Revolution!

Revolution: Science, Politics, and Religion in the Seventeenth Century

            There was nothing particularly spectacular about the cold October morning in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the front door of the Castle Church in protest to perceived doctrinal errors of the Catholic Church. While incredibly bold for one man, it amounted to a simple pinprick in the face of the Church’s monolithic power over European life. What it accomplished, however, was nothing short of revolution. From the subsequent Protestant Reformation came the increasingly symbiotic, inter-dependent, and highly progressive relationship between the development of empiricism, rationalism, experimental Newtonian philosophy, natural rights, and “enlightened” theology which would revolutionize the social fabric of the world for centuries to come.

            It was thanks to the Protestant Reformation of the seventeenth century that men became bold enough in Europe to challenge the Catholic Church’s hegemony on all matters of issues, but most specifically those of theology, religion, economics, politics, and science. In generations past the Church had governed with an iron fist over all manners of thought and knowledge. Nearly all of the cosmology of the medieval world was based on a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and the Church, through its powers of excommunication, execution and the Inquisition made it very difficult for progressive thinkers of the time to challenge the prevailing worldview. It was only when reform-minded Protestants began to weaken the foundation of the Church with accusations of corruption and incorrect interpretation of the Bible did it become possible for political thinkers and scientists to defy Roman domination of their arenas as well. One of the major advancements of the time was the protestant practice of putting Bibles into the hands of the laity instead of restricting ownership of Bibles to clergymen and priests alone. This allowed anyone who could read to search the Holy Scriptures for their own answers on the nature of God and the world around them.

While this may seem, on the surface, like a simple theological matter it affected a wide range of behavior in Europe. By allowing people to read the Bible for themselves it allowed people to form their own ideas about the values systems that prevailed in their time. A man could choose for himself if God, through the Bible, truly outlawed the use of corpses in medicine, or if the Bible truly told that the Sun revolved around the Earth, or if the world truly was created in seven days or, perhaps most important of all, whether or not God truly gave the Pope complete discretion in the affairs of Christendom. Not only did this empower the common man to act in regard to his individual conscience over the instructions of his priest, but it also emboldened many princes of Europe to break ties with Rome and establish their lands as new homes for thoughts and notions not approved of by the Pope. It was through this princely rejection of Catholicism as a state religion and the establishment of protestant states that allowed for the influx of thinkers and ideas that were previously banned by Catholic authorities.

Let it be said, however, that independence from Rome did not come cheaply for those nations. Nearly all of the major wars of the seventeenth century in Europe revolved, among other things, around the struggle between Catholics and Protestants over the dominant state religion. From the English war with Spain and the Dutch Revolution that led to the Thirty Years’ War and ended in the Peace of Westphalia, to Catholic France’s civil war with the protestant Huguenots, to the War of the Triple Alliance, and the War of Spanish Succession Europe spent more than a century fighting over religion. It must be noted, however, that no nation had a clear-cut distinction in the religion of the native population. Catholics lived in protestant countries and vice versa. In fact one of the most significant treaties to come out of the seventeenth century was the Peace at Westphalia. This peace established the Dutch Republic as an independent protestant nation – no longer under the rule of Spain, set territorial borders for the victors, recognized Calvinism as a legitimate Christian denomination and, perhaps most telling of all, cemented the rights of religious minorities in principalities where the majority of the people – or even just the prince! – established an alternate state religion. In other words Catholics living in a protestant nation and Protestants living in a Catholic nation could not be persecuted for their beliefs. It could be said that this treaty is among the first official documents advocating religious tolerance in Europe. In more ways than one could it be argued that this notion of inter-denominational Christian tolerance was the foundation of eighteenth century notions of freedom of religion found – most specifically – in the American Bill of Rights.

In no way should one conclude that the theological and religious reforms of the seventeenth century stopped at theology and religion. As I alluded to before, the relationship between the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution was, and perhaps still is, incredibly symbiotic. In other words, the benefits and growth of one movement had foundational effects upon the other without a truly distinct indication of dominance. In this paper I argue that the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century acted as a catalyst for the subsequent revolutions in science and politics, but I cannot argue that the Protestant Reformation was sparked in a theological or religious vacuum. While the argument is outside the scope of this discussion, it may be argued that some aspects of the Protestant Reformation were predicated on perceptions of injustice in Europe with the persecution of Copernicus, a sixteenth century scientist, and his followers by the Catholic Church thus illustrating an interdependent relationship.

What can and should be argued is that many of the scientists of the seventeenth century were so disillusioned by the Catholic Church and its perceived abuses of power that they spent much of their scientific effort to further weaken the Church and make it less influential in the affairs of secular and natural sciences. The Catholic Church intrinsically tied its own legitimacy to the cosmology it created. As mentioned before, this cosmology was based on literal interpretations of the Bible as well as the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. To the natural philosopher and scientist of the seventeenth century the opportunity to prove the Church as a liar was perhaps too great to let slip. This is not to say, however, that whatever liberty provided by protestant states to explore new ideas and schools of thoughts was the same as complete license. While the protestant states protested the hegemony of the Catholic Church, they themselves were still fairly religious and the progressive agendas of contemporary natural philosophers did have limitations. Protestant states did have censors of their own, but those states were arguably far more open to progressive notions than Catholic states. It is no coincidence that the most prominent figures in the scientific and political revolutions were either born, lived in, or were published in protestant countries. Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton were influential members of English nobility. John Locke was also an influential English philosopher. Rene Descartes, while a Catholic Frenchman, spent his final twenty years in the Netherlands. Baruch “Benedict” Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew from Catholic Spain, also wrote his influential works in the Dutch Republic. It is in the writings of these men that I intend to demonstrate the inter-dependent and progressive nature of the relationship between religion, politics, and science in the seventeenth century.

In 1620 Sir Francis Bacon finished his great work for James I, king of England, called Novum Organum along with the accompanying preface, The Great Instauration. In The Great Instauration Bacon lays out the purpose of his new instrument (novum organum), its scope, the needs that bred its creation and a stalwart defense of a budding new cosmology based on empiricism. This work helped introduce the notion that much, if not all, of human knowledge could be derived through the practice of observation. In order to understand nature and the universe-at-large one simply needed to observe it in its natural state. To understand it further a natural philosopher could also remove the object from nature – as much as was possible – and place it in a state of isolation for further observation. While Bacon vigorously argued that the realm of the sacred could not be held to this empirical standard (GI, p.15) he did make a veiled attack upon the Aristotelian mode of thought, backed by the English Church and universities, when he argued that those scholars had “usurped a kind of dictatorship in the sciences” and had fallen to complaints of “the weakness of the human mind… seeing that they will rather lay the blame upon the common condition of men and nature than upon themselves.” (GI, p.10) We can see that despite his most obvious admonitions about giving “to faith that which is faith’s” (GI, p.15) how easy it might have been for many of his later readers to apply his empirical view of nature to the realm of the supernatural. If one cannot observe the supernatural in any way, why should one believe that the supernatural – God included – exists at all? The effect this had on the religious community in subsequent generations must have been immense: a proverbial “bell” which could not be un-rung. In this work Bacon also argued that deriving all knowledge simply from human reason as others, such as Descartes, had argued was folly when he states that: “As for those who have given the first place to Logic, supposing that the surest helps to the sciences were to be found in that, they have indeed most truly and excellently perceived that the human intellect left to its own course is not to be trusted”. (GI, p.12) Man, according to Bacon, could not simply reason himself into knowledge. Knowledge had to come either by observation – with the aid of new instruments (GI, p.13) – or by revelation, which Bacon does not seem to endorse either but makes mention of. It is toward the end of his introductory piece that Bacon seems to direct his most pointed instructions. Science, as he saw it, needed to pass a strict ethical test before man could implement it. New advancements and new knowledge should not, at any point, be made simply for personal gain or private profit. Whatever scientific gains could be made should be applied to the greater aid of all mankind in an attempt to understand and exert control over nature. (GI, p.16) It was in this reprimand that Bacon seems to draw most heavily from Christian Scripture when he reminds his readers that “it was from lust of power that the angels fell, from the lust of knowledge that man fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it.” (GI, p.16) It was in The Great Instauration that we see the most bold and most pointed attempts to deconstruct all previous notions provided by Aristotelians, discard them, and develop a new instrument of knowledge rooted solely in scientific process. (GI, pp.5, 8) It was in this solid beginning that we are not only able to see the developing roots of Newtonian philosophy and experimentation later in the century, but also to gaze back to the Reformation that made his challenge of Aristotelianism and careful examinations of Biblical passages possible.

If Francis Bacon was most concerned with the process of the new sciences, Rene Descartes seemed most engaged with the source and the end of this knowledge, arguing that it was man’sreason that enabled them to understand the world. In his Discourse on the Method For Conducting One’s Reason Well and For Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Descartes notes that the empirical faculties do well to help in observation but that man’s sensual faculties, unlike reason, are both too weak and ill-equipped to understand the mysteries of the universe-at-large. (DM, p.18) Yet while Bacon and Descartes seemed to follow different paths, they both began and desired to end at the same place. Whereas Bacon would complain over the lack of serious achievements in the Aristotelian model, Descartes found it much easier to simply ignore it altogether by intellectually deconstructing everything he had learned in his prior education (DM p.18.32). Descartes, coming from a very Catholic upbringing in France, dared not apply this deconstructionist model to God maintaining that since he recognized himself to be imperfect, his notions of perfection must have come from something that was perfect – and that perfection must be God. (DM, p. 19.34) What was perhaps most scandalous were his two main assertions in Discourse on Method: first that all certain knowledge came from reason. It was in this argument that Descartes, knowingly or not, opened up a full-frontal attack upon the prevailing belief system that human understanding of the world was and should continue to be based on the Bible its divine revelations, and other authoritative texts (e.g., Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle). By leaving no room for revelatory knowledge Descartes is canceling out any way to incorporate Biblical understandings of God and creation into this method.

While we see much of this thought in his critique of his Jesuit education (DM, p.3.5), it might even be more evident in the writings of Baruch Spinoza where we see the student going even farther than the master. In his Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza argues that the Bible can’t be trusted in the theopneustonian (Greek for “god-breathed” or “divinely inspired”) reverence that both Christians and Jews give it.  Among a great host of other arguments Spinoza resolved that the prophets of the Old Testament were not chosen because of their incredible wisdom but because oftheir unusual pliability and possible mental instability. In other words, the prophets weren’t oracles of God through intelligence but moved “in the Spirit” by their own passions and prejudices which they flavored God’s messages with. (TPT, p.5) Worse still for the Christian apologist was Spinoza’s criticism of Judeo-Christian religious rituals as “superstitious” and an exercise in the hatred of reason, “turning away from the intellect as naturally corrupt”. (TPT, p.4) This, however, should not be confused with an intentional assault on the whole of the sacred or divine as he argues that “everyone should be allowed the freedom of judgment and the right to interpret the basic tenets of his faith as he sees fit.” (TPT, p.6) Again, this may have been unintentional, but it certainly was substantial. To this day Spinoza’s arguments and skepticism is quoted when discussing the “inherent contradictions” and “inconsistencies” of the Bible. Arguments that for the last three hundred or so years have stuck in the minds of doubters that still demand a verdict. While this was a challenge to the authority of organized churches which determined the tenets of faith, we can also see these words as influential in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution – most specifically the First Amendment. It is fairly evident that this declaration of Spinoza came directly from the first page of Discourse where Descartes states, “’reason’ is naturally equal in all men”. In this assessment Descartes is arguing against the belief that an extra dispensation of carnal wisdom or sacred grace could be found in the priesthood or the nobility extrapolated all the way to the Pope and the kings of Europe. The suggestion that anything could be equal in all men, let alone reason, had the potential to undermine the entire social, political, economic, scientific, and religious order of the world that was grounded in a strict hierarchy with most power concentrated at the top.

One of the most lasting impressions made on the religious developments of the eighteenth and subsequent centuries was this seemingly foundational formation of deism. Deists believe, as Descartes and Spinoza did, that there was a divine figure in the Universe but that it was not necessarily the one told of by sacred scriptures as much as attested to by Nature. This being is not the God of religion, but a god of reason. If one were to argue that Descartes’ theories have become obsolete over time they would be mistaken. It may be that Cartesian cosmology has been replaced in large part by the Newtonian model, but it is easy to see how Descartes’ groundbreaking work laid the foundation for Newtonian sciences and Lockean philosophy.

While some natural philosophers used their freedoms to argue against the Bible or abandon Biblical sources of cosmology, Isaac Newton was among the first of the 17^th century scientists to pursue the sciences vigorously while still reconciling those findings with Biblical data. (NPN, pp.60-61) Newton, more so than any of his predecessors, used Christian Scriptures as a baseline for understanding the “who” and “what” of the Universe and the sciences as an explanation of the “how”. Decrying atheism as both “senseless and odious”, Newton contends that behind the human effort of every scientific discovery lies the “counsel and contrivance of an Author.” (NPN, p.65) At some points in his writings Newton seems to use a very generic or even deist identity for God such as “Maker”, “Author”, “Deity” or “an intelligent Agent”. This, if looked at by itself, might lead some to believe that Newton did not endorse the idea of the Christian God and approached the divine with a more deistic approach like Descartes or worse yet, a radical one like Spinoza; but in his other writings Newton enthusiastically defends the identity of God as “The Lord” and reminds his readers that the Biblical narratives are still the best source by which man can understand “the Eternal of Israel”. (NPN, p.42) Newton’s largest contributions to the future of all human thought are, in a modern context, invaluable. His laws of motion, while difficult to comprehend for the untrained mind, revolutionized how people understand the way the world – and everything in it – moves. But the most striking aspect of these laws of motion is that they, like his supplemental law of gravity, are universally applicable. Newton scientifically proved what Descartes and Spinoza intellectually ascended to: the basic equality of all men. All men may not have been equal yet under human law, but Newton discovered that all men were equal under the state and laws of Nature. “Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward [bodily] shapes but from the counsel and contrivance of an Author?” Newton sees the truth of the universe in the perfection of light and of all earthly eyes that make use of that light to see, in the symmetry of all bodies (both earthly and celestial), in the power of perfect celestial orbits and even in the laws of motion. Such truth, to Newton, all comes from the mind of God: a God that is not available to the senses, but one whose reflection could be seen sensually in the perfect working order of the universe. This notion of equality in the universe may seem, to the modern reader, rather mundane and trivial but to the seventeenth century reader this theory had outrageous implications. One might even be able to see the train of thought that led to Locke’s shocking declaration that all men were entitled to rights in the state of nature. If God created all of Nature, and Nature has laws that apply to all men regardless of rank and station making all men equal under Nature, then all men must also be equal under God! If all men are, thence, equal under God then all men are, in fact, truly equal and the supposed divine right of kings to rule is an indignity to be immediately cast off. It was no less than this very argument that John Locke put forth.

Most scholars recognize John Locke as a very deliberate political revolutionary. He may be best known in America for being the chief influence on Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. What many scholars fail to recognize about Locke, however, is that he was also a very unintentional theological revisionist. Locke was, in every sense of the word, a rationalist. His writings are nothing short of a comprehensive synthesis for rational thought. His Second Treatise of Government was and still is one of the most provocative revolutionary documents ever produced by human hands. In one fell swoop Locke argues to cast off the shackles of assumed dominion, to establish – at the tip of a sword if necessary – the “natural rights” of all men, and to replace the tyranny of absolutism with the hope and prosperity of a government that is accountable to its citizenry. What was not so equally recognized in his time was this argument of natural rights, based on his notion of tabula rasa (Latin for “clean slate”). It argued that men were born with no innate notions except those that were introduced to them by education and environment. This was a radical new theological argument, though I doubt very much that Locke treated it as such. This apparently simple doctrine of tabula rasa flew in the face of centuries of dogma that built upon the notion that all men were born into a state of sinfulness and needed to be cleansed through baptism: a belief that both protestants and Catholics agreed upon. In America and dozens of other nations across the globe this theory of tabula rasa and natural rights is now the law of the land and does not come as much of a surprise to a modern mind. As has been stated before, however, such was not the case in the seventeenth century: there was no substantial notion of natural rights nor was there any government that applied such a notion so universally as to empower its citizenry to form a “social compact” with it for the safety and security of those rights. It was to this end that law and government existed according to Locke. (STG, pp.32.57, 66.124) He states with great confidence that this equality in the state of nature is evident (STG, p.8.4) and that the “laws of nature, do bind men absolutely” in a state of nature and liberty (STG, p.13.15). It is here that we so clearly see the influences of Newton as he also elaborates the point in claiming that “absolute monarchs are but men” and the “natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth… to have only the law of nature for his rule.” (STG, p.17.22)

There can be no doubt about the political ramifications of these brazen and bold declarations, but what of the religious consequences? He agrees with his religious contemporaries that God both gave the world to mankind to rule over and gave reason to mankind to rule the world judiciously. (STG, p.18.26) What is unique and different about his conclusions of that dominion is that all the earth is held in common between all men for the fulfillment of needs and the enjoyment of the race. (STG, pp.18.25, 24.37, 20.31) It is from that central point that his theory begins to diverge from Scripture and takes on a different role. Whereas Locke argues that all men are endowed with natural rights, to be defended from encroachment with violence (STG, p.105.207), the New Testament places unending responsibility on its adherents (Matthew 5:39-48), makes no mention whatsoever of rights and accepts that violence will be visited upon the followers of Jesus but that it should not in any situation be returned (Luke 22:49-51). What might be most interesting about this difference arethe effects of Locke’s argument. In so many ways does Locke make statements about human rights that starkly contrast New Testament rebukes concerning human responsibilities, and yet so many Western evangelical Christians (especially those in America) will take the word of John Locke over Jesus Christ. In this way does it seem that Locke had just as much of an effect on religious culture as he did on politics and through this it is apparent that he was both a deliberate political revolutionary and unintentional theological revisionist.

By no means should any reader assume that the relationship between science, politics, and religion is limited to these thinkers and the theories that they published for us. Scores of volumes could (and perhaps should) continue to be written on the subject without overlapping. What I’ve hoped to demonstrate is how these five individuals entered into such a sacred relationship and succeeded so completely in laying the foundation of a comprehensive social revolution, which has forever altered the course of human events and will continue to do so for centuries to come.