The apogee of Greek science in the works of Archimedes and Euclid coincided with the rise of Roman power in the Mediterranean. The Romans were deeply impressed by Greek art, literature, philosophy, and science, and after their conquest of Greece many Greek intellectuals served as household slaves tutoring noble Roman children. The Romans were a practical people, however, and, while they contemplated the Greek intellectual achievement with awe, they also could not help but ask what good it had done the Greeks. Roman common sense was what kept Rome great; science and philosophy were either ignored or relegated to rather low status. Even such a Hellenophile as the statesman and orator Cicero used Greek thought more to buttress the old Roman ways than as a source of new ideas and viewpoints.
The spirit of independent research was quite foreign to the Roman mind, so scientific innovation ground to a halt. The scientific legacy of Greece was condensed and corrupted into Roman encyclopaedias whose major function was entertainment rather than enlightenment. Typical of this spirit was the 1st-century-CE aristocrat Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History was a multivolume collection of myths, odd tales of wondrous creatures, magic, and some science, all mixed together uncritically for the titillation of other aristocrats. Aristotle would have been embarrassed by it.
[…]
An equal amount of energy was devoted to achieving a scientific understanding of nature, but it is essential to understand to what use medieval thinkers put this kind of knowledge. As the fertility of the technology shows, medieval Europeans had no deep prejudices against utilitarian knowledge. But the areas in which scientific knowledge could find useful expression were few. Instead, science was viewed chiefly as a means of understanding God’s creation and, thereby, the Godhead itself. The best example of this attitude is found in the medieval study of optics. Light, as Genesis makes clear, was among the first creations of God. The 12th–13th-century cleric-scholar Robert Grosseteste saw in light the first creative impulse. As light spread, it created both space and matter, and, in its reflection from the outermost circle of the cosmos, it gradually solidified into the heavenly spheres. To understand the laws of the propagation of light was to understand, in some slight way, the nature of the creation.
[…]
It should be clear that there was no conscious conflict between science and religion in the Middle Ages. As Aquinas pointed out, God was the author of both the book of Scripture and the book of nature. The guide to nature was reason, the faculty that was the image of God in which humankind was made. Scripture was direct revelation, although it needed interpretation, for there were passages that were obscure or difficult. The two books, having the same author, could not contradict each other. For the short term, science and revelation marched hand in hand.
[…]
The search for antiquity turned up a peculiar bundle of manuscripts that added a decisive impulse to the direction in which Renaissance science was moving. These manuscripts were taken to have been written by or to report almost at first hand the activities of the legendary priest, prophet, and sage Hermes Trismegistos. Hermes was supposedly a contemporary of Moses, and the Hermetic writings contained an alternative story of creation that gave humans a far more prominent role than the traditional account. God had made humankind fully in his image: a creator, not just a rational animal. Humans could imitate God by creating. To do so, they must learn nature’s secrets, and this could be done only by forcing nature to yield them through the tortures of fire, distillation, and other alchemical manipulations. The reward for success would be eternal life and youth, as well as freedom from want and disease. It was a heady vision, and it gave rise to the notion that, through science and technology, humankind could bend nature to its wishes. This is essentially the modern view of science, and it should be emphasized that it occurs only in Western civilization. It is probably this attitude that permitted the West to surpass the East, after centuries of inferiority, in the exploitation of the physical world.
The Hermetic tradition also had more specific effects. Inspired, as is now known, by late Platonist mysticism, the Hermetic writers had rhapsodized on enlightenment and on the source of light, the Sun. Marsilio Ficino, the 15th-century Florentine translator of both Plato and the Hermetic writings, composed a treatise on the Sun that came close to idolatry. A young Polish student visiting Italy at the turn of the 16th century was touched by this current. Back in Poland, he began to work on the problems posed by the Ptolemaic astronomical system. With the blessing of the church, which he served formally as a canon, Nicolaus Copernicus set out to modernize the astronomical apparatus by which the church made such important calculations as the proper dates for Easter and other festivals.
Re: Morto un papa se ne fa un altro
Originariamente Scritto da alnus
Permessi di Scrittura
Rispondi Citando
Segnalibri