes was able to forge a political theory based on human behavior rather than metaphysics and theology is that the achievements of the Scientific Revolution were beginning to work with a conception of nature separate from theological considerations. Here, the shift to the modern cosmos that I have talked about really became solidified. We can begin this discussion with Copernicus and Galileo, whose astronomical observations and theories provided grounds for the claim that the earth is not the center of the cosmos.
Copernicus first theorized that the earth revolved around the sun, and Galileo provided evidence that the stars did not revolve around the earth or even around our solar system. So, not only did these scientists de-center the universe — that is, take us out of the center of the universe, or at least rejected the idea that we are the center of things, but perhaps even more important was Galileo's conception of universal natural laws — beginning with mathematical laws to which the movement of celestial bodies conformed. This allowed thinkers to view natural causality and not God as the force that maintained the cosmos. One could still imagine that God was needed to create the cosmos, but one could dispense with the idea that God's continual supervision of the cosmos is needed: The universe could run on its own.
This conception of nature becomes fully articulated in Isaac Newton, who despite his own strong religious faith saw the universe as guided by laws that give it the precision and predictability of a machine. Here, we have an even greater distance between God and the world than in the Reformation. Not only is the earth not the center of the universe, but natural laws can proceed without God's constant supervision, and nature can be fully understood without God. God becomes assigned to a supernatural realm that reason cannot comprehend. Nature — no longer alive with divinity — is, instead, a machine. Science is able to begin to assert its independence from religion on its way to eclipsing religion as a social and cultural authority.
So with this, we arrive at a crucial stage in the emergence of modernity. Over the last few lectures we have conducted a very rapid sweep through history and through Christian theology in order to show how the theological cosmology of the premodern period where it is impossible to understand what we call the universe and our place in it without God — is transformed to a modern cosmos in which nature can be understood without any reference to God.
One way to put this is that for the premodern world-view, nature does not exist. I'm making a conceptual point here — that is, I'm not saying that those things we embrace today with the category "nature" did not exist: trees, grass, fuzzy animals, and the like. Of course, they did exist. But what did not exist was our modern idea of nature, which means that the experience of nature that tends to characterize modern consciousness — that is, nature understood or experienced as the physical universe available to the senses, explicable in terms of fundamental laws and principles — this nature did not exist as such. Rather, premodern human beings did not experience nature, but they experienced God's creation — a reality permeated by God's grace and understood as having its end and its meaning in God.
Recall our discussion, in the second lecture, of Nietzsche's account of the death of God in The Gay Science. There, Nietzsche paints a picture of the dissolution of meaning — of an earth that has become unchained from the sun, drifting as through an infinite nothing. This is a picture of the dissolution of the cosmos. I said at that point that Nietzsche's is not the only modern vision of the fate of the cosmos. It is, though, a very important one — an interpretation of modernity as not producing a new cosmos, a new ordered universe, but marked by the end of any such order. This view has been expressed, albeit in less-dramatic form than in Nietzsche, in a recent book by the philosopher Mark Lilla, called The Stillborn God. Lilla suggests that the very fact that in the modern period we have seen a number of ways of conceptualizing the whole within which we live means that we have lost the cosmos. Lilla puts it this way:
We have never lived in a Copernican, or Newtonian, or Darwinian, or Einsteinian world. The fact that we can draw up such a list proves the point: we have lost "the world," if by world we mean the natural "whole" that Greeks and Christians once thought linked God and man. Instead, modern man lives with an ever-changing string of hypotheses about the cosmos and must resign himself to the fact that whatever picture he finds adequate today will probably be found inadequate tomorrow.
Lilla goes on to say that "it is clear that modern science broke an age-old link between God and man." Nietzsche's madman seems desperate, lost, in the face of the dissolution of the cosmos; Lilla, by contrast, counsels a kind of resignation. Both are classic modern responses to this event. We will see, though, that other thinkers reject the idea that we have lost the cosmos. They will seek out new ways of linking God and man.
With the Scientific Revolution came a new set of intellectual tools for exploring the universe and ourselves. This becomes obvious when we consider that the way our institutions of higher learning are organized today is very different from the way that they were organized at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution. Then, the main divisions in most European universities were Theology, Law, and Medicine. Today we have many more divisions and science — and the many different forms of science, each focused on a different kind of object and using different kinds of methods, dominate our colleges and universities. More generally, the Scientific Revolution brought with it radically new ideas about what it is "to know," what knowledge is, and how it is produced.
Hobbes, as we have seen, argued for new, naturalistic ways of explaining religion and politics. We also see something like this in another early modern philosopher, the French thinker Rene Descartes, who is often credited with being the first modern philosopher — in large part because of his major role in trying to articulate a new, modern view of human knowledge. In the remainder of this lecture and in the next one I will focus on Descartes, and — to put it in technical, philosophical terms — I will focus on his "epistemology" — that is, his theory of human knowledge. But this will also lead us to consider how he rethinks what it means to be a human subject, and how his views of knowledge and subjectivity lead him to ask just how it is that human beings can know God and know the world.
The question of knowledge was a problem for Descartes in large part because the mid-17'" century, as we have seen, was a time of chaos and transition. Descartes was writing in a context where the unity of Christianity had been destroyed, and Europeans were fighting and killing each other on the basis of very different religious visions. This conflict means that what had been the main source of intellectual and moral authority for centuries in Europe — Christian scripture and its interpretation by the Church — had been thrown into question by the conflict between Protestants and Catholics and their sharp disagreements about God, salvation, and tradition.
In short, traditional religious authorities could not agree with each other. At the same time, new powerful ways of understanding the world were emerging — attested to by the success of the natural sciences and, especially for Descartes, the success of mathematical models of reasoning. But it is one thing to point to the success; it' s another to articulate a new comprehensive vision of knowledge based on this success. Although the power of scientific thought was becoming more and more established, this only raised the question of how precisely to understand, to conceptualize, to theorize, this power.
Think back to what I have said about the nominalist views of God' s power. It may be the case that human beings are getting more and more able to determine and understand the regularities of nature, but can we be certain about these if we also consider that God in his infinite power could change them at any minute? What, in the end, grounds our knowledge of the world? Are there firm foundations upon which our knowledge rests that can give us confidence that our knowledge is real?
Religious thinkers were, of course, trying to address this problem so we have seen how Luther insists on the authority of the Bible, and how Catholics at the Council of Trent reasserted the truth of dogma and tradition. These were the foundations for Protestants and Catholics, respectively. But Descartes and many others were not satisfied with this approach and attempted to secure foundations not just for religious knowledge, but for scientific knowledge as well.
Descartes' effort is important for us for at least two reasons. First, it leads him to separate the intellectual tasks of philosophy and theology, which I will talk about in the rest of this lecture. Second, it leads him to a conception of human knowledge that has a great impact on how later thinkers think about God and religion — and we' ll pursue this a little bit in the next lecture. So, recall from the very first lecture the letter Descartes writes to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris. As I noted, Descartes appended this letter to one of his most important books, the Meditations, which was published in 1641 — and he addressed it to "those Most Wise and Distinguished Men, the Dean and Doctors of the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris." In the letter, Descartes distinguished between two ways of knowing about God, and this distinction still informs the way we think about God and religion today: On the one hand, there are those Christians, like himself, who believe in "God's existence," as Descartes wrote, "God's existence because it is taught in the Holy Scriptures." But he recognizes that such reasoning will not persuade those he calls "unbelievers." He wants to show, therefore, that it is possible to prove the existence of God without appeal to faith, tradition, or scripture — to prove it by reasons that are, as he puts it, "drawn exclusively from our own mind." Basically, the Meditations is an effort to demonstrate these truths through which Descartes calls "philosophy" — that is, a mode of reasoning and discourse based not on revelation, but on the use of "natural reason." Descartes thus asserts the philosophy from theology and religious authority.
As I noted in the first lecture, this reason to which Descartes is appealing is universal — he thinks it is common to all human beings. This idea of a universal natural reason is the crucial step in the emergence of modern philosophy, and the question of what this natural reason is and how it works becomes a central problem for philosophers of the modern period. In other words, modern philosophy begins with the question: How do we know? Descartes' own answer to this question is not the only one we will explore, but we will also see that most philosophers will agree with him that new models of reasoning and knowledge need to be developed. They will also agree with Descartes that we must distinguish scientific and philosophical reasoning, which use natural reason, from theological or religious thinking.
One consequence of this is that theology becomes more and more marginalized in the modern period. In the medieval period, theology was called "the Queen of the Sciences" — and so it made sense for Descartes to write his letter to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris. In the modern period, though, theology loses its place of honor — to the point where by the time we get to the 19 and 20'" centuries, theology is in danger of losing its place in the university altogether, and its more general cultural role is also greatly diminished. Another consequence is, as we have already seen in Hobbes, the emergence of new ways of thinking about religion from the perspective of reason. Can we defend religion through the use of reason? Or does reason show us the dangers and the falsity of religion?
We've covered a lot in this lecture — from the Catholic response to the Reformation at the Council of Trent, to the religious wars that troubled Europe in the late 16'" and much of the 17'" century, to the political theory of Hobbes, to the view of the cosmos that emerged from the Scientific Revolution, and finally to Descartes. One way of looking at all this material is to think about how each of these events or thinkers helps to usher in the modern age by instituting or theorizing a significant separation. I have already referred in this lecture to Mark Lilla's book, The Stillborn God.
There, Lilla describes Hobbes's work as having helped to conceptualize what Lilla calls "the great separation" — that is, the separation between political theory and theology, and so, ultimately, the separation of religion and politics. I think this idea of separation is a useful one for summarizing the issues we discussed in this lecture. The separation between Catholicism and Protestantism was the catalyst for the great separation between religion and politics the separation between the natural and the supernatural that we saw in nominalism; in the theologies of Calvin and Luther; and in the view of the universe that emerged in thinkers such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton; and then, finally, the separation between theology and philosophy that we see in Descartes. There are a number of ways to think about how these separations are linked together, but all of them contribute to a new way of viewing religion — to a process of re-conceptualizing religion as a sphere of human life quite distinct from politics, art, economics, and science. Consequently, religion is no longer the air people breathe, no longer something that provides a context and horizon for life as a whole. It is increasingly becoming an option, something people can choose to participate in — or not.
