A Brief History of Creation (4 page)

But some Christian contemporaries of Hypatia did share her thirst for understanding and love of classical knowledge. One was Augustine of Hippo. By the time of his death, he had become a far more important figure in the formation of the early church than Tertullian or anyone else, save the apostle Paul. He was probably the most important thinker and writer in the first two millennia of the church's history. And he espoused a very different strain of thought than Tertullian did—one in which the knowledge and learning of the Greeks was to be cherished and not discarded.

Augustine came from modern-day Algeria, and he spent most of his life on the North African frontier of the Roman Empire, first as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage and later as the bishop of Hippo. As a young man, he always seemed to be in search of something. He turned to Manichaeism, losing himself in the mystical teachings of the Iranian prophet Mani, who borrowed from Christianity and Buddhism. For a short time, Augustine became a Neoplatonist as Hypatia had been, absorbing himself in Greek classics that would leave a lasting impression on his young mind. Eventually, he converted to Christianity, the religion of his mother.

Augustine's early writings, those penned most recently after his conversion, were closer to the inflexibility of theologians like Tertullian. But as he matured in his faith, his writings became more open to the classical teachings he had been exposed to in his youth. By the time he wrote one of his most famous works,
Literal Commentary on Genesis
, he was urging his fellow Christians back to the study of the natural world:

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about
the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. . . . If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.

Augustine was intrigued by the mysteries of nature and wrote prolifically about them. He was a keen observer of plants and trees, which he looked at with the eye of a natural philosopher. He noted the medicinal qualities of hellebore, and he observed that hyssop could be used as a respiratory purgative. He noticed the seasonal growth patterns of plants, wondering why trees shed their leaves with the season, and why the leaves later grew back. He hinted at an understanding of osmosis that went beyond what most people understood for the next millennium.

Augustine also turned his inquisitive eye toward the animal kingdom. He accepted Aristotle's notion of spontaneous generation, even speculating that Noah had no need to take animals “which are born without the union of sex from inanimate things” aboard the ark. Spontaneous generation was all part of God's grand plan for the Earth.

Augustine's writings on the subject—and, thus, Aristotle's—would resonate in the Christian world for more than a thousand years. The theory even found its way into the dietary proscriptions of the church. Beginning in the twelfth century, Christians were allowed to eat geese on Fridays, when meat was forbidden. The policy was a result of English naturalist Alexander Neckam's “discovery” that geese could be born spontaneously from a mixture of pine resin and sea salt, which led to the widespread belief that they were fish. Even as late as 1623, William Shakespeare would write, in
Antony and Cleopatra
, “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud, by the action of your Sun”—a reference to the belief held by ancient
Egyptians that crocodiles were spontaneously generated by the action of sunlight on mud, which Herodotus had noted in his writings about the Nile. But Shakespeare wasn't just writing about what the ancient Egyptians believed. He was referencing what his seventeenth-century contemporaries, among them the most learned natural philosophers, believed. Some forty years after
Antony and Cleopatra
appeared, the most sophisticated scientific organization in the world, Britain's Royal Society, would hold meetings devoted to the ways serpents might be born from dust.

By Shakespeare's time, Europe was emerging from centuries of cultural stagnation, and a new spirit of learning and discovery was starting to take hold—an age of reason. With the dawn of the Renaissance, the ancient learning of men like Aristotle and Augustine would be reabsorbed, reexamined and, most important, questioned. Natural philosophers like Copernicus and Galileo would look to the stars and see a very different universe from the one that human beings had always known. Another would cast his inquiring gaze in a different direction and question the very idea of how life begins.

*
Using little more than trigonometry and sundials, Greeks were able to make accurate estimates of the Earth's circumference and shape. The philosopher Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference to be about 25,000 miles. Modern measurement using satellite-based instruments has determined the circumference to be 24,860 miles.

†
About the same time, the Indian philosopher Kanada described material building blocks, which he called
anu
, from which all matter was constructed.
Anu
were tiny (smaller than a speck of dust), indestructible spheres. The Greek philosopher Democritus reached similar conclusions and coined the term “atom.” Both came to their respective theories by asking themselves the same question: If you break something in half and then continue breaking those halves into smaller halves, how long until you run out of things to break?

PROVANDO E RIPROVANDO

Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth
.

—DENIS DIDEROT,
D'Alembert's Dream
, 1769

 

I
N THE WINTER OF 1662
, three priests made their way through the streets of the Tuscan city of Pisa. The distinctive loud clicking of their shoes on the cobblestone avenues gave away their religious affiliation. More vulgar peasants would have called them
Zoccalanti
, after the heavy wooden sandals for which their order was known. The more reverential knew them as Franciscans, monks of the order of Saint Francis.

They were on their way to Pisa, winter home of Ferdinando II, grand duke of Tuscany. Ferdinando typically spent most of his time in the capital, Florence, but winters there tended to be wet and cold by Italian standards. Sometimes it would even snow. The grand duke was not fond of the cold.

Ferdinando had been a handsome prince in his youth. But the man who greeted the priests was middle-aged and fat, with puffy circles around his eyes. By then, Ferdinando had started wearing a mustache that curved upward at the wings, as if someone had painted a smile on his face. He looked a bit like a clown. Standing at Ferdinando's side was a young man named Francesco Redi, the grand duke's personal physician, confidant, and right-hand man in matters of science.

The grand duke had a reputation for lavishing generosity on those who could furnish him with anything he might consider a scientific wonder. The Franciscans had just returned from the Orient, and they were carrying
many such gifts for the duke. They were particularly excited about some tiny black stones they had brought back from the region around the Ganges River that had been extracted from the head of a snake that the Portuguese called a cobra. The stones, the priests said, were wards against all forms of poison, whether delivered from the fangs of a serpent or the poisoned weapon of a man. One need only apply these stones to the wound and they would stick, like magnets, until they had absorbed all the poison into themselves. The stones could then be washed with freshly squeezed milk and the poison would be released, leaving them ready to be used once more.

Redi had seen such stones before. Their supposed supernatural properties were well known to those who practiced the healing arts. Their efficacy had been vouched for even by the Roman physician Galen, one of the most important figures in classical medicine. But Redi was not impressed. He was a skeptic at heart, active in the Florentine scientific society called the Accademia del Cimento (“Academy of Experiment”). The group's motto was
provando e riprovando
, “test and test again,” and Redi embraced it fully. Over the years, Redi himself had acquired many such stones—some from true believers and others from mere charlatans. None proved to have any more protective power than the pebbles one could find in any field.

Soon, the most learned men on hand in Pisa, many of them schooled in medicine, had gathered to see the miraculous stones brought back from the Far East. The grand duke decided to put the Franciscans' stones to the test. He called the guards to find him some vipers, but it was winter and none could be found. A new test was devised, using a chicken. A needle was dipped, four fingers deep, into a deadly poison made from tobacco, and the chicken was stuck with it. The stones proved useless, and within a quarter of an hour the chicken was dead. The Franciscans were flabbergasted. Try again, they urged. More chickens were dispatched, one after another. The priests were never quite convinced, arguing that the chickens had died from some cause not readily apparent. Many years later, Redi wrote of the episode in a letter to the famous Jesuit natural philosopher Athanasius
Kircher: “Doubt often wants to grow at the foundation of truth,” he wrote, “like a blooming sprout.”

R
EDI HAD ARRIVED
at Ferdinando's court just a little more than two years before the Franciscans. As the grand duke's physician, he was entitled to a suite in the Palazzo Pitti, the grand duke's marvelous palace in Florence. The palace itself was a kind of embodiment of the two very different ages between which Redi lived. On the outside, it was a Dark Ages fortress, with tall arches arranged in forbidding militaristic columns, built by Roman soldiers to protect against tides of barbaric invaders. Inside, however, it was filled with vibrant tapestries and daring art, the opulent trappings and symbols of the power of its owners, the Medicis, one of the most important families of the Renaissance.

The Medicis were bankers, and spectacularly successful. Their gold flowed through every corner of Europe. They were fond of showing off their wealth in their possessions, especially their collection of the most modern scientific contraptions. The Palazzo Pitti was filled with all manner of the latest technological gadgets: thermometers, astrolabes, and the world's first barometer. It even held the world's finest collection of telescopes, a lingering reminder of the famous astronomer who had once also walked the palace's halls: Galileo Galilei.

Though Galileo had died nearly two decades before Redi arrived at court, Redi would have been impressed by those signs of his famous predecessor. Galileo refused to accept the world as it was told to him. He sought to explain the world through observation. He embodied—as he still embodies—the struggle between reason and dogma. And Francesco Redi was firmly on the side of reason.

Like his father, Cosimo II, Grand Duke Ferdinando II was fascinated with all things relating to science. He even kept a collection of human specimens he considered scientific oddities, including a dwarf that roamed the palace and was said to have tusks in place of teeth. Some, like his devout wife, Vittoria della Rovere, thought him obsessed. He did little to conceal his hatred of her pious sermonizing. And there were other reasons for their
marital discord. Gossip about the grand duke's love life was commonplace in the Florentine court. Some said Vittoria discovered him in bed with a man many believed to be his lover, Count Bruto della Molera. Ferdinando II's own mother, Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, told a story of a cold winter day when she stopped in at his chambers. She had with her a list of Florentines with power and influence who were said to be sodomites. They should, she advised him, be burned at the stake. Her son looked over the list and told her it was incomplete. He added a name and handed back the paper. The name the grand duke had added was his own.

Redi thrived under the grand duke's patronage. He became active in the Accademia del Cimento, which had been started by the Medicis in order to keep Galileo's science alive after the great man's death. And always, Redi wrote prolifically on the natural sciences. Whenever possible, he stuck to the academy's motto of
provando e riprovando
. He often did so boldly. He once drank snake venom to prove that, although fatal when it enters the bloodstream, it is harmless when swallowed. Some of the greatest scientists of the time filled the ranks of the Accademia del Cimento, including the most important of Galileo's disciples. Yet of all its esteemed members, Francesco Redi would be the one most remembered by history.