Science and Medieval Thought

Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who early in the seventeenth century attended lectures at Padua, opined that natural science deals with “ignoble studies, not proportioned to the dignity of our Souls.” In the eighteenth century indeed, grave English physicians, humanists who forgot how Aristotle had exclaimed that marvellousness lies in all natural phenomena, scorned the trivial curiosity of John Hunter respecting flies and tadpoles.

It is part of my argument to-day to point out one evil of many which this prejudice has wrought for medicine. The progress of an applied science dependent as it is upon accessions of advantage from other arts, yet on the whole is from the simple to the complex; from facts of more direct observation to those of longer inference: and this path was the more necessary when the right method of inference – the so-called inductive method – had not been formulated, and indeed was barely in use. Now in medicine, from Homer to Lord Lister, direct observation and the simpler means of experiment have obtained their first-fruits on the surface of the body. In Homeric times surgery was the institution of medicine, and kings concerned themselves with the practice of it. From Erasistratus to Celsus physicians of all schools practised medicine and surgery as one art. Galen urges the unity of medicine, and Littré points out that this unity is maintained in the Hippocratic writings. In the Middle Ages the ascetic contempt for the body – partly Stoic, chiefly oriental, – the barren alliance of medicine with philosophy, and the low esteem of mechanical callings hid from the physician the very gates of the city into which he would enter. Francis Bacon says of the physicians of Harvey’s day, that they saw things from afar off, as if from a high tower; and, again, that after the manner of spiders they spun webs of sophistical speculation from their own bowels. Surgery, by virtue of its imperative methods, was kept clear of philosophy on the one hand and of humanism on the other; and in Paris the establishment of the Collège de St Côme, afterwards the Academy of Surgery, protected the higher surgery against the rabble of barbers. Upon the raft of anatomy and surgery, with some clinical aid from Salerno, positive medicine crossed the gulf between Byzantine compilations, monkish leechcraft, Arab starcraft and alchemy, and the scientific era of Harvey44. But physicians were not only blind to the great services to the whole art of medicine of the surgical school of Lanfranc in the fourteenth century, of Guy de Chauliac in the fifteenth, and of Paré and Gale in the sixteenth century, advances even accelerated in the seventeenth, but they ignored also their very origin, and even withdrew from fellowship with the surgeon; to our grievous harm from those days unto our own45. Surgery was excluded from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris; and from the Royal College of Physicians of England, which was, and is still, enabled by charter to teach surgery, and to grant licenses therein. Fabricius, the master of Harvey, was fortunately as great a surgeon as anatomist, and such was Fallopius. In this College Harvey lectured on anatomy and surgery, and he left his surgical instruments to us; for us Caldwal founded a lectureship in surgery which has been allowed virtually to lapse. From the progress of anatomy which, under the protection of the Italian nobles as formerly of the Alexandrian, went hand in hand with surgery, physicians drew then little advantage; and so in part perhaps it came about that although Vesalius, Fallopius, and Fabricius broke up the traditional anatomy of Mundinus, yet anatomy did more even for the fine arts than for physiology; and medicine at the end of the Middle Ages had not recovered the standard of Alexandria. Against this adversity also had to contend the founder of physiology whom to-day we celebrate.

Such were the chief adversities (vid. Appendix on Astrology) under which the naturalist suffered, but natural knowledge was never stifled; let us now turn our eyes to another point of view, from the oppression to the gradual enfranchisement of knowledge.

Necessary for the welding of western society in the Middle Ages as was authority in all spheres of thought and action, and, heavy as the price of its inertia has been since its work was done, yet in the celebration of the founders of natural science it would be untrue to assume that before them, even in the earlier scholastic period, the indomitable spirit of man had lain under tyranny in silence. “Μένει τὸ θεῖον δουλίᾳ περ ἐν φρενί.” The way had been prepared for them. By the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries fury and devastation were diverted in part from Europe, and hurled upon Asia; which soon closes up again. The naïve serenity of the Faith was gone, but as its great minsters arose it forgot its dangers; and the social bonds of orthodoxy rudely shaken were renewed. The Schools grew as great as the churches: Naples, Pavia, Bologna and Padua; Paris, Orleans, Bourges, Toulouse, Montpellier, the Sorbonne; Oxford and Cambridge. Even the Friars Preachers and Minors were driven to fight with the new weapons; first rivalling the universities, then possessing themselves of their chairs. But philosophy, which had lent much to the Faith46, gained nothing from it; and to philosophy rather than to the Church the sciences looked for their principles and methods. In physics the experimental method was creeping into life; and the substance as well as the form of old controversies was changing. Thus through all these generations was rising a leaven of free thought, and its reforms may roughly be put in a twofold division, into the reform of tradition, and the reform of method; the reform of texts being again divisible into two periods – the Arabian, or second scholastic, and the modern or Renascence period. The chief monuments of learning were stored in Byzantium47 until Western Europe was fit to take care of them. In the peace of Theodoric, in the peace of Charlemagne, under Alfred at Winchester, the arts and sciences had scarcely found breathing-time, and no sure establishment48. Cassiodorus is said to have directed the Benedictines of the sixth century to read Cælius Aurelianus, a Roman adaptor of Soranus of Ephesus; but medical lore consisted of little beyond some relics of the Roman schools, handed on in prose or verse compilations which the teacher read to his class, and explained so far as he could. It seems that medicine was not taught formally until so ordered, in 805, by Charlemagne; probably by the advice of Alcuin, the founder of the learned tradition at Fulda, the founder, we may almost say, of the neo-latin period, and some time headmaster of my own school of St Peter at York. The influence of the School of Salerno, relatively excellent as it was in the domains of clinical medicine and of public health, never made its way into the general stream of Western culture. Religious wars and persecutions had driven Greek learning eastwards, as in the case of the Nestorians from Antioch to Persia; Hebrew and Syrian sages49 translated some classical texts, and from these again the Arabs, in their brief and brilliant culture, made translations; for no Arab sage knew Greek. The palace of the Spanish Caliphs in the tenth century was a workshop of translators, and a huge storehouse of books. The learned and ubiquitous Jew carried texts and translations from Bagdad to Morocco, and from Morocco to Toledo, Paris, Oxford and Cologne; but translations made in Bagdad in the ninth century did not reach Paris till the eleventh or twelfth.

Among the earliest of these renderings in the West were works on medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, which in the Schools of Toledo and Cordova, by Constantinus Africanus at Monte Cassino (including certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen), by Gerard of Cremona (a Salernitan scholar), by Michael the wizard50, and by other hands, were converted into Latin; and, thus doubly disguised, and half buried in glosses which not only overlaid the text (“oscura glossa dov’ é piana la lettera”) but often supplanted it, were received with pathetic eagerness by the ardent scholars of the West. Aristotle, for instance, was now taught in the schools of the West from a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arab commentary upon an Arab translation of a Syriac translation of the Greek text51. Even in the sixteenth century medicine and anatomy were taught wholly from books; and teachers were forbidden to use other than prescribed books. Students began with the “Articella” of the Venetian physician Gregorio Volpi, a compendium of translations with woodcuts, published in 1491; they advanced to the Aphorisms, the Diet in Acute Diseases and the Prognostics of Hippocrates, overlaid with Syriac, Arabic and Spanish apparatus and glosses; to the Ars Parva of Galen; to the first and fifth Canons of Avicenna, with glosses; to the ixth Book of Rhazes, Honein, Aegidius Corboliensis, and perhaps some of the translations of Constantinus Africanus52; – this was the lore that ruled the medical schools even to the birth of Harvey. Disputations among the students were incessant, both “inter se” and “sub cathedrâ”; but it is doubtful whether these did more than sharpen their dialectical wits. Botany, regarded by the galenists as the secret of the divine dispensary, was always more forward; every medical school had its physic garden, professors carried their students abroad to gather herbs, and Herbals, Dispensatoriums and Kräuterbücher were much in advance of the Bestiaries, mostly after Pliny’s kind, the chief of which, largely an original work, was that of the well-known Conrad Gesner.

Some hundred years before the appearance of the Arabian Aristotle, which marked the second scholastic period, we have seen that the shadow of the Faith and the savagery of the peoples had not quelled such teachers as Roscellinus and Abélard, who fought for rationalism so sturdily as even then to threaten the ascendency of realism and the persuasion of supple and plausible demagogues like Anselm of Laon – that “sterile tree” as Abélard called him, – and actually to determine the first period of the Middle Ages. Happily the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root in Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered towards Aristotle53, and it was more uniformly peripatetic than the earliest Christian Scholasticism. It is one of the notes of the greatness of Aristotle that, even thus garbled and glossed, his power made itself felt by the mouths of the great Franciscans Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and William Ockham. The Organon had been expounded in Paris in 1180, and about the same time Alexander Neckam cited the Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the De anima; but Hales was in possession of the whole, or almost the whole, of a more or less corrupt Aristotle, which he turned upon theology.

Roger Bacon was the first of the natural philosophers of the West, and the only eminent forerunner of Harvey and the other pioneers of natural science in the seventeenth century. As erudite as Albert, Bacon was more inventive, freer of spirit, more disposed to scientific method, better aware of the hollowness of authority, better aware that truth can be found only in free reason guided by experiment. Unfortunately as an author he was as dull and ineffectual as Francis Bacon was rich, animated and impressive. That indeed this premature renascence, without scientific methods or sound tradition, should have failed54, that its light was but the phantom of dawn55, is no matter for surprise; yet from this time forward the methods of Cyprian and Athanasius lost their undisputed sway. This earlier renascence made the second period of the Middle Ages: the period distinguished by the Arabian version of Aristotle; by a check to the chimeras of realism; by some liberty of secular knowledge, for even bishops came out of the Mussulman school of Toledo and arrayed themselves in vestments of Arab work decorated with sentences from the Koran; and again by the coming of the friars, the Dominican and Franciscan especially, whose influence upon the thought of the Middle Ages was considerable, and soon rivalled even that of the universities, wherein later, as we have seen, they filled some of the chairs.

The issues of all schemes of thought led indeed as inevitably to natural science, as all ways to Rome. The logic and rhetoric of the learned Dominicans – the watch-dogs (“Domine cani”) of the Lord against the wolves of heresy, – culminating in the systems of Albert and St Thomas, by their rationalism defined, and in defining restricted, the dominion of the Faith. Keen defenders of the Faith recognised this danger, and whimpered even against Albert that “philosophiam profanam in limen Sanctæ Theologiæ intromiserit; … in ipsa sacraria Christi56.” Men got used to reason, and great protestants, such as Robert of Lincoln, had put justice and honour before ecclesiastical politics57. Then the few Greek texts found their way into the West, and in the thirteenth century Albert and Aquinas possessed themselves of Greco-latin translations of some treatises of Aristotle58. And in the history of the comparatively unlearned Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in the history of thought, that mysticism was less unfavourable to natural science than the passionate dogmatism of Clairvaux, or the dogmatism by ratiocination of St Thomas; the Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason rather than feared it; they would not accept the services of philosophy even with its wings clipped.

“Cujus laus est ex ore infantum,

Hæc est sapientia”!

Mysticism makes for individual religion, as with Glisson and Newton, rather than for a Church, as Albert was clear-sighted enough to foresee; if science undermines dogma, mysticism relaxes or neglects it: hence, as clerks only could teach, it may have been that independent thinkers like Hales, Roger Bacon, and Ockham entered the Franciscan order59. Indeed the science of Pietro di Abano (1250-1320), which laid the foundations of medicine at Padua, and inspired the frescoes of the Salla della Ragione, was occult and mystical.

In the thirteenth century then the conflict with the provisional synthesis of the Faith had become imminent and menacing. The faith, the chivalry and the learning of the Saracens led men to feel that without the Church all might not be utter darkness. Albert owed as much to Avicenna – “the Albert of the Orient” – as St Thomas to Averroes; pagan sages technically damnable yet “mighty spirits,” worthy of reverence. Dante put in Hell, but on green meadows in an open place, lofty and luminous, – esteeming himself exalted by the sight of them, – not only Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, but also

“Euclide geometra, e Tolommeo,Ippocrate, Avicenna, e Galieno,Averrois, che il gran comento feo.”Inf. iv. 142.

Universities were founded in France, England, and Italy. Frederick the Second protected the Arabs, and even aped them; Ghibeline indeed almost signified freethinker. From the Roman de Renard, from the candid Joinville, from Boccaccio, we may infer that the very foundations of the Faith were sapped; and therewith, for good or ill, both moral and political bonds were loosened. But the natural Science which made the second renascence irresistible was absent in the first: the consolidation of the European peoples was not compact enough for a rehandling of the conceptions of religion and morals, too incomplete even for the latitude of opinion which, in nations as in individuals, is apt to slacken swift and consentient action. The toleration and scepticism of the first renascence had causes no deeper than a general enlargement of experience and thought.

To appreciate the influence, covert or overt, of scepticism in the Middle Ages we must clear the meaning of the word. Under the yoke of tribal custom scepticism can hardly arise, there is no place for the half-hearted, as all men feel alike so all think alike: scepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions. Then, as experience and comparison enlarge, we detect scepticism in three forms or degrees: namely, doubt of a particular creed; doubt of all unverified propositions; and doubt of the validity of reason itself, whether in respect of the supernatural only or of all argument. It is remarkable that this last, the most devastating of the forms of scepticism, has come from the ranks of the faithful (Pascal, Hamilton, Mansel), who in resentment of the attacks of reason have turned blindly to rend reason herself. No civil society has been without scepticism; even in ages of most prevalent faith some current of doubt has flowed under the surface. In the Ionian philosophy the place of scepticism was only restricted in so far as many aspects of the subject-matter were not before those thinkers; for instance no Greek philosopher would have separated faith from reason. In the well-known words of Hippocrates, “οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἑτέρου θειότερον οὐδὲ ἀνθρωπινώτερον, ἀλλὰ πάντα θεῖα.” “The Greek boldly set up his academy by the side of the temple.” Even Protagoras never taught the futility of all reason, nor even the inconstancy of sensation which indeed is doctrine rather than scepticism. Neo-platonism had its scepticism in the first two forms, covering even the ground of the modern agnostic. Agnosticism does not deny the existence of the ladder, but asserts that the ladder begins and ends in the clouds; it is consistent therefore with ethical and practical activity. When Abélard said “Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem venimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus,” if a sceptic, he was no infidel. Even in the thirteenth century it was never doubted that truth is attainable, nor indeed that the Faith contained the truth. The scepticism of that age was rather cautious and controversial than faithless, and in practice divine discontent rather than indifference (ἀταραξία). Pyrrhonism on the other hand leads to slackness of ethics; either to the insouciance of Horace and Montaigne, or to the attitude of the seventeenth century in Padua (Pomponatius) and elsewhere, when the “economy,” ironic or disingenuous, of allotting their several spheres to reason and dogma, if not first invented, became as fashionable as in the pulpits and in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. “Comme savant j’ignore tout; comme citoyen je crois tout.” The Hypotyposes Pyrrhoniœ of Sextus Empiricus, whose influence in the times of the Renascence was considerable, was not translated till the fourteenth century. The detachment of mind and shrewd wisdom of John of Salisbury foreshadowed Petrarch rather than Hume; and when John discusses what it is given to man to know, asking the frequent question, “Utrum contingat homini scire aliquid?”, we must not fall into the error of importing into his question all it connotes for ourselves. Likewise when James of Douay (in ms. De anima, quoted by Hauréau) roundly says, “Id quod recipitur ab aliquo non recipitur secundum naturam rei receptæ sed secundum naturam recipientis … sicut recipitur ita patitur… Sensus judicando de sua passione non decipitur” and so on, he knew no more whither this would lead than John Duns knew that his system must lead to that of Spinoza. That guardians of morals and social cohesion, from Cato to the Westminster Assembly, and from Samuel Johnson to Cardinal Newman, should have distrusted scepticism even as reserve of judgment, or indeed repelled it with fierceness; that priest, presbyter, magistrate and moralist have tolerated irony, or even license, rather than vigilant and radical criticism of doctrine, is intelligible; and within limits springs from a justifiable apprehension. For the gay and indolent sceptic veers to conformity, especially if he mistrust the competence of reason; while the active sceptic endangers the theory of his society, and of the sanctions upon which all moral conduct temporarily depends. Hence the bitter condemnation of Galileo, “Perish all physical science rather than one article of the Faith be lost.” Happily it is true that during times of transition piety and good conduct survive by virtue of “inertia,” that is by tradition, social pressure, custom and sense of fitness; and it is true that in times of transition, as in our own times, halting thought is quickened for a while by plenitude of emotion, and wealth of æsthetic impressions makes amends for poverty of ideas; yet that morals are based on a theory of life is a truth still deeper and more abiding, and this deeper truth it was the function of the “Ages of Faith” to root in the conscience of mankind. “Abeunt studia in mores.” As contrasted with Pyrrhonism, scepticism in its normal sense, while it declares that the conformity of notions with things in themselves cannot be postulated, for lack of an external standpoint of comparison, and while it declines to be confuted by the “regressus ad infinitum,” for, having repudiated first principles it is prepared to be pushed backwards to remoter and remoter causes, is ready nevertheless to yield to assurance as facts are intercalated into inferences, and as inferences thus stiffened by verification are found to consist with each other and with the general context of experience.

If in the Middle Ages these various attitudes of mind were not fully distinguished, yet scepticism was moving variably towards the demand for verification on which all natural science is based; and the reaction was not long delayed. In the thirteenth century the culture of Omeyad and Abasid caliphs failed; by the end of the century philosophy was denounced and its books were burned; the generous and learned Frederick dashed himself in vain against the Papacy; Clement, the protector of Bacon, was dead, and during the two following centuries, in Spain at any rate, freedom of thought was crushed out by the Church. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the very name of Averroes – of “the mad dog who barked against the Christ,” the “Averroem impium καὶ τρὶς κατάρατον” of Erasmus – began to signify loose life as well as free thought. Of this resentment there had been no trace in Albert or St Thomas; but Imola had begun to wonder why Dante had treated so well Averroes who, if the Great Commentator, was yet the father of infidels. The Dominicans controlled the fine arts, and for them, – at Pisa, at Siena, in the Spanish Chapel, – Orcagna, Gaddi, Spinello Aretino, Simone Memmi abased the Empire, Averroes, and the new learning far more intolerantly than Dante had done; and exalted the Pope, with his handmaids Theology, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. In Santa Maria Novella, Memmi represents the triumph of the Dominicans in theology, Gaddi in philosophy; St Thomas and the Dominicans march triumphant over Arius, Sabellius, Averroes, and Savonarola. Thus in the Middle Ages Averroes appeared in two forms – first as the Great Commentator, later as the blasphemer and father of infidels of the Campo Santo and of Santa Maria Novella. In the fifteenth century the Council of Constance forbad the laity to teach, under a penalty of forty days’ excommunication. In the sixteenth, in Granada, Ximenes burnt, it is said, 80,000 books of Arab philosophy, as Torquemada did for Hebrew in Seville; medical works, however, such as the Colliget60 of Averroes, and his Commentary on Galen, were spared.

With the greater renascence the second period of Scholasticism, and indeed the Middle Ages themselves are closed. With the fall of Constantinople the stream of learning, driven eastwards in the first period of the Middle Ages, set westward again. Exiled grammarians now found their shelter under the protection of the “literate tyrants” of Italy, and with their spoil of manuscripts enriched the libraries of Rome and Venice. The Universities of Bologna and Padua from their foundation became notable for independence of thought; and, on the revival of learning, for their peripatetic teaching as opposed to the platonism of Florence, where, however, a spirit of accurate learning was nurtured in the deciphering and verification of texts. The political and commercial ambition of Venice, the Holland of Italy, of which State Padua was the learned quarter, and the inflow of liberal thinkers from other nations, kept her aloof from the fury of the Catholic reaction of the sixteenth century, which ruined Paris; thus in North-east Italy the spirit of modern science awoke sooner than in England or in France, and inquisitive students, both home and foreign, were attracted rather to Padua and to Bologna than, as in earlier times, to Paris.

In so far as Scholasticism may be described as a temporary reconciliation of Aristotle – that is, of natural and secular methods – with the Faith, this end had been attained, if at all, by St Thomas; in St Thomas Scholasticism culminated. But no such artificial truce could abide; and the issue of the chief scholastic controversy was to be determined by one greater than St Thomas. The pilgrim to Ockham, sitting in its church beneath the seven lancets of its twelfth century window, may be solitary also in his memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen, who saw that light six long centuries ago; yet a child rather of our age than of his own. As Abélard had closed the gates upon the neo-platonist tradition of Alexandria, so Ockham closed them against realism in all its forms; and the Church cursed them both. In his own person the occupation of professorial chairs by Franciscans came to an end; Paris and the Thomists could not consistently oppose nominalism; Duns the Northumbrian had inflated realism into a monstrous phantasm, and speculative reason had to submit to the yoke of verification. Yet what could nominalism do for theology, or for clerical schools? The Franciscans for the most part had turned to mysticism, and thenceforth the man of science and the devotee were to work apart. Furthermore, by Ockham philosophy gained a new meaning, or lost all meaning. Before Locke, Voltaire, and Kant, Ockham demonstrated that faculties were not substances; and differentiated logic, psychology, and natural science61.