Books: History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

J >> John William Draper >> History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

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The insect differs from a mere automaton in this, that it is
influenced by old, by registered impressions. In the higher forms
of animated life that registration becomes more and more
complete, memory becomes more perfect. There is not any necessary
resemblance between an external form and its ganglionic
impression, any more than there is between the words of a message
delivered in a telegraphic office and the signals which the
telegraph may give to the distant station; any more than there is
between the letters of a printed page and the acts or scenes they
describe, but the letters call up with clearness to the mind of
the reader the events and scenes.

An animal without any apparatus for the retention of impressions
must be a pure automaton--it cannot have memory. From
insignificant and uncertain beginnings, such an apparatus is
gradually evolved, and, as its development advances, the
intellectual capacity increases. In man, this retention or
registration reaches perfection; he guides, himself by past as
well as by present impressions; be is influenced by experience;
his conduct is determined by reason.

A most important advance is made when the capability is acquired
by any animal of imparting a knowledge of the impressions stored
up in its own nerve-centres to another of the same kind. This
marks the extension of individual into social life, and indeed is
essential thereto. In the higher insects it is accomplished by
antennal contacts, in man by speech. Humanity, in its earlier,
its savage stages, was limited to this: the knowledge of one
person could be transmitted to another by conversation. The acts
and thoughts of one generation could be imparted to another, and
influence its acts and thoughts.

But tradition has its limit. The faculty of speech makes society
possible--nothing more.

Not without interest do we remark the progress of development of
this function. The invention of the art of writing gave extension
and durability to the registration or record of impressions.
These, which had hitherto been stored up in the brain of one man,
might now be imparted to the whole human race, and be made to
endure forever. Civilization became possible--for civilization
cannot exist without writing, or the means of record in some
shape.

From this psychological point of view we perceive the real
significance of the invention of printing--a development of
writing which, by increasing the rapidity of the diffusion of
ideas, and insuring their permanence, tends to promote
civilization and to unify the human race.

In the foregoing paragraphs, relating to nervous impressions,
their registry, and the consequences, that spring from them, I
have given an abstract of views presented in my work on "Human
Physiology," published in 1856, and may, therefore, refer the
reader to the chapter on "Inverse Vision, or Cerebral Sight;" to
Chapter XIV., Book I.; and to Chapter VIII., Book II.; of that
work, for other particulars.

The only path to scientific human psychology is through
comparative psychology. It is a long and wearisome path, but it
leads to truth.

Is there, then, a vast spiritual existence pervading the
universe, even as there is a vast existence of matter pervading
it--a spirit which, as a great German author tells us, "sleeps in
the stone, dreams in the animal, awakes in man?" Does the soul
arise from the one as the body arises from the other? Do they in
like manner return, each to the source from which it has come? If
so, we can interpret human existence, and our ideas may still be
in unison with scientific truth, and in accord with our
conception of the stability, the unchangeability of the universe.

To this spiritual existence the Saracens, following Eastern
nations, gave the designation "the Active Intellect." They
believed that the soul of man emanated from it, as a rain-drop
comes from the sea, and, after a season, returns. So arose among
them the imposing doctrines of emanation and absorption. The
active intellect is God.

In one of its forms, as we have seen, this idea was developed by
Chakia Mouni, in India, in a most masterly manner, and embodied
in the vast practical system of Buddhism; in another, it was with
less power presented among the Saracens by Averroes.

But, perhaps we ought rather to say that Europeans hold Averroes
as the author of this doctrine, because they saw him isolated
from his antecedents. But Mohammedans gave him little credit for
originality. He stood to them in the light of a commentator on
Aristotle, and as presenting the opinions of the Alexandrian and
other philosophical schools up to his time. The following
excerpts from the "Historical Essay on Averroism," by M. Renan,
will show how closely the Sarscenic ideas approached those
presented above:

This system supposes that, at the death of an individual, his
intelligent principle or soul no longer possesses a separate
existence, but returns to or is absorbed in the universal mind,
the active intelligence, the mundane soul, which is God; from
whom, indeed, it had originally emanated or issued forth.

The universal, or active, or objective intellect, is uncreated,
impassible, incorruptible, has neither beginning nor end; nor
does it increase as the number of individual souls increases. It
is altogether separate from matter. It is, as it were, a cosmic
principle. This oneness of the active intellect, or reason, is
the essential principle of the Averroistic theory, and is in
harmony with the cardinal doctrine of Mohammedanism--the unity of
God.

The individual, or passive, or subjective intellect, is an
emanation from the universal, and constitutes what is termed the
soul of man. In one sense it is perishable and ends with the
body, but in a higher sense it endures; for, after death, it
returns to or is absorbed in the universal soul, and thus of all
human souls there remains at last but one--the aggregate of them
all, life is not the property of the individual, it belongs to
Nature. The end of, man is to enter into union more and more
complete with the active intellect--reason. In that the happiness
of the soul consists. Our destiny is quietude. It was the opinion
of Averroes that the transition from the individual to the
universal is instantaneous at death, but the Buddhists maintain
that human personality continues in a declining manner for a
certain term before nonentity, or Nirwana, is attained.

Philosophy has never proposed but two hypotheses to explain the
system of the world: first, a personal God existing apart, and a
human soul called into existence or created, and thenceforth
immortal; second, an impersonal intelligence, or indeterminate
God, and a soul emerging from and returning to him. As to the
origin of beings, there are two opposite opinions: first, that
they are created from nothing; second, that they come by
development from pre-existing forms. The theory of creation
belongs to the first of the above hypotheses, that of evolution
to the last.

Philosophy among the Arabs thus took the same direction that it
had taken in China, in India, and indeed throughout the East. Its
whole spirit depended on the admission of the indestructibility
of matter and force. It saw an analogy between the gathering of
the material of which the body of man consists from the vast
store of matter in Nature, and its final restoration to that
store, and the emanation of the spirit of man from the universal
Intellect, the Divinity, and its final reabsorption.

Having thus indicated in sufficient detail the philosophical
characteristics of the doctrine of emanation and absorption, I
have in the next place to relate its history. It was introduced
into Europe by the Spanish Arabs. Spain was the focal point from
which, issuing forth, it affected the ranks of intelligence and
fashion all over Europe, and in Spain it had a melancholy end.

The Spanish khalifs had surrounded themselves with all the
luxuries of Oriental life. They had magnificent palaces,
enchanting gardens, seraglios filled with beautiful women. Europe
at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement,
more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which
we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their
streets were lighted and solidly paved. The houses were frescoed
and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled
in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from
flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining-halls,
fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of
conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead of
the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their Northern
neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety.
Wine was prohibited. The enchanting moonlight evenings of
Andalusia were spent by the Moors in sequestered, fairy-like
gardens or in orange-groves, listening to the romances of the
story-teller, or engaged in philosophical discourse; consoling
themselves for the disappointments of this life by such
reflections as that, if virtue were rewarded in this world, we
should be without expectations in the life to come; and
reconciling themselves to their daily toil by the expectation
that rest will be found after death--a rest never to be succeeded
by labor.

In the tenth century the Khalif Hakein II. had made beautiful
Andalusia the paradise of the world. Christians, Mussulmen, Jews,
mixed together without restraint. There, among many celebrated
names that have descended to our times, was Gerbert, destined
subsequently to become pope. There, too, was Peter the Venerable,
and many Christian ecclesiastics. Peter says that he found
learned men even from Britain pursuing astronomy. All learned
men, no matter from what country they came, or what their
religious views, were welcomed. The khalif had in his palace a
manufactory of books, and copyists, binders, illuminators. He
kept book-buyers in all the great cities of Asia and Africa. His
library contained four hundred thousand volumes, superbly bound
and illuminated.

Throughout the Mohammedan dominions in Asia, in Africa, and in
Spain, the lower order of Mussulmen entertained a fanatical
hatred against learning. Among the more devout--those who claimed
to be orthodox-- there were painful doubts as to the salvation of
the great Khalif Al-Mamun--the wicked khalif, as they called
him--for he had not only disturbed the people by introducing the
writings of Aristotle and other Greek heathens, but had even
struck at the existence of heaven and hell by saying that the
earth is a globe, and pretending that he could measure its size.
These persons, from their numbers, constituted a political power.

Almansor, who usurped the khalifate to the prejudice of Hakem's
son, thought that his usurpation would be sustained if he put
himself at the head of the orthodox party. He therefore had the
library of Hakem searched, and all works of a scientific or
philosophical nature carried into the public places and burnt, or
thrown into the cisterns of the palace. By a similar court
revolution Averroes, in his old age--he died A.D. 1193--was
expelled from Spain; the religious party had triumphed over the
philosophical. He was denounced as a traitor to religion. An
opposition to philosophy had been organized all over the
Mussulman world. There was hardly a philosopher who was not
punished. Some were put to death, and the consequence was, that
Islam was full of hypocrites.

Into Italy, Germany, England, Averroism had silently made its
way. It found favor in the eyes of the Franciscans, and a focus
in the University of Paris. By very many of the leading minds it
had been accepted. But at length the Dominicans, the rivals of
the Franciscans, sounded an alarm. They said it destroys all
personality, conducts to fatalism, and renders inexplicable the
difference and progress of individual intelligences. The
declaration that there is but one intellect is an error
subversive of the merits of the saints, it is an assertion that
there is no difference among men. What! is there no difference
between the holy soul of Peter and the damned soul of Judas? are
they identical? Averroes in this his blasphemous doctrine denies
creation, providence, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of
prayers, of alms, and of litanies; he disbelieves in the
resurrection and immortality; he places the summum bonum in mere
pleasure.

So, too, among the Jews who were then the leading intellects of
the world, Averroism had been largely propagated. Their great
writer Maimonides had thoroughly accepted it; his school was
spreading it in all directions. A furious persecution arose on
the part of the orthodox Jews. Of Maimonides it had been formerly
their delight to declare that he was "the Eagle of the Doctors,
the Great Sage, the Glory of the West, the Light of the East,
second only to Moses." Now, they proclaimed that he had abandoned
the faith of Abraham; had denied the possibility of creation,
believed in the eternity of the world; had given himself up to
the manufacture of atheists; had deprived God of his attributes;
made a vacuum of him; had declared him inaccessible to prayer,
and a stranger to the government of the world. The works of
Maimonides were committed to the flames by the synagogues of
Montpellier, Barcelona, and Toledo.

Scarcely had the conquering arms of Ferdinand and Isabella
overthrown the Arabian dominion in Spain, when measures were
taken by the papacy to extinguish these opinions, which, it was
believed, were undermining European Christianity.

Until Innocent IV. (1243), there was no special tribunal against
heretics, distinct from those of the bishops. The Inquisition,
then introduced, in accordance with the centralization of the
times, was a general and papal tribunal, which displaced the old
local ones. The bishops, therefore, viewed the innovation with
great dislike, considering it as an intrusion on their rights. It
was established in Italy, Spain, Germany, and the southern
provinces of France.

The temporal sovereigns were only too desirous to make use of
this powerful engine for their own political purposes. Against
this the popes strongly protested. They were not willing that its
use should pass out of the ecclesiastical hand.

The Inquisition, having already been tried in the south of
France, had there proved to be very effective for the suppression
of heresy. It had been introduced into Aragon. Now was assigned
to it the duty of dealing with the Jews.

In the old times under Visigothic rule these people had greatly
prospered, but the leniency that had been shown to them was
succeeded by atrocious persecution, when the Visigoths abandoned
their Arianism and became orthodox. The most inhuman ordinances
were issued against them--a law was enacted condemning them all
to be slaves. It was not to be wondered at that, when the Saracen
invasion took place, the Jews did whatever they could to promote
its success. They, like the Arabs, were an Oriental people, both
traced their lineage to Abraham, their common ancestor; both were
believers in the unity of God. It was their defense of that
doctrine that had brought upon them the hatred of their
Visigothic masters.

Under the Saracen rule they were treated with the highest
consideration. They became distinguished for their wealth and
their learning. For the most part they were Aristotelians. They
founded many schools and colleges. Their mercantile interests led
them to travel all over the world. They particularly studied the
science of medicine. Throughout the middle ages they were the
physicians and bankers of Europe. Of all men they saw the course
of human affairs from the most elevated point of view. Among the
special sciences they became proficient in mathematics and
astronomy; they composed the tables of Alfonso, and were the
cause of the voyage of De Gama. They distinguished themselves
greatly in light literature. From the tenth to the fourteenth
century their literature was the first in Europe. They were to be
found in the courts of princes as physicians, or as treasurers
managing the public finances.

The orthodox clergy in Navarre had excited popular prejudices
against them. To escape the persecutions that arose, many of them
feigned to turn Christians, and of these many apostatized to
their former faith. The papal nuncio at the court of Castile
raised a cry for the establishment of the Inquisition. The poorer
Jews were accused of sacrificing Christian children at the
Passover, in mockery of the crucifixion; the richer were
denounced as Averroists. Under the influence of Torquemada, a

Dominican monk, the confessor of Queen Isabella, that princess
solicited a bull from the pope for the establishment of the Holy
Office. A bull was accordingly issued in November, 1478, for the
detection and suppression of heresy. In the first year of the
operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were
burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up
from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or
imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee,
escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed
inquisitor-general for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office
by his ferocity. Anonymous accusations were received, the accused
was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for
conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear
the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was
forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible
duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed
at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the
following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into
irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition,
computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of
eighteen years, burnt at the stake ten thousand two hundred and
twenty persons, six thousand eight hundred and sixty in effigy,
and otherwise punished ninety-seven thousand three hundred and
twenty-one. This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever
be could find them, And burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental
literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated
Judaism. With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that
the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich
dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.

But all these frightful atrocities proved failures. The
conversions were few. Torquemada, therefore, insisted on the
immediate banishment of every unbaptized Jew. On March 30, 1492,
the edict of expulsion was signed. All unbaptized Jews, of
whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm
by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they
should suffer death. They might sell their effects and take the
proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or
silver. Exiled thus suddenly from the land of their birth, the
land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in
the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody
would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The
Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public
squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims,
who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads
and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish
onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however,
enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help.

Of the banished persons some made their way into Africa, some
into Italy; the latter carried with them to Naples ship-fever,
which destroyed not fewer than twenty thousand in that city, and
devastated that peninsula; some reached Turkey, a few England.
Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and
old people, died by the way; many of them in the agonies of
thirst.

This action against the Jews was soon followed by one against the
Moors. A pragmatica was issued at Seville, February, 1502,
setting forth the obligations of the Castilians to drive the
enemies of God from the land, and ordering that all unbaptized
Moors in the kingdoms of Castile and Leon above the age of
infancy should leave the country by the end of April. They might
sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they
were forbidden to emigrate to the Mohammedan dominions; the
penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse
than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they
chose. Such was the fiendish intolerance of the Spaniards, that
they asserted the government would be justified in taking the
lives of all the Moors for their shameless infidelity.

What an ungrateful return for the toleration that the Moors in
their day of power had given to the Christians! No faith was kept
with the victims. Granada had surrendered under the solemn
guarantee of the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty.
At the instigation of Cardinal Ximenes that pledge was broken,
and, after a residence of eight centuries, the Mohammedans were
driven out of the land.

The coexistence of three religions in Andalusia--the Christian,
the Mohammedan, the Mosaic--had given opportunity for the
development of Averroism or philosophical Arabism. This was a
repetition of what had occurred at Rome, when the gods of all the
conquered countries were confronted in that capital, and
universal disbelief in them all ensued. Averroes himself was
accused of having been first a Mussulman, then a Christian, then
a Jew, and finally a misbeliever. It was affirmed that he was the
author of the mysterious book "De Tribus Impostoribus."

In the middle ages there were two celebrated heretical books,
"The Everlasting Gospel," and the "De Tribus Impostoribus." The
latter was variously imputed to Pope Gerbert, to Frederick II.,
and to Averroes. In their unrelenting hatred the Dominicans
fastened all the blasphemies current in those times on Averroes;
they never tired of recalling the celebrated and outrageous one
respecting the eucharist. His writings had first been generally
made known to Christian Europe by the translation of Michael Scot
in the beginning of the thirteenth century, but long before his
time the literature of the West, like that of Asia, was full of
these ideas. We have seen how broadly they were set forth by
Erigena. The Arabians, from their first cultivation of
philosophy, had been infected by them; they were current in all
the colleges of the three khalifates. Considered not as a mode of
thought, that will spontaneously occur to all men at a certain
stage of intellectual development, but as having originated with
Aristotle, they continually found favor with men of the highest
culture. We see them in Robert Grostete, in Roger Bacon, and
eventually in Spinoza. Averroes was not their inventor, be merely
gave them clearness and expression. Among the Jews of the
thirteenth century, he had completely supplanted his imputed
master. Aristotle had passed away from their eyes; his great
commentator, Averroes, stood in his place. So numerous were the
converts to the doctrine of emanation in Christendom, that Pope
Alexander IV. (1255) found it necessary to interfere. By his
order, Albertus Magnus composed a work against the "Unity of the
Intellect." Treating of the origin and nature of the soul, he
attempted to prove that the theory of "a separate intellect,
enlightening man by irradiation anterior to the individual and
surviving the individual, is a detestable error." But the most
illustrious antagonist of the great com- mentator was St. Thomas
Aquinas, the destroyer of all such heresies as the unity of the
intellect, the denial of Providence, the impossibility of
creation; the victories of "the Angelic Doctor" were celebrated
not only in the disputations of the Dominicans, but also in the
works of art of the painters of Florence and Pisa. The
indignation of that saint knew no bounds when Christians became
the disciples of an infidel, who was worse than a Mohammedan. The
wrath of the Dominicans, the order to which St. Thomas belonged,
was sharpened by the fact that their rivals, the Franciscans,
inclined to Averroistic views; and Dante, who leaned to the
Dominicans, denounced Averroes as the author of a most dangerous
system. The theological odium of all three dominant religions was
put upon him; he was pointed out as the originator of the
atrocious maxim that "all religions are false, although all are
probably useful." An attempt was made at the Council of Vienne to
have his writings absolutely suppressed, and to forbid all
Christians reading them. The Dominicans, armed with the weapons
of the Inquisition, terrified Christian Europe with their
unrelenting persecutions. They imputed all the infidelity of the
times to the Arabian philosopher. But he was not without support.
In Paris and in the cities of Northern Italy the Franciscans
sustained his views, and all Christendom was agitated with these
disputes.

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