Kitabı oku: «The Popes and Science», sayfa 34

Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize anything as scholarship, except what was deduced from the Scriptures, shows how far a man can go in his assumption of knowledge when he knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something, but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 54]

[Footnote 54: Page 250.]

"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea. In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in–as the phrase then went–drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things. Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy. Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man."

Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts, engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals, university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as representing magnificent intellectual–and social–accomplishments, had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.

It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's, in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness, a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 55]

[Footnote 55: Page 267.]

"While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves they possessed–some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand–begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization."

As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram has made a special study of the subject in connection with the magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate. Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more convincing. [Footnote 56]

[Footnote 56: The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain. New York: The Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.]

"At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to the tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."

Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the influence of the monks in agriculture:

"Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty. So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers. Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales":

"'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'

"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere, but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of peasants and serfs."

President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:

"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard, and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation, and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land and the pestilence had ceased."

President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise them. He concluded his address as follows:

"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and when they perished they left a void which generations have not filled."

In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject. Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).

"The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes–the south of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides, etc."

We must suppose that the scientific readers of this book, for they were mainly scientists, and it had a place in the International Scientific Series, agreed with this marvellous exhibition of ignorance. Here is a man summarizing modern European science and leaving out all mention of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the great medical school of Salerno in the twelfth century, and the great medical schools of Italy farther north during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This lack of knowledge of the history of medicine deserves, above all, to be emphasized because Draper as a professor in a medical school would naturally be supposed to know something about his own branch of science.

He attributes all the initiative of modern science to the impulse derived from the Arabs. This used to be a favorite way of looking at the history of culture for those who wanted to minimize just as far as possible all Christian influence. The facts of history are in constant contradiction with this. Modern European science began at the University of Salerno. It has often been stated that Arabian influence must have largely impelled Salerno's work, situated as it was in the southern part of Italy, but the use of any such expression means that the writer must forget that this southern part of Italy had been a Greek colony, was indeed called Magna Graecia and that Greek influence persisted there, and when the revival came after the Barbarians who had invaded Italy had gradually been brought by religious influence into a state where culture and science and civilization were to mean something for them, the influence of the old Greek authors was first felt here. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, emphasizes the fact, for instance, that the first important modern (or medieval) writers on surgery, the Four Masters of Salerno, were not influenced by the Arabs. Their books contain no Arabisms but many Graecisms. They obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their proper place.

For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the significance of their work–for that is his way. He is emphatic in his declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests." He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk scourge of disease–the White Plague.

Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like apartments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges. Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the Reformation, under religious influence,–but Professor Draper knows nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as largely religious as it was in other countries and times.

Professor Draper seems to have known nothing of the fine hospitals and foundling institutions and the great surgery of the later Middle Ages, but he thinks he knows enough to be quite sure that any such developments were impossible. Certain incidents that he accepts as historical showed him what fools the Popes and all near them were in matters of science, and, therefore, it would be quite impossible that they could have any sympathy for scientific progress and quite easy to understand their opposition. It is from conclusions and assumptions in history that we need to be saved. A hundred years ago it used to be said with pride that if you gave a zoologist a single bone he could reconstruct the entire animal for you. We know that such reconstruction worked much harm to science. Many of the animals possess structures that even important portions of their anatomy in other parts of the body would give no hint of. History that is built up from single incidents is likely to be even more false because human conduct is much more complex than any animal body. What could be expected of the zoologist's reconstruction, however, if the original bone handed to him was factitious, what a curious result might be expected from his deduced skeleton.

This is what happened with Professor Draper's reconstruction of history from certain incidents that he accepted. The story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet seemed enough to him to make it quite clear that for centuries the Popes must have been buried in the profoundest ignorance of science,–but then the story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet is all a modern invention. Draper said: "But when Halley's comet came in 1456 so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III, and did not venture back again for seventy-five years!" Of course this bit of supposed information is all nonsense; Calixtus did no such thing, and just at that time the Popes were encouraging Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his great mathematical work and astronomical speculations, were inviting Regiomontanus, "the Father of modern astronomy," down to Rome to do his work there and help in the correction of the calendar, while Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most intimate friends of the Pope at this time, was encouraging Purbach at Vienna and Regiomontanus to translate Ptolemy and providing them with manuscripts and putting them in touch with Greek science in every way.

Halley's comet is a favorite reference with Professor Draper. How well his readers must have remembered all about it! He says, for instance, on page 320:

"The step that European intellect had made between 1456 and 1759 was illustrated by Halley's comet. When it appeared in the former year, it was considered as the harbinger of the vengeance of God, the dispenser of the most dreadful of his retributions, war, pestilence, famine. By order of the Pope, all the church-bells in Europe were rung to scare it away, the faithful were commanded to add each day another prayer; and, as their prayers had often in so marked a manner been answered in eclipses and droughts and rains, so on this occasion it was declared that a victory over the comet had been vouchsafed to the Pope. But, in the meantime, Halley, guided by revelations of Kepler and Newton, had discovered that its motions, so far from being controlled by the supplications of Christendom, were guided in an elliptic orbit by destiny. Knowing that Nature had denied to him an opportunity of witnessing the fulfilment of his daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it came."

All this is of course mere persiflage once it is known that the story of the Papal Bull against the comet has no foundation in history. It is the sort of nonsense that a great many serious men permit themselves to indulge in when they think they are convicting some past century of sublime foolishness. Not infrequently they make themselves out just as absurd as they would like to present the men of former generations, because they show how credulous a modern scholar can be when his prejudices influence him. Unfortunately such passages have a particularly lamentable effect upon young minds. For them ridicule means much more than argument. For a young man to be ridiculous seems the worst thing that can possibly happen and when anything is made ridiculous for him he loses his respect for it. Ridicule is, as is well known, an extremely dangerous argument, however. Professor Draper and, indeed, many another teacher of history and, above all, lecturer and writer on the history of science, have made themselves supremely ridiculous by their ready acceptance of a legend for which there is not the slightest authority. It was made up to serve the purpose of exhibiting Papal ignorance and superstition, but it so happens that in serious history the Popes of the time when this is supposed to have occurred are among the most intelligent and scholarly men of history.

It seems worth while to go over the list of Popes who came during the twenty years just before and after the date given for the issuance of this supposed bull. Eugene IV, elected Pope in 1431, whatever may have been his faults of lack of tact, was scholarly and unselfish. At an early age he distributed what was really an immense fortune in his time to the poor, and entered the monastery. When political troubles drove him from Rome he resided at Florence and the presence of the Papal Court there did much to foster the humanistic movement which was just then beginning. It was he who consecrated the beautiful church just finished by Brunelleschi. His successor in 1447 was Pope Nicholas V, a man of wide education and deep interest in the revival of classical literature and Christian antiquities. He was the founder of the Vatican Library and brought Fra Angelico to Rome for the great decorative work at the Vatican. Pope Calixtus III, who succeeded Nicholas in 1455, was a man of cultivated mind, scholarly tastes and shared with his predecessor the honor of having founded the Vatican Library. He encouraged the Greek scholars in Italy and added greatly to the collections of precious manuscripts. His desire to prevent the further destruction of Greek culture by the Turks who had just captured Constantinople, led him to devote himself mainly to the fulfilment of a vow that he had made to wrest Constantinople from the Moslem. To his influence is largely due the victory gained by the Christians at Belgrade at this time which prevented the further spread of Mohammedan power. Pope Calixtus had the Angelus Bell rung every day at noon to implore the aid of the heavenly powers against the Turks. There is absolutely no question of any reference in this matter to the comet, but here is where the story comes in.

Pope Calixtus' successor was the famous Renaissance scholar AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was just beginning some of the reforms, the need of which had been pointed out by his friend, the scholarly Nicholas of Cusa, when his death occurred as a consequence of his fatigue in journeys undertaken to rouse the Christians of the West against the Turks so as to preserve Christian civilization. His successor was Pope Paul II. He found it necessary to suppress some of the academies of Rome whose privileges were being abused by fostering a pagan attitude toward philosophy and religion, and in revenge Platina wrote a bitter biography of him, but no one has ever doubted of his scholarliness. He built the Palace of St. Marco in Rome, now known as the Venezia, and organized relief work among the poor while encouraging printing, protecting universities, and showing himself a judicious collector of works of ancient art.

Professor Draper's summaries of periods of history are amusing caricatures of the reality. I know no easier way to make a comic history of progress in Europe, so-called, than to take a series of excerpts from Draper's book and string them together. He ignores completely the wonderful work done for scholarship, he knows nothing apparently of the great series of books printed for us during the Renaissance, usually in magnificent editions, which preserve scholarly works of the Middle Ages, he utterly neglects the painting, the architecture, the sculpture, even the great engineering feats in the making of bridges and constructive work of all kinds, and then in order to explain why there was nothing done by mankind puts all the blame on the Church. As I have said before, in a period in which even well-read men knew nothing about the Middle Ages, self-complacency tempted them to conclude that such a gap in their knowledge could only be because there was nothing to know about them. They looked for some reason for the absence of accomplishment that made this blank in human history. With their feelings, the Church was just the one that must be responsible. Progress would surely have been made only that some factor was keeping it back.

Professor Draper makes an especially strong appeal to American readers by contrasting all the accomplishments of our material civilization here in the United States, with the results in Mexico and in South America. Our progress has been all beneficent, while the influence of the Spaniard was everywhere absolutely maleficent. He seems to forget all about our treatment of the Indian, with its awful injustice. He proclaims our increase in wealth as the surest sign of our intellectual superiority. He says: [Footnote 57]

[Footnote 57: Page 289.]

"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 plow. 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 land and other property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church."

Place beside that a paragraph from the late lamented Professor Bourne of Yale, who having made special studies in Spanish-American culture and education, as well as in its intellectual life, contrasts it quite unfavorably with what was accomplished in the English colonies. Professor Bourne was, like Draper, a professor at an American university, but he had made special studies in the subject, and knew something about it. Professor Draper talked out of the depths of his assumption of knowledge; Professor Bourne out of an intimate acquaintance that had been obtained by years of serious research work. Professor Bourne said:

"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the Spanish colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings, and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother, and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and painters."

Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the "National Dictionary of Biography of England," and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare, which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, without deliberate intent, answered Draper almost directly, in the following paragraphs from his work, "The Call of The West," which appeared originally in Scribner's Magazine, but has since been published in book form. Since Mr. Lee cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities with the Spaniards, and his knowledge of the subject is unquestionable, his direct contradictions of Draper are all the more weighty:

"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated, in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under a divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent, who deplored her presence among them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.

"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed books, maps, and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan Englishman. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light, which illumes every corner of the picture, the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."

When an Englishman will admit this much in a comparison of his own countrymen with the Spaniards, it is easy to understand how great must be the actual historical contrast between the settlers of Spanish and English America.