A Counterfactual History.

Let us make a simple counterfactual historical assumption, namely that the so-called "Scientific Revolution" of the 17th Century did not take place, as it did in our history. Let us further assume that it never took place, and that - in consequence - the 18th Century Enlightenment and the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions of that century also did not take place in this alternate history.

Thus, the huge increase in global human population, and the enormous increase in carbon emissions due to fossil fuel burning and the destruction of forestry and wetlands experienced in our late 20th and early 21st Centuries do not take place in this parallel world, and science and technology remain at the level of the 16th Century.

It is as well to remember that the "Scientific Revolution" was, in fact, owed to a comparative handful of European intellectuals: namely, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in England; René Descartes (1596-1650), in France and elsewhere; Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) in Italy; Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) in France; Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in Germany; and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) in France. Later figures, of whom the most important were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in Germany and Isaac Newton (1643-1727) in England could not have done their work without the foundation laid by those who preceded them.

Would Galileo have challenged the Ptolemaic cosmology if the Polish mathematician and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had not presented his heliocentric alternative in De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium ("On the revolution of the heavenly spheres", 1543)?

This was not without historical precedent: a heliocentric, or at any rate, non-geocentric, cosmology was advocated by some ancient philosophers, such as Philolaus of Croton (c.470-385 BCE) and Aristarchus of Samos (c.310-c.230 BCE). Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287-c.212 BCE) made use of Aristarchus' heliocentric theory in his work, Psammitēs (Latin, Arenarius = "The Sand Reckoner"), in which he sets out to determine an upper bound to the number of grains of sand that fit into the Universe - which obviously required him to estimate the size of the Universe.

According to Gingerich (Journal for the History of Astronomy 16[1]:37-42, February 1985, DOI: 10.1177/002182868501600102), however, "Our best source for Aristarchus's heliocentric ideas, the Sand-reckoner of Archimedes, was not published until 1544, the year after Copernicus died" (p.37).

Aristotle, in his Peri Ouranou (Latin, De Caelo, "On the Heavens", 350 BCE), Book II, Part 4, informs us that the Earth, the heaviest element, at the centre of the Universe, is surrounded by a sphere of water, that by another sphere of air, and that, in its turn, by a sphere of fire. Above that, lie the heavens, composed of aithēr, the quintessence or fifth element (see Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis ["Commentary on the Dream of Scipio"], 5th Century CE). This is, of course, no more than the cosmology of Claudius Ptolemaeus (c.100-c.170 CE), outlined in his Mathematikē Syntaxis ("Mathematical synthesis", c.150 CE), known to medieval Europe in a Latin translation of its Arabic translation, the Almagest, produced by Gerard of Cremona, an Italian, in Spain in 1175.

Even if he had, a heliocentric cosmology by itself was by no means a guarantee of a scientific understanding of the natural world. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian ex-Dominican, defended the Copernican cosmology in a debate at the Divinity School in Oxford in 1583, with arguments drawn from Hermetic philosophy, not science, as Dame Frances Young points out in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964). Hermeticism (a flavour of which can be found in the Pœmander, or Pœmandres) is a synthesis of Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism and Stoicism, and inspired Medieval and Renaissance magic, alchemy and astrology, and - most importantly for Bruno - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535), whose De occulta philosophia libri tres ("Three Books on Occult Philosophy", 1510, substantially rev., 1533; English trans., 1651) "recover[s] 'true magic' in the framework of Neoplatonic metaphysics and Hermetic theology," and influenced Bruno profoundly.

If these magical and mystical ideas had prevailed over those of empiricism and rationalism, science, as we know it in the 21st Century, would not exist, and nor would it have come into existence in the 17th Century. So why did they, over those of Agrippa, Bruno, the German-Swiss Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541) or the Englishman, John Dee (1527-1608/9)?

The prestige of the Corpus Hermeticum, and its associated works, was undermined by the philological work (De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI) of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), published in the year of his death, which showed that the Hermetic writings dated, not from the time of Moses, as had been thought, but from the 3rd or 4th Century CE. Frances Young is dismissive of Robert Fludd (1574-1637), but if he is a marginal figure, Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) is very much less so, and Isaac Newton is central - yet both these men entertained magical ideas, the latter concerning himself with alchemy and the numerological interpretation of the Old Testament. 

Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), points out that "[16th and 17th Century] medical science was helpless before most contemporary hazards to health... doctors were quite unable to diagnose or treat most contemporary illnesses" (pp.8, 9). This did not matter very much to most of the population, however, as Thomas also points out (p.10), because they could not afford the services of a doctor, and there were not enough qualified doctors to serve all the populace in any event. Again, as he points out, "many of the poor chose to... consult an empiric, herbalist, wise woman, or other member of that 'great multitude of ignorant persons' whose practice of physic and surgery had been denounced by Parliament in 1512" (p.12).

Thomas notes that "Nearly every primitive religion is regarded by its adherents as a medium for obtaining supernatural power" (p.25). Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine philosopher, theologian and translator, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), another Italian, had both sought to reconcile Hermeticism with Catholic Christianity, and Pico, additionally, sought to reconcile the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah with Christianity in his Heptaplus (1489), a commentary on the first 26 verses of the Book of Genesis.

Neither of these attempts at reconciliation had been fully accepted by the Church - indeed, they had met with considerable opposition. Most theologians of the Reformation opposed any form of mysticism (but see McGinn, Acta Theologica 35[2]:50-65, 2015, DOI: 10.4314/actat.v35i2.4), and all of them regarded magic, in toto, as the work of the Devil (see Scribner, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23[3]:475-494, 1993, DOI: 10.2307/206099). As Scribner says (p.475): "The Reformation... [took] the 'magical' elements out of Christian religion, eliminating the ideas that religious rituals had any automatic efficacy, that material objects could be endowed with any sort of sacred power, and that human actions could have any supernatural effect." There was nothing new in the ascription of the efficacy of magic to demons, as Scribner points out (p.481): "From the fifth century... John Cassian... [attributed] the effects and efficacy of magic to demons, identified from Old Testament sources as those who fell with Lucifer." Giordano Bruno did not help matters with his talk of invoking "higher demons" for magical purposes, and nor did Cornelius Agrippa before him: "Agrippan magic... regularly involved direct efforts to invoke the intervention of planetary daemons and other spirits."

However, as C.S. Lewis points out in his The Discarded Image (1964), the term 'daemon' is ambiguous. For Apuleius (c.124-after 170 CE), as for Plato (in the Symposium), "Daemons are... creatures of a middle nature between gods and men" (Lewis, p.40).Their natural habitat is the air, according to Apuleius, and they are rational aerial animals, as we are rational terrestrial ones. "The daemons have bodies of a finer consistency than clouds" (p.41). As Lewis notes, "The daemons are 'between' us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal; like mortal men, they are passible" (p.42). He further notes (ibid.) that the standard Latin translation of the Greek "daemon" is "genius", with all the changes of meaning that word has undergone since the Middle Ages. However, by the time of St Augustine, Lewis informs us (p.50, & n.5, citing De Civitate Dei ["The City of God"], VIII, 14-X, 32), "all the daemons of Paganism were evil - were 'demons' in the later sense of the word". There is no need to refer to the 16th and 17th Century panic about witches.

One other - and crucial - thing that the Reformation achieved was its challenge to the notion of authority, replacing that of the Pope and the Church, with its tradition and magisterium - its creeds, Councils and Fathers - with that of scripture alone (sola Scriptura), which was taken to be its own interpreter, and was not supposed to require the Church's interpretation (Sancta Scriptura sui interpres). The fact that Protestants could not agree in their interpretation of Scripture over a number of issues (infant baptism and the nature of the Eucharist or Holy Communion, for example) did not dent this belief. The naïve medieval trust in, and acceptance of, auctoritates, was gone.

Furthermore, the "new learning" of the Renaissance had liberated the minds of people like the Dutchman, Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), who, although he rejected the theology of Luther and the other Reformers, and remained a Catholic, was nevertheless a critical thinker, who did not simply swallow the doctrines of either side of the controversy, but made his own valuable contribution to the debate, and to the historical-critical study of the Bible and the Church Fathers. "He was [and is] a beacon for those who [value] liberty more than orthodoxy." In this, he is a sad contrast to that other Renaissance figure, his contemporary, Thomas More (1478-1535). 

This is a large part of the problem: for, without this mental liberation, not only would there have been no scientific revolution, but no liberalism, no tolerance (or better, acceptance) no freedom of thought, expression, conscience, religion, freedom of the press, freedom of any kind, for all of those things arose out of the fiery conflicts of the early modern period. Democracy, in the sense of universal adult suffrage and periodic elections to any sort of legislative assembly, would also not exist. That is the case is amply confirmed by the diatribe of Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903, r.1878-1903), in his Encyclical, Humanum genus (1884), 22, against the Freemasons: "the naturalists lay down that all men have the same right, and are in every respect of equal and like condition; that each one is naturally free; that no one has the right to command another; that it is an act of violence to require men to obey any authority other than that which is obtained from themselves. According to this, therefore, all things belong to the free people; power is held by the command or permission of the people..." These ideas Leo XIII unreservedly condemned.

It seems very likely, however, that our so-called "civilisation" will, in the very near future, revert to the state it was in prior to the Industrial Revolution, and probably the Scientific Revolution, as well.