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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If policy may be held accountable as much for the births it
prevents as for the deaths it occasions, what a great
responsibility there is here!

In this investigation of the influence of Catholicism, we must
carefully keep separate what it did for the people and what it
did for itself. When we think of the stately monastery, an
embodiment of luxury, with its closely-mown lawns, its gardens
and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must
connect it not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help
in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk
and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder. He is part of a
system that has its centre of authority in Italy.. To that his
allegiance is due. For its behoof are all his acts. When we
survey, as still we may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals
of those times, miracles of architectural skill--the only real
miracles of Catholicism--when in imagination we restore the
transcendently imposing, the noble services of which they were
once the scene, the dim, religious-light streaming in through the
many-colored windows, the sounds of voices not inferior in their
melody to those of heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments,
and above all the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and
prayers in a foreign and unknown tongue, shall we not ask
ourselves, Was all this for the sake of those worshipers, or for
the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority at Rome?

But perhaps some one may say, Are there not limits to human
exertion--things which no political system, no human power, no
matter how excellent its intention, can accomplish? Men cannot be
raised from barbarism, a continent cannot be civilized, in a day!

The Catholic power is not, however, to be tried by any such
standard. It scornfully rejected and still rejects a human
origin. It claims to be accredited supernaturally. The sovereign
pontiff is the Vicar of God upon earth. Infallible in judgment,
it is given to him to accomplish all things by miracle if need
be. He had exercised an autocratic tyranny over the intellect of
Europe for more than a thousand years; and, though on some
occasions he had encountered the resistances of disobedient
princes, these, in the aggregate, were of so little moment, that
the physical, the political power of the continent may be
affirmed to have been at his disposal.

Such facts as have been presented in this chapter were,
doubtless, well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the
sixteenth century, and brought them to the conclusion that
Catholicism had altogether failed in its mission; that it had
become a vast system of delusion and imposture, and that a
restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished by
returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This
was no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the opinion
of many religious and learned men. The pious Fratricelli in the
middle ages had loudly expressed their belief that the fatal gift
of a Roman emperor had been the doom of true religion. It wanted
nothing more than the voice of Luther to bring men throughout the
north of Europe to the, determination that the worship of the
Virgin Mary, the invocation of saints, the working of miracles,
supernatural cures of the sick, the purchase of indulgences for
the perpetration of sin, and all other evil practices, lucrative
to their abettors, which had been fastened on Christianity, but
which were no part of it, should come to an end. Catholicism, as
a system for promoting the well-being of man, had plainly failed
in justifying its alleged origin; its performance had not
corresponded to its great pretensions; and, after an opportunity
of more than a thousand years' duration, it had left the masses
of men submitted to its influences, both as regards physical
well-being and intellectual culture, in a condition far lower
than what it ought to have been.

CHAPTER XI.

SCIENCE IN RELATION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.

Illustration of the general influences of Science from the
history of America.

THE INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE.--It passed from Moorish
Spain to Upper Italy, and was favored by the absence of the popes
at Avignon.--The effects of printing, of maritime adventure, and
of the Reformation--Establishment of the Italian scientific
societies.

THE INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE.--It changed the mode and
the direction of thought in Europe.--The transactions of the
Royal Society of London, and other scientific societies, furnish
an illustration of this.

THE ECONOMICAL INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE is illustrated by the
numerous mechanical and physical inventions, made since the
fourteenth century.--Their influence on health and domestic life,
on the arts of peace and of war.

Answer to the question, What has Science done for humanity?

EUROPE, at the epoch of the Reformation, furnishes us with the
result of the influences of Roman Christianity in the promotion
of civilization. America, examined in like manner at the present
time, furnishes us with an illustration of the influences of
science.

SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION. In the course of the seventeenth
century a sparse European population bad settled along the
western Atlantic coast. Attracted by the cod-fishery of
Newfoundland, the French had a little colony north of the St.
Lawrence; the English, Dutch, and Swedes, occupied the shore of
New England and the Middle States; some Huguenots were living in
the Carolinas. Rumors of a spring that could confer perpetual
youth--a fountain of life--had brought a few Spaniards into
Florida. Behind the fringe of villages which these adventurers
had built, lay a vast and unknown country, inhabited by wandering
Indians, whose numbers from the Gulf of Mexico to the St.
Lawrence did not exceed one hundred and eighty thousand. From
them the European strangers had learned that in those solitary
regions there were fresh-water seas, and a great river which they
called the Mississippi. Some said that it flowed through Virginia
into the Atlantic, some that it passed through Florida, some that
it emptied into the Pacific, and some that it reached the Gulf of
Mexico. Parted from their native countries by the stormy
Atlantic, to cross which implied a voyage of many months, these
refugees seemed lost to the world.

But before the close of the nineteenth century the descendants of
this feeble people had become one of the great powers of the
earth. They had established a republic whose sway extended from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. With an army of more than a million
men, not on paper, but actually in the field, they had overthrown
a domestic assailant. They had maintained at sea a war-fleet of
nearly seven hundred ships, carrying five thousand guns, some of
them the heaviest in the world. The tonnage of this navy amounted
to half a million. In the defense of their national life they had
expended in less than five years more than four thousand million
dollars. Their census, periodically taken, showed that the
population was doubling itself every twenty-five years; it
justified the expectation that at the close of that century it
would number nearly one hundred million souls.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. A silent continent had been changed into a
scene of industry; it was full of the din of machinery and the
restless moving of men. Where there had been an unbroken forest,
there were hundreds of cities and towns. To commerce were
furnished in profusion some of the most important staples, as
cotton, tobacco, breadstuffs. The mines yielded incredible
quantities of gold, iron, coal. Countless churches, colleges, and
public schools, testified that a moral influence vivified this
material activity. Locomotion was effectually provided for. The
railways exceeded in aggregate length those of all Europe
combined. In 1873 the aggregate length of the European railways
was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty miles, that of
the American was seventy thousand six hundred and fifty miles.
One of them, built across the continent, connected the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans.

But not alone are these material results worthy of notice. Others
of a moral and social kind force themselves on our attention.
Four million negro slaves had been set free. Legislation, if it
inclined to the advantage of any class, inclined to that of the
poor. Its intention was to raise them from poverty, and better
their lot. A career was open to talent, and that without any
restraint. Every thing was possible to intelligence and industry.
Many of the most important public offices were filled by men who
had risen from the humblest walks of life. If there was not
social equality, as there never can be in rich and prosperous
communities, there was civil equality, rigorously maintained.

It may perhaps be said that much of this material prosperity
arose from special conditions, such as had never occurred in the
case of any people before, There was a vast, an open theatre of
action, a whole continent ready for any who chose to take
possession of it. Nothing more than courage and industry was
needed to overcome Nature, and to seize the abounding advantages
she offered.

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM AMERICAN HISTORY. But must not men be animated
by a great principle who successfully transform the primeval
solitudes into an abode of civilization, who are not dismayed by
gloomy forests, or rivers, mountains, or frightful deserts, who
push their conquering way in the course of a century across a
continent, and hold it in subjection? Let us contrast with this
the results of the invasion of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards,
who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in
many respects superior to their own--a civilization that had been
accomplished without iron and gunpowder--a civilization resting
on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plough. The
Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction
whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal
children of America had accomplished. Millions of those
unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for
many centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity,
under institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them,
were plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful
superstition, and a greater part of their landed and other
property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church.

I have selected the foregoing illustration, drawn from American
history, in preference to many others that might have been taken
from European, because it furnishes an instance of the operation
of the acting principle least interfered with by extraneous
conditions. European political progress is less simple than
American.

QUARREL BETWEEN FRANCE AND THE PAPACY. Before considering its
manner of action, and its results, I will briefly relate how the
scientific principle found an introduction into Europe.

INTRODUCTION OF SCIENCE INTO EUROPE. Not only had the Crusades,
for many years, brought vast sums to Rome, extorted from the
fears or the piety of every Christian nation; they had also
increased the papal power to a most dangerous extent. In the dual
governments everywhere prevailing in Europe, the spiritual had
obtained the mastery; the temporal was little better than its
servant.

From all quarters, and under all kinds of pretenses, streams of
money were steadily flowing into Italy. The temporal princes
found that there were left for them inadequate and impoverished
revenues. Philip the Fair, King of France (A.D. 1300), not only
determined to check this drain from his dominions, by prohibiting
the export of gold and silver without his license; he also
resolved that the clergy and the ecclesiastical estates should
pay their share of taxes to him. This brought on a mortal contest
with the papacy. The king was excommunicated, and, in
retaliation, he accused the pope, Boniface VIII., of atheism;
demanding that he should be tried by a general council. He sent
some trusty persons into Italy, who seized Boniface in his palace
at Anagni, and treated him with so much severity, that in a few
days he died. The succeeding pontiff, Benedict XI., was poisoned.

The French king was determined that the papacy should be purified
and reformed; that it should no longer be the appanage of a few
Italian families, who were dexterously transmuting the credulity
of Europe into coin--that French influence should prevail in it.
He Therefore came to an understanding with the cardinals; a
French archbishop was elevated to the pontificate; he took the
name of Clement V. The papal court was removed to Avignon, in
France, and Rome was abandoned as the metropolis of Christianity.

MOORISH SCIENCE INTRODUCED THROUGH FRANCE. Seventy years elapsed
before the papacy was restored to the Eternal City (A.D. 1376).
The diminution of its influence in the peninsula, that had thus
occurred, gave opportunity for the memorable intellectual
movement which soon manifested itself in the great commercial
cities of Upper Italy. Contemporaneously, also, there were other
propitious events. The result of the Crusades had shaken the
faith of all Christendom. In an age when the test of the ordeal
of battle was universally accepted, those wars had ended in
leaving the Holy Land in the hands of the Saracens; the many
thousand Christian warriors who had returned from them did not
hesitate to declare that they had found their antagonists not
such as had been pictured by the Church, but valiant, courteous,
just. Through the gay cities of the South of France a love of
romantic literature had been spreading; the wandering troubadours
had been singing their songs--songs far from being restricted to
ladye- love and feats of war; often their burden was the awful
atrocities that had been perpetrated by papal authority-- the
religious massacres of Languedoc; often their burden was the
illicit amours of the clergy. From Moorish Spain the gentle and
gallant idea of chivalry had been brought, and with it the noble
sentiment of "personal honor," destined in the course of time to
give a code of its own to Europe.

EFFECT OF THE GREAT SCHISM. The return of the papacy to Rome was
far from restoring the influence of the popes over the Italian
Peninsula. More than two generations had passed away since their
departure, and, had they come back even in their original
strength, they could not have resisted the intellectual progress
that had been made during their absence. The papacy, however,
came back not to rule, but to be divided against itself, to
encounter the Great Schism. Out of its dissensions emerged two
rival popes; eventually there were three, each pressing his
claims upon the religious, each cursing his rival. A sentiment of
indignation soon spread all over Europe, a determination that the
shameful scenes which were then enacting should be ended. How
could the dogma of a Vicar of God upon earth, the dogma of an
infallible pope, be sustained in presence of such scandals?
Herein lay the cause of that resolution of the ablest
ecclesiastics of those times (which, alas for Europe! could not
be carried into effect), that a general council should be made
the permanent religious parliament of the whole continent, with
the pope as its chief executive officer. Had that intention been
accomplished, there would have been at this day no conflict
between science and religion; the convulsion of the Reformation
would have been avoided; there would have been no jarring
Protestant sects. But the Councils of Constance and Basle failed
to shake off the Italian yoke, failed to attain that noble
result.

Catholicism was thus weakening; as its leaden pressure lifted,
the intellect of man expanded. The Saracens had invented the
method of making paper from linen rags and from cotton. The
Venetians had brought from China to Europe the art of printing.
The former of these inventions was essential to the latter. Hence
forth, without the possibility of a check, there was intellectual
intercommunication among all men.

INVENTION OF PRINTING. The invention of printing was a severe
blow to Catholicism, which had, previously, enjoyed the
inappreciable advantage of a monopoly of intercommunication. From
its central seat, orders could be disseminated through all the
ecclesiastical ranks, and fulminated through the pulpits. This
monopoly and the amazing power it conferred were destroyed by the
press. In modern times, the influence of the pulpit has become
insignificant. The pulpit has been thoroughly supplanted by the
newspaper.

Yet, Catholicism did not yield its ancient advantage without a
struggle. As soon as the inevitable tendency of the new art was
detected, a restraint upon it, under the form of a censorship,
was attempted. It was made necessary to have a permit, in order
to print a book. For this, it was needful that the work should
have been read, examined, and approved by the clergy. There must
be a certificate that it was a godly and orthodox book. A bull of
excommunication was issued in 1501, by Alexander VI., against
printers who should publish pernicious doctrines. In 1515 the
Lateran Council ordered that no books should be printed but such
as had been inspected by the ecclesiastical censors, under pain
of excommunication and fine; the censors being directed "to take
the utmost care that nothing should be printed contrary to the
orthodox faith." There was thus a dread of religious discussion;
a terror lest truth should emerge.

But these frantic struggles of the powers of ignorance were
unavailing. Intellectual intercommunication among men was
secured. It culminated in the modern newspaper, which daily gives
its contemporaneous intelligence from all parts of the world.
Reading became a common occupation. In ancient society that art
was possessed by comparatively few persons. Modern society owes
some of its most striking characteristics to this change.

EFFECTS OF MARITIME ENTERPRISE. Such was the result of bringing
into Europe the manufacture of paper and the printing-press. In
like manner the introduction of the mariner's compass was
followed by imposing material and moral effects. These were--the
discovery of America in consequence of the rivalry of the
Venetians and Genoese about the India trade; the doubling of
Africa by De Gama; and the circumnavigation of the earth by
Magellan. With respect to the last, the grandest of all human
undertakings, it is to be remembered that Catholicism had
irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth, with
the sky as the floor of heaven, and hell in the under-world. Some
of the Fathers, whose authority was held to be paramount, had, as
we have previously said, furnished philosophical and religious
arguments against the globular form. The controversy had now
suddenly come to an end--the Church was found to be in error.

The correction of that geographical error was by no means the
only important result that followed the three great voyages. The
spirit of Columbus, De Gama, Magellan, diffused itself among all
the enterprising men of Western Europe. Society had been hitherto
living under the dogma of "loyalty to the king, obedience to the
Church." It had therefore been living for others, not for itself.
The political effect of that dogma had culminated in the
Crusades. Countless thousands had perished in wars that could
bring them no reward, and of which the result had been
conspicuous failure. Experience had revealed the fact that the
only gainers were the pontiffs, cardinals, and other
ecclesiastics in Rome, and the shipmasters of Venice. But, when
it became known that the wealth of Mexico, Peru, and India, might
be shared by any one who had enterprise and courage, the motives
that had animated the restless populations of Europe suddenly
changed. The story of Cortez and Pizarro found enthusiastic
listeners everywhere. Maritime adventure supplanted religious
enthusiasm.

If we attempt to isolate the principle that lay at the basis of
the wonderful social changes that now took place, we may
recognize it without difficulty. Heretofore each man had
dedicated his services to his superior--feudal or ecclesiastical;
now he had resolved to gather the fruits of his exertions
himself. Individualism was becoming predominant, loyalty was
declining into a sentiment. We shall now see how it was with the
Church.

INDIVIDUALISM. Individualism rests on the principle that a man
shall be his own master, that he shall have liberty to form his
own opinions, freedom to carry into effect his resolves. He is,
therefore, ever brought into competition with his fellow-men. His
life is a display of energy.

To remove the stagnation of centuries front European life, to
vivify suddenly what had hitherto been an inert mass, to impart
to it individualism, was to bring it into conflict with the
influences that had been oppressing it. All through the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries uneasy strugglings gave a
premonition of what was coming. In the early part of the
sixteenth (1517), the battle was joined. Individualism found its
embodiment in a sturdy German monk, and therefore, perhaps
necessarily, asserted its rights under theological forms. There
were some preliminary skirmishes about indulgences and other
minor matters, but very soon the real cause of dispute came
plainly into view. Martin Luther refused to think as he was
ordered to do by his ecclesiastical superiors at Rome; he
asserted that he had an inalienable right to interpret the Bible
for himself.

At her first glance, Rome saw nothing in Martin Luther but a
vulgar, insubordinate, quarrelsome monk. Could the Inquisition
have laid hold of him, it would have speedily disposed of his
affair; but, as the conflict went on, it was discovered that
Martin was not standing alone. Many thousands of men, as resolute
as himself, were coming up to his support; and, while he carried
on the combat with writings and words, they made good his
propositions with the sword.

THE REFORMATION. The vilification which was poured on Luther and
his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that
his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus,
who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his
conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the
immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of
drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly addicted; that he
blasphemed the Holy Scriptures, and particularly Moses; that he
did not believe a word of what he preached; that he had called
the Epistle of St. James a thing of straw; and, above all, that
the Reformation was no work of his, but, in reality, was due to a
certain astrological position of the stars. It was, however, a
vulgar saying among the Roman ecclesiastics that Erasmus laid the
egg of the Reformation, and Luther hatched it.

Rome at first made the mistake of supposing that this was nothing
more than a casual outbreak; she failed to discern that it was,
in fact, the culmination of an internal movement which for two
centuries had been going on in Europe, and which had been hourly
gathering force; that, had there been nothing else, the existence
of three popes--three obediences--would have compelled men to
think, to deliberate, to conclude for themselves. The Councils of
Constance and Basle taught them that there was a higher power
than the popes. The long and bloody wars that ensued were closed
by the Peace of Westphalia; and then it was found that Central
and Northern Europe had cast off the intellectual tyranny of
Rome, that individualism had carried its point, and had
established the right of every man to think for himself.

DECOMPOSITION OF PROTESTANTISM. But it was impossible that the
establishment of this right of private judgment should end with
the rejection of Catholicism. Early in the movement some of the
most distinguished men, such as Erasmus, who had been among its
first promoters, abandoned it. They perceived that many of the
Reformers entertained a bitter dislike of learning, and they were
afraid of being brought under bigoted caprice. The Protestant
party, having thus established its existence by dissent and
separation, must, in its turn, submit to the operation of the
same principles. A decomposition into many subordinate sects was
inevitable. And these, now that they had no longer any thing to
fear from their great Italian adversary, commenced partisan
warfares on each other. As, in different countries, first one and
then another sect rose to power, it stained itself with cruelties
perpetrated upon its competitors. The mortal retaliations that
had ensued, when, in the chances of the times, the oppressed got
the better of their oppressors, convinced the contending
sectarians that they must concede to their competitors what they
claimed for themselves; and thus, from their broils and their
crimes, the great principle of toleration extricated itself. But
toleration is only an intermediate stage; and, as the
intellectual decomposition of Protestantism keeps going on, that
transitional condition will lead to a higher and nobler state
--the hope of philosophy in all past ages of the world--a social
state in which there shall be unfettered freedom for thought.
Toleration, except when extorted by fear, can only come from
those who are capable of entertaining and respecting other
opinions than their own. It can therefore only come from
philosophy. History teaches us only too plainly that fanaticism
is stimulated by religion, and neutralized or eradicated by
philosophy.

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