Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (130 page)

Faced with the change of atmosphere in the 1520s, some humanists withdrew into an interior exile, ceasing to publish, or moving to fields of enquiry such as Classical history which could not easily be drawn into theological controversy. Distinguished scholars like Maarten van Dorp, Beatus Rhenanus and Willibald Pirckheimer thus earned themselves a quiet life, but with the consequence that their names are now known only to specialists in intellectual history.
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Nevertheless, their silence on matters of religious controversy reminded the literary public that there might be ways of approaching the sacred which did not dance to agendas set by Martin Luther or the pope. Just such an alternative perspective came from various forms of esoteric ancient literature beyond scripture: the hermetic books, Neoplatonic writings and Jewish Cabbala (see pp. 577-9).

One of the most independent-minded (or eccentric) scholars of the sixteenth century, the German polymath Paracelsus, gloried in the Cabbala and became an all-purpose symbol for wide-ranging 'Paracelsian' investigation which riskily combined irreverence with a sense of magical possibilities. He particularly excited less conventional Protestants, especially Protestant doctors, who valued the Reformation as a liberation from centuries of falsehood.
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Yet many mainstream Reformed Protestants shared Paracelsus's enthusiasm for the esoteric. Their Reformed theology was dependent on themes of the Tanakh, such as the motif of covenant, and it was logical to welcome apparent new shafts of light from Hebrew wisdom. These might aid that common Reformation preoccupation, the timing of the Last Days, or illuminate some of the theological problems which caused so many murderous arguments in the Reformation.

Perhaps the most surprising outcrop of Reformed Protestant interest in the esoteric was the phenomenon of Freemasonry. Although this very varied worldwide movement now boasts mythology tracing its origins to antiquity, Masonic practice actually began in late-sixteenth-century Scotland as an outcrop of Reformed Christianity. The new conditions of comparative peace brought by that shrewd monarch James VI produced a surge of domestic building, as the Scottish nobility and gentry rehoused themselves in greater comfort amid spectacular outward display. Patrons naturally took an interest in their projects, especially the theories behind the new Classical architectural styles being used: they were educated men seized with enthusiasm for Renaissance rediscoveries of Classical wisdom. At the centre of this activity was the royal Master of Works, William Schaw, actually a crypto-Catholic. From the 1590s, various Scottish notables in contact with Schaw joined the trade 'lodges' of masons and builders, which clearly replaced in their esteem the devotional gilds which the Scottish Reformers had destroyed only a few decades before.

Soon lodges were adding dignity to their socializing with the aid of esoteric literature: late-medieval masons had already constructed proud histories for themselves out of such material and their own craft traditions. The Church of Scotland, in interesting contrast to its growing paranoia about witchcraft (see p. 687), showed no signs of alarm at the new departure; many of its clergy were caught up in the same intellectual fashions. The impressive ancient history manufactured by Scottish Freemasons gradually travelled throughout Europe and eventually beyond, as Masonic lodges spread as congenial settings for male camaraderie with a habit of secrecy calculated to put them beyond the reach of the Church authorities. Part of Freemasonry's continuing Reformed inheritance was a general hostility to the institution of the Catholic Church. This was inclined to linger even when Masons spread beyond Reformed societies and into the Catholic world, forming a major focus for anticlericalism wherever the Catholic Church was strong (see pp. 821-2).
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So a heady mixture of Paracelsianism, hermeticism and Cabbala bred an optimism in Protestant Europe which sat curiously alongside the pessimism about human capability built into the thought of Augustine of Hippo. The ancient esoteric books became more rather than less important through the seventeenth century, particularly in universities in central Europe. Here ecumenically minded scholars were trying to find theological ways of bridging the gulf between Lutheran and Reformed theology - while also exploring many other fields of knowledge, often with the agenda of extending the bounds of human wisdom in preparation for the Last Days. The discipline which is the ancestor of modern specializations like astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry was then called natural philosophy. It demarcated itself from theology's concentration on the world beyond by exploring evidence from nature, the visible created world. We define this exploration as 'science', and the story of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has in the past often been called a 'Scientific Revolution'. In the modern West, that term has commonly been yoked to the thought that 'science' is a rational mode of enquiry, waging an ideological battle with an irrational foe, Christianity.

'Science' is a very imprecise word, and in the era of the Reformation and Renaissance it simply meant knowledge - from any quarter. Natural philosophy was as much an examination of God's creation as theology, and exhibited no sense of clash of purpose or intention with religion. Evidence from the created world might have its own mysterious or magical dimension when seen through the eyes of a Paracelsian or Neoplatonist, and so it might link directly with religious and even political concerns. One example was the curious episode of the 'Rosicrucians'. Unlike the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians never existed. The texts which described this ancient and benevolent secret society of philosophers of the 'Rosy Cross' were principally written between 1614 and 1616 by a Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreae, who had spent perhaps too much time poring over hermetic wisdom and Paracelsianism. Over the next decade Andreae's fantasy was presented as documentary reality. It sparked febrile excitement and expectation right across Europe, and became intimately entwined in the politics of the Elector Palatine Friedrich's attempted Reformed Protestant crusade against the Habsburgs which led to the Thirty Years War (see p. 646).
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Protestant hopes for a coming apocalypse, disappointed in Friedrich's downfall, persisted. The renowned Reformed Protestant scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted proclaimed calculations of the divinely ordained End Times, eventually choosing 1694 as the crucial date; significantly much of his theorizing was drawn not from the Bible but from hermetic literature.
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The possibilities offered by the apocalypse were constructively developed by two of Europe's most restlessly creative Protestant scholars, Alsted's pupil the much-exiled Czech Johannes Comenius and the equally much-travelled Scots minister John Dury. They saw in England's Republic in the 1650s a new flowering of scholarship and radical extension of human knowledge in the many different fields of natural philosophy. Both men believed that Classical esoteric literature was not a series of ancient dead ends, but an entry into knowledge long forgotten. They hoped that the Protestant confusions so obvious both in Oliver Cromwell's England and in the Netherlands might be exploited positively to lead a newly reunited and tolerant Church for all Europe, to welcome back the Saviour.
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Their enthusiasms included the readmission of the Jews to England after their expulsion back in 1290: this would hasten the Last Days, provided of course the Jews dutifully converted. The scheme succeeded in 1656, thanks to the sympathy of that conflicted seeker of the Last Days Lord Protector Cromwell, who rather characteristically disguised the revolutionary nature of what he was allowing by conniving at a very technical decision in the English law courts about property rights.
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The efforts of the Interregnum optimists did not have the result they expected. Alsted's apocalyptic calculations helped inflame the disastrous political ambitions of Reformed Transylvania (see p. 641), and the only second coming at the end of the 1650s was the return of the Stuart dynasty to its Atlantic kingdoms from exile. Yet there were significant and practical consequences: not only the readmission of the Jews (which Charles II, probably primed with Jewish cash from Amsterdam, did not challenge), but also the foundation with Charles's patronage of England's premier forum for a continuing gentlemanly discussion of natural philosophy. This 'Royal Society' was a regrouping of several of the most prominent speculative thinkers who had flourished under the Interregnum regime. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most prominent early members of the Society, illustrates the contemporary blend of fascination with a mysterious past, innovative observation and abstract thinking; he wrote as much about the Book of Revelation as about 'the Book of Nature' which revealed the theory of gravity. In fact, in Newton's eyes, all his enterprises were part of a common task of Reformation, which in the case of his religious investigations led him to a discreet dismissal of doctrines like the Trinity. Newton's task was to recover a lost rationality: 'the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. For there is no way ['without revelation', he inserted in his manuscript in an afterthought] to come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature.'
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Another variant of rationality was to be found in Francis Bacon, the philosopher and eventually disgraced politician who died a couple of decades before Newton was born. Bacon's writings were a great inspiration to the natural philosophers of Europe, and the Royal Society could be seen as a fulfilment of his posthumously published work
New Atlantis
, which had portrayed a 'Foundation' of philosophers devoted to improving human society through practical ('empirical') experiment and observation - the Royal Society borrowed his term for its members, 'Fellows'. Bacon did set his project of extending human knowledge in a theological context: in his first manifesto for his 'Great Instauration' (that is, restoration) of natural philosophy,
Temporis partis masculus
(1603), he presented what he was doing as the 'instauration' of humankind's dominion over creation lost in Adam's fall: a restoration of the image of God in humanity.
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That much appealed to the likes of Alsted and Comenius, but Bacon coupled this programme with contempt for both Neoplatonism and Aristotelian scholasticism, and he quickly became brutally sceptical about the Rosicrucian rivals of his Foundation. Indeed, he failed to see the importance of many of the discoveries of his time precisely because they employed what he regarded as obsolete methodologies. And he provided a convenient escape route for the increasing number of scholars who wished to ignore the constraints of Christian teaching in investigating the problems of nature and humanity: knowledge of God could only come from divine revelation, and so his own enquiries could be neatly separated from theology as representing a different sort of truth: 'God never wrought miracle to convince Atheisme, because his Ordinary Works convince it.'
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What did that say about biblical miracles?

It was perfectly possible for natural philosophers to share Bacon's priority for empirical research by drawing on Reformed Protestantism - he was himself a Reformed Protestant, son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, one of the architects of Elizabeth I's 1559 religious settlement (see p. 639). Humankind's capacity for abstract, speculative thought had been impaired in the Fall, so what was left was patient observation of the Book of Nature. Yet some areas of natural philosophy which also valued practical observation had long revealed tensions with theology. One was medicine, where for centuries doctors had been inclined to see the evidence of their eyes as more important than what the textbooks told them. That shocked theologians, who were inclined to take very seriously what the great Classical authorities Aristotle or Galen said about the human body, and who then constructed theological conclusions out of it - such as the proposition that women were physically and probably therefore in other ways inferior versions of men.
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Ironically, humanist doctors were generally more conservative in medicine than doctors with a medieval scholastic training, simply because they placed a new value on the ancient texts: a problem arose for humanists, for instance, when they tried to understand syphilis, a new disease unknown to the ancients.
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A more difficult frontier between natural philosophy and theology was astrology and astronomy. Natural philosophers concerning themselves with the planets and the stars made statements about the heavens which might seem to be the business of theological faculties, particularly since the Bible makes certain confident pronouncements on the make-up of the visible heavens. The divisions were unpredictable: Philipp Melanchthon and John Calvin flatly disagreed about the value of astrology, which meant that sixteenth-century Lutheran ministers lined up on confessional grounds behind Melanchthon against Calvin, and proclaimed astrology as a respectable and valuable guide to God's purposes.
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At least astrology was a scholarly pursuit with a long history. Much more problematic was the body of opinion growing from the early-sixteenth-century work of Copernicus that the Bible contained a mistake about the physical universe: its assumption (on the few occasions that it addressed the question) that the sun revolved around the earth. We have already noted the unfortunate clash which this produced between the Catholic authorities in Rome and the scientific work of Galileo Galilei (see p. 684).

Although many Protestants might rage against Copernicans, they did not take action against them as the Roman Inquisition had done in the Galileo case; moreover his treatment did seem all of a piece with the efforts of Europe's various Inquisitions to ban so much of the creative literature of the previous centuries through their Indexes. There was no doubt that natural philosophy had more room to manoeuvre amid the complexities and divisions of the Protestant world. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was gaining new strength and confidence in Protestant northern Europe. Despite the intentions of most of its practitioners, when its privileging of reason was united with Baconian insistence on observation, the alliance of natural philosophy with the wisdom of an esoteric past was gradually abandoned, calling into question mainstream Christian authority. Other forces besides the empiricism of Francis Bacon converged on this development.