The Case for God (31 page)

Catholics also found it necessary to reformulate their faith, but they maintained to a greater degree the older notion of religion as practice. The Spaniards, still in the vanguard of modernization, took the lead in the Catholic reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which made the Church a more centralized body on the model of the absolute monarchy. The Council reinforced the power of pope and hierarchy, issued a catechism to ensure doctrinal conformity,
ensured that the clergy were educated to a higher standard, and rationalized liturgical and devotional practices, jettisoning those that were either corrupt or no longer effective. Trent set up programs of education and parish organization to ensure that the new intellectual style spread to the laity.
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But even though the Council fathers went to such lengths to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy, their prime concern was to promote regular liturgical observance to enable the laity to transform the old external, communal rites into genuinely interior devotion. Catholics were certainly drifting toward the new conception of “belief,” but they would never identify it so completely with doctrinal assent as Protestants.
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Other Spanish reformers, such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, modernized the religious orders, attempting to weed out the more dubious and superstitious devotions and make the spiritual quest more systematic and less dependent on the whims of inadequate advisers. Mystics of the new age should know what to expect, learn how to deal with the pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively. The former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, perfectly embodied the efficiency and effectiveness of the early modern West. His
Spiritual Exercises
provided a systematic, time-efficient, thirty-day retreat—a sort of crash course in mysticism, designed to make each Jesuit a dynamic force in the world. Like the Iberian explorers, Jesuit missionaries were dispatched all over the world: Francis Xavier (1506–52) to Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) to India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to China.

The reformed Catholic Church and the new Protestant denominations all succumbed to the iconoclasm of modernity, which would forever feel obliged to destroy what had been personally superseded. The positive achievements of the Catholic reformation were balanced by the horrors of the Inquisition. Protestants used the Old Testament ban on images as a mandate to trash statues and frescoes. Luther raged against the pope, Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants. The Protestant reformers may have demanded that Christians be free to read and interpret the Bible as they chose, but there was no toleration for anybody who opposed their own teachings. Luther believed that all “heretical” books should be burned, and both Calvin and Zwingli were prepared to execute dissidents. Despite its intense religiosity,
the divisions effected by the Protestant Reformation also helped to accelerate the process of secularization and the growth of nationalism. In order to maintain order, the princes had to separate themselves from the turmoil engendered by the squabbling churches and denominations, whose political power therefore diminished. As an infant nation struggled for political independence from Rome, it built a distinct identity, opting for Catholic or Protestant affiliation, and nonconformists were often persecuted as political dissidents and traitors.

As it entered the modern period, therefore, the West was torn between a frequently strident dogmatism on the one hand, and a more liberal humility that recognized the limits of knowledge on the other. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) explored the myriad possibilities of the human personality. He shared the Renaissance understanding of the importance of context; ideas, customs, and behavior were inextricably combined with a particular set of circumstances, so it was impossible to judge them from a purely objective, theoretical point of view. Human affairs were not motivated primarily by rational considerations. People were often caught unawares by unconscious or emotional impulses that were neither pragmatic nor efficient but sometimes worked against their own interests.
Hamlet
depicted the tortured consciousness of a hero with whom everybody somehow identified turning ceaselessly yet fruitlessly upon itself, unable to understand its motivation or achieve any degree of certainty about the most pressing and practical matters. In
Othello
, the apparently “motiveless malignancy” of Iago militated against simplistic ideas of good and evil. Shakespeare made his audiences aware that human beings were mysterious to themselves and others, and that it was disastrous and counterproductive to either attempt to manipulate them or expect them to act in a certain way.

In his own distinctive way, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) expressed a similar spirit, and was skeptical of any human attempt to attain absolute truth. In the famous “Apology of Raymond Sebond,” written, tongue-in-cheek, largely to please his father, Montaigne had marveled at Sebond’s intellectual confidence. This sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher had argued that we could derive all the information we required about God, salvation, and human life from a study of the natural world. But for Montaigne,
reason was so blind and lame that nothing was certain or even probable. If an argument was sufficiently attractive, human beings could be persuaded to believe almost anything. But, far from being cast down by this unknowing, Montaigne was able to live quite happily with this modest assessment of the human intellect and seemed to enjoy the diversity and complexity of early modern life. Like the Renaissance humanists, he had no wish to pass judgment on a world that was daily becoming more difficult to assess. He regarded himself as a loyal Catholic but, in light of the new discoveries that constantly revealed the limits of human understanding, judged the attempt to impose any kind of orthodoxy as arrogant, futile, and dishonest.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the entire population absorbed the new ideas instantaneously. The vast majority probably felt obscurely perplexed at the sudden fragmentation of Christendom without any clear understanding of what was going on. For at least two hundred years, old mental habits of thought persisted, sometimes jostling uneasily with the new values, and we can see this at work even in the scientific revolution. In 1530, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473— 1543), the Polish-born canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg in Prussia, completed
De revolutionibus
, a thesis that argued that the sun was the center of the universe. A typical Renaissance man, Copernicus had studied mathematics, optics, and perspective at Krakow, canon law in Bologna, and medicine at Padua and had lectured on astronomy in Rome. In Frauenberg, working at different times as a church administrator, bailiff, military governor, judge, and physician, he had continued his study of the stars. Copernicus knew that most of the population would find the idea of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe impossible either to understand or to accept, so he did not publish his treatise but circulated the manuscript privately. Nevertheless,
De revolutionibus
was widely read in both Catholic and Protestant countries and inspired a good deal of interest.

Since the twelfth century, Europeans had adopted a cosmology based on Aristotelian physics and popularized by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (c. 90–168).
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The Earth was firmly at the center of the universe, encased like an onion in eight spherical shells composed of an invisible substance called ether. These spheres revolved in a uniform manner around the Earth, and embedded in the ether of each of the first seven spheres was one of the heavenly bodies: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The fixed stars occupied
the eighth sphere at the outermost rim of the universe and gave stability to the whole. The Ptolemaic system was the most accurate account of the data that had been accumulated in the ancient world, when techniques of observation had, of course, been limited and inadequate. The medievals also found it morally satisfying. The Earth may have been the center of the universe but it was also the lowest point of creation. On Earth all was change and decay. But as one moved past the waxing and waning moon to the more constant sun and, finally, reached the fixed stars, everything became more reliable, until beyond the eighth sphere was the immutable world of heaven. Even though Ptolemy’s system was spiritually uplifting, however, it was cumbersome scientifically. Because the circle was universally regarded as the symbol of perfection, it was taken for granted that the planetary orbits described a perfect circle. But observers had noted that some planets appeared to move erratically and seemed brighter at some times than at others. Ptolemy tried to account for these irregularities by an intricate mathematical device that had the planets revolving in small “epicycles” around a central point, which itself described a perfectly circular course around the Earth. When viewed from the Earth, he explained, the center of the epicycle
seemed
to move irregularly, but if it were possible to observe it from an off-center point, it would be seen to move in a wholly uniform manner.

Copernicus turned the whole system inside out.
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Even though his thesis would spark an intellectual revolution, he still retained a foothold in the old mythical world, finding it impossible to abandon the heavenly spheres or the symbolism of the circular planetary orbits. Copernicus, the church administrator, scanned the heavens in order to fix the dates of the religious festivals, but, as a Renaissance man, he was disturbed by the inelegance of Ptolemaic cosmology. How could the Creator have devised such an unwieldy and aesthetically unpleasing cosmos? Looking back
ad fontes
to classical antiquity, he found that in the third century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos had suggested that the planets revolved around the sun and that the Earth revolved on its own axis. He discovered that the Pythagoreans believed that mathematics rather than physics was the key to any understanding of the natural world, and that Philolaus, one of Pythagoras’s pupils, thought that the Earth, planets, and sun all revolved around a central, cosmic fire.

But none of these Greek
phusikoi
had worked out the mathematical
implications of their theories. Copernicus proceeded to do so and produced a radically new hypothesis. If, for the sake of argument, we supposed that the Earth revolved daily on its own axis and
also
described an annual revolution around the sun, we could account for all known celestial phenomena just as accurately as Ptolemy did but in a far more elegant manner. The daily revolution of the celestial bodies and the annual motion of the sun that we
thought
we observed could be explained by the Earth’s diurnal rotation on its axis and its annual orbit around the sun. The heavenly movements we observed were simply a projection of the Earth’s motion in the opposite direction.

Copernicus’s theory was roundly criticized, not because he could not prove it, but because it contravened basic principles of Aristotelian physics. The mathematics worked beautifully, but—according to the traditional academic hierarchy—mathematics was supposed to defer to physics, the superior science. It is not surprising that most people found the idea of a sun-centered universe incredible. It contradicted not only the standard scientific explanation but also basic common sense. Copernicus was asking his colleagues to believe that the Earth, which
seemed
static, was actually moving very fast indeed and that the planets only
appeared
to be in motion around us because of a mistaken projection. Copernican theory demanded that people no longer trust the evidence of their senses and accept on faith the counterintuitive theories of an eccentric mathematician.

There were at first few specifically religious objections. Even though some biblical texts implied that the sun moved in the heavens and that the Earth was stable,
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Catholics were not obliged to interpret them literally. They still followed Augustine’s principle of accommodation, which had ruled that a scriptural text should be reinterpreted if it clashed with science. Copernicus had offered his hypothesis
sub imaginationem
in the traditional way, and when he read his treatise in the Vatican in 1534, the pope gave it cautious approval. When
De revolutionibus
was finally published in 1543, Copernicus was on his deathbed and his editor Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) took it upon himself to write a preface to protect the dying man from harassment: because astronomy could not prove any of its hypotheses, we should depend on divine revelation for reliable information about the cosmos.
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Neither Copernicus nor the handful of people who were able to entertain the idea of a heliocentric universe regarded themselves as religious rebels. Luther is reported to have remarked irritably in his
Table Talk
that Copernicus was a “fool” who wanted “to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down” but seemed more concerned about scientific orthodoxy than its religious implications.
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Luther was not a biblical literalist; his disciple Philipp Melanchthon (14971560) was initially hostile to Copernicus, but mathematics and astronomy figured prominently in the curricula he devised for Protestant universities. Calvin never mentioned Copernicus, but he held fast to Augustine’s principle of accommodation. He was not surprised to hear that the biblical description of the cosmos differed from the latest discoveries of learned philosophers. In Genesis, for example, Moses had described the sun and moon as the largest of the heavenly bodies, but modern astronomers claimed that Saturn was bigger. “Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend.”
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The Bible had nothing to say about astronomy. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere,” Calvin instructed emphatically. Science was “very useful” and must not be impeded “because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.”
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