Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Wissenschaft: Mittelalter - Renaissance -> Gegensatz; Giordano Bruno

Kurzinhalt: the early scientists (Renaisscane) were curiously unscientific, not only by our standards, but also by medieval standards; rediscovery of the esoteric spiritual traditions

Textausschnitt: 78a Foremost among these is the anticipation of science as a window into the order of being as a whole. One has only to consider the contrast between medieval and Renaissance science to perceive this pattern. Medieval scientists were by and large nominalists, very often Franciscans or influenced by them. For them, nature was a discrete realm, open to empirical investigation, but in no sense an avenue into the inner working of divine reason. God ruled the universe through his will, which remained inaccessible to rational speculation. Only through his self-revelation in Scripture was access provided into the divinely willed order of things. Nature by itself could not disclose its ultimate structure. There might not be a rational necessity to be apprehended within it. Ultimately, whatever rational order was to be discovered empirically fell under the shadow of the impenetrable divine will. Scripture alone allowed us entry into as much of the mystery as God was willing to disclose. The result was that science could proceed without external pressure as an unfettered empirical examination of nature.1 (Fs)

79a No doubt there were serious problems with the truncated conception of reason as well as with the capricious understanding of nature within this nominalist outlook. But, from the perspective of empirical science, the burden was relatively light. Free from the pressure to find a mode of integration with revelation, we might even regard the nominalist reason as the epitome of free scientific inquiry. Where it led was a matter of supreme indifference, since nothing of ultimate significance rested on the outcome. All that mattered had already been settled through the fideistic response of faith to the divine word of Scripture. Perhaps at no time since has science been so free to pursue its unfolding without glancing at the larger picture of reality it is constructing. No one looked to science to provide definitive guidance in existence. It was free simply to be itself, pursuing only its own intimations and obedient only to its own canons. Without the burden of ultimacy, the rationality of science was unleashed. (Fs)

79b Contrast this with the much more central role of science in the Renaissance. It is no accident that a veritable explosion of scientific interest occurs at precisely the moment when the authoritative force of revelation begins to decline. The Renaissance is marked by a raw hunger for new ways to God. Nature and the cosmos as a whole are probed tirelessly to discover the secret by which more direct access might be attained. Late medieval devotional fervor had lost much of its impetus, and Christianity had increasingly devolved into acrimonious dogmatic disputes, a pattern that only seemed to be extended with the Reformation aftermath. The spiritually attuned began to look elsewhere for the opening toward divinity. What could be more appealing than the project of reading the mind of God expressed directly in the natural order? The Bible of nature was available to all. Beyond the reach of theologians and prelates, it seemed to promise revivifying contact with the ancient theology from which all religion had originated. The result was the pervasive turn toward nature we recognize as the proximate source of the scientific revolution that culminates in the seventeenth century. Modernity itself seems to have its birth in this new found preoccupation with the empirical order of the world.2 (Fs) (notabene)

80a The only difficulty is that the early scientists were curiously unscientific, not only by our standards, but also by medieval standards. Renaissance science is enveloped in the rediscovery of the esoteric spiritual traditions that had continued a subterranean existence since the ancient world. Now the syncretistic myths of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kaballah, together with a rejuvenation of alchemical techniques and the rich speculative framework of Neoplatonic mysticism, burst on the public scene. The sixteenth century is astonishing for the extent to which priests and scholars, kings and popes, embrace the new learning that emanates from these exotic mytho-speculative sources. It is not until the end of the century that their divergence from Christian theology becomes abundantly apparent. A moment of such recognition can no doubt be dated with the burning of Giordano Bruno, a paradigmatic instance of the Renaissance magus, by the Italian inquisition in 1601. Shattered by the ever firmer drawing of dogmatic boundaries in the seventeenth century was the dream that had sustained the flowering Neoplatonic-Hermetic spirituality: that here at last had been found the opening toward the ancient theology, the pure original divine revelation to mankind in nature. (Fs) (notabene)