There is a very general impression in many minds in our time that from the very beginning of Christianity the interest of Church men in the other world was so great that human attention was diverted just as far as possible from concerns of all kinds with the stage of existence through which man is passing here and now. As a consequence, there has been the feeling that from the earliest time the Church was opposed to science and scientific education, partly because this represented a rather compelling diversion from other-worldly interests, but mainly because it gave men control over natural forces which made life more comfortable, raised men up in their own estimation and was opposed to the spirit of humble faith best suited to the adherents of Christianity. Hence it is concluded that there was always a Church policy of deliberate opposition to science and indeed to all intellectual development. This attitude is often declared to be best represented by the expression attributed to one of the Fathers of the Church, "Heaven lies open to the simple of mind, the little ones of the earth, and the ignorant bear it away better than those who are proud of intellect."
Any such impression with regard to the Fathers of the Church as to the establishment of a policy of opposition to science and education is quite erroneous and entirely contrary to the general trend of their writings, even though it may be apparently substantiated by expressions taken at random from the writings of the Fathers at moments when they were emphasizing the truth that has always been so manifest, that from the knowing ones of earth,--and our use of the word knowing in the phrase is not complimentary,--especially from those who are conceited in their knowingness, many things are concealed that are revealed to those who are simple of heart and mind. It has seemed worth while, however, to devote an appendix to this subject of the real attitude of the Fathers to science. As Father Leahy, in his "Astronomical Essays," Boston (Washington Press, 1910), has answered Professor White's assumptions on this subject with a knowledge of the Fathers I could not hope to emulate, I have preferred to avail myself of his permission to quote him at length.
"By the Fathers we understand in general the Christian writers in the Church's early history. In the West the period may be held to have terminated with Isidore of Seville of the seventh century, and in the East with John of Damascus of the eighth. The important writers of this epoch number between fifty and a hundred, and their works constitute, as may be imagined, a body of literature of vast extent.
Our only present concern is to learn, if possible, what was the general attitude of this army of ecclesiastical writers towards the physical sciences, especially the science of astronomy. Explicit treatises on astronomy we shall not, indeed, expect them to supply. For their works when massed are seen to constitute a library of theology, and in such a collection we should no more look for scientific treatises than in a modern library for law. But inasmuch as the Fathers of the Church have been accused, by Andrew D. White and others, of having stayed and even thwarted the advance of science, it becomes the interest and the duty of the apologist to hunt up their scientific allusions that we may learn to what extent the charges made are true.
The Standstill of Science.--It has often been alleged as derogatory to the accomplishments of the Fathers, that they contributed nothing to the progress of scientific knowledge. From our modern standpoint we may be tempted to esteem this failure of theirs as a cardinal sin. But it would be wrong in this instance, as in every other, to render a verdict of guilt too hastily. We of the twentieth century are prone to forget that there are other fields of profitable intellectual exploration besides the physical, and that there may be objects of research and thought worthier of study than the material world.
The Fathers of the Church were philosophers and theologians occupied with the problems of the world's origin and destiny, higher themes, surely, than any with which physical science is concerned. It is the fashion of the day to praise the ancient Greeks at the expense of the patristic and medieval theologians. But the distinction is to a large extent inconsistent, since both bodies of writers were at work upon the selfsame themes. Philosophers like the Greeks, the Fathers were like them moralists as well, engaged in the elaboration of right rules of conduct. Finally, unlike the Greeks, the Fathers were Scriptural scholars, many of them of extensive erudition, in homily and commentary expounding with wonderful assiduity the Sacred Books in which they believed that God had given His revelation to man.
Analogous Examples.--Should we be surprised, then, if men so occupied failed to add much to the world's store of scientific knowledge? Though it were admitted, as it cannot be in its entirety, that they left physical science just where they found it, could not an explanation be discovered that would exonerate them from all blame? To justify such an apology, we do not even need to transport ourselves in spirit back to their time, a process which, however, strict fairness would demand. But in our own era we can think easily of dozens and hundreds of men of highest respectability and most beneficent accomplishment, men of books and men of affairs, jurists, statesmen, historians and others, who have {486} themselves done little or nothing for the onward march of Science. That the careers of these men are profitless, who shall allege?
Again, the present writer has often thought of the almost parallel example of the ancient Romans. It makes their history but little less illustrious to learn that this conquering people did nothing for Science's advance. Till Pliny of the first century after Christ, what Roman was a scientist? They were a nation of soldiers, statesmen, orators and jurists, and for seven hundred years they pursued through such avenues their triumphant course. Yet what writer of to-day rises to charge them with a cardinal sin, because Science remained at a standstill among them for seven full centuries? With these seven centuries can we not properly compare the later seven in which the Christian Fathers were the teachers of the civilized world?
Heritage from the Greeks.--Objection will be made, no doubt, that the Fathers began their career with fairer start than the Romans, forasmuch as they were the direct heirs of the astronomy and physics of ancient Hellas. And they will be incriminated with having abused their precious heritage, by not merely letting it lie fallow but by raising every possible obstruction to its further cultivation. Such is the tenor of Andrew D. White's accusations against them.
This well-known writer smiles at the puerilities of patristic science. He cites from among them Cosmas of Egypt as having propounded a perfectly childish theory of the structure of the earth and grafted it on the science of theology. The ready answer to this particular charge is that Cosmas' conception of the universe belonged to cosmogony and not theology, and further that it had no influence on subsequent thought. Returning to the general arraignment, White rebukes the Fathers for having clung so tenaciously to false opinions regarding the shape of the earth, the motion of the heavens, and the nature of the firmament. And, most seriously of all, he charges the Fathers with indifference and even hostility to the study of science itself.
In a few short paragraphs it is impossible to give an adequate rejoinder to these damaging complaints. But they demand some sort of reply, however inadequate it be, as emanating from an American scholar and statesman of high rank, and embodied in a work that has free and wide circulation among our college students.
Defence of Their Doctrine.--The first palliation for the reputed offence of the Fathers is that whatever false science they retail, was practically all of it derived from the very sources which it is the fashion of the day to laud in the highest degree. As far as was consistent with their faith, the Christian Fathers were the pupils of the Greeks. It was the latter and not the patristic writers who invented the false theories of a solid firmament and a motionless earth. If Europe and Arabia down to the Renaissance believed in the Geocentric system, it was because they trusted Ptolemy the Greek, till then admittedly the greatest of astronomers. And a similar ancestry could be traced, we venture to say, for all or the major part of their scientific errors as far as these may have extended.
Restrictions Made by the Fathers.--But if the Fathers were in {487} general the heirs of the Greeks, they were not guilty of the mistake of accepting the inheritance in its entirety. To a large extent they could discern the chaff from the wheat, and were actually at pains to make the separation. It ought to be known that the scientific literature of the Grecians is teeming with the wildest and vainest of speculations regarding all matters within the scope of astronomical science. Here as elsewhere, the Greeks speculated endlessly, contradictorily, emptily, and almost aimlessly. In unfounded speculation they discoursed on all manner of astronomical subjects, the shape and size and distance of the sun, its nature and that of the moon and stars, and so on almost indefinitely, with scarcely any agreement or concomitance of opinion. There were almost as many diverse opinions as there were men.
To this motley assemblage of groundless and conflicting theories the Fathers had full access through the medium of Plutarch, the Greek compiler. Eusebius, for example, the Father of Church History, quotes Plutarch on just these topics for over thirty pages. If Eusebius and the other Fathers grew impatient with all this ill-assorted mass of soi-disant science, shall we charge them as Dr. White does with having been false to the interest of science? Should we not rather maintain that they helped save science from its enemies?
Opposition to Science.--It is only in the light of these indisputable facts that we can understand the sayings of the Fathers in which, as quoted by White, they upbraid science for its inutility. Be it noted in passing that White is wont to quote them not literally but freely, and apart from their context. Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, and Basil, these are the four whom he selects as representative. They are truly representative, and indeed any one of them might stand for all.
Let Eusebius be our particular choice, for he discusses astronomy more completely than the others. White alleges (Warfare, Vol. I, p. 91) that Eusebius endeavored to bring scientific studies into contempt, and quotes him as saying, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them [scientific investigators], but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things."
Who would guess from this brief epitome of Eusebius' views that the latter had devoted to the subject more than thirty pages? Who could possibly surmise that he had taken pains to write out, under the guidance of Plutarch, all the known opinions of the Greeks on some thirty-nine problems, all but two or three of them astronomical? Let the curious read Eusebius for themselves in the fifteenth book of his Praelectio Evangelica. They will there discover what White might have well acknowledged, that on not one of the problems are the Greek philosophers in agreement. On the nature of the sun there are nine opinions, on its size four, on its shape an equal number, on the moon's nature seven. And this discrepancy of judgment continues to the end. Moreover a large proportion of the theories are of the most fantastic sort.
In the face of this chaotic wilderness of diverse, fluctuating and contradictory teachings, what could Eusebius do but turn away in impatience, and take up in their stead the only truth of which he {488} felt certain, the truth of the Gospel? Such was his actual procedure. "Does it not seem to you that we have rightly and deservedly departed from the curiosity of all these men, so idle and so full of error?" He confesses frankly that he can see no fruit or utility for man in the teachings he has quoted. And he appeals for his complete justification to Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, who in his day had adopted precisely the same stand. This and no other is the argument and spirit of Eusebius.
No Opposition to True Science.--This was the temper, also, that actuated the other Fathers named, Lactantius, Basil, and Augustine. No doubt these men valued spiritual knowledge above material. But it by no means follows from this that they undervalued Science. They were scholars of extensive culture, Basil a graduate of Athens, Augustine of Carthage, and Lactantius styled because of his proficiency the Christian Cicero. They were well acquainted with the learning of the Greeks. That they rebelled against the scientific fantasies of the latter, is not a proof that they were hostile to the advance of Science itself.
In the Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis expresses a sentiment quite similar to theirs. "Surely a humble husbandman that serveth God, is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, is occupied in studying the course of the heavens." Like the Fathers, à Kempis had reason to be disgusted with the astronomy of his time, for it was beginning to be impregnated again with the virus of Astrology. By refusing to follow such pseudo-scientific teachings, both à Kempis and the Fathers did a real if seemingly negative service to the science of astronomy.
"He was born under a lucky star." Language of this sort, used now only in pleasantry, recalls a form of superstition which was once accepted seriously by all men throughout the civilized world. In many a period, mankind has believed literally that the stars and planets exercised a real influence in shaping human lives. And there have been many epochs, ancient, medieval, and even modern, when astrology, the telling of fortunes by the stars, was given a rank among the learned professions.
Even now there occur occasional sporadic outbreaks of the same superstition. Along with other quacks and necromancers, astrologers are still occasionally in evidence, advertising their trade through the columns of the press. Indeed it is affirmed by the Catholic Encyclopedia that the growth of occultistic ideas is reintroducing astrology into society.
Errors of Astrology.--Whatever the popularity of this practice in the past, and whatever its prospective vogue in the near future, it is to be set down without qualification or hesitation as a delusion and a snare. To suppose that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human conduct is in its origin a pagan error, closely allied with the pagan myth that the sun, moon and stars are presided over by as many separate deities. Only thus could have originated the delusion that Jupiter and Venus would procure a blessed destiny, and Mars and Saturn a troubled one, for the children born at the time of their rising.
Nor can the cult be justified by an array of the names of those who have been its votaries. It is true that many astronomers in the {489} past, including the great Kepler himself, have practised the astrological art, casting horoscopes for their clients. But in most cases it would be found, at least in the modern period, that these scientists merely yielded through tolerance to the weakness of their age. In true astronomy there is no place whatever for astrology.
Besides being groundless the practice is to be condemned for its perilous moral tendencies. Distracting the soul from the worship of the spiritual God, who alone governs the universe, it substitutes for His action that of mere material objects, stars and planets, which it thus elevates to the rank of lesser gods or demons. Pretending to forecast from birth what each man's course in life shall be, it robs the will of its proper share in moulding human conduct.
The Christian Fathers.--An interesting testimony to the former prevalence of this erroneous belief is found in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, "Guy Mannering," whose whole plot turns upon the fulfilment of an astrological prediction. Reading the history at hand the novelist had learned what complete sway the cult had formerly exercised, almost down to the time of his writing. It would have interested the celebrated author to know that there was, however, one long period in which astrology was absolutely and effectually excluded from Christian Europe. For over a thousand years Christendom remained free from this blight, thanks to the teachings of the Fathers of the Church.
In discussing the relations of the Fathers towards the astral science, we have already shown how they purged it of some of its grossest errors. But their principal service to the science remains now to be told. For amongst all the vagaries of the science of the heavens, astrology is both in theory and in practice the most deplorable. That the Fathers placed the weight of their great authority in the scale against this superstition, is one of the most praiseworthy of their achievements.
First Efforts at Reform.--At the time that the Fathers began to write, in the century just following the labors of the Apostles, astrology formed everywhere an integral part of the science of astronomy. It was taught in all the schools, Chaldean, Jewish, Grecian and Roman. Almost from the beginning the defenders of the Christian faith proceeded to attack this pernicious error, realizing how inimical it was to the spread of truth which Christ had come to impart. Already in his address to the Greeks, Tatian was heard denouncing the absurdities of Grecian astronomy and astrology. This was in the middle of the second century, just at the close of what is called the Apostolic Period.
A little later, Tertullian, the famed apologist of the then flourishing African Church, placed himself on record as the uncompromising enemy of astrology. With his usual vehemence of language he declared that "of astrologers there should be no speaking even" among Christians; and went to the length of saying that "he cannot hope for heaven whose finger or wand abuses the heavens." These and many similar utterances may be found in his Treatise on Idolatry.
Respect for True Astrology.--With this denunciation of magic and idolatry there went hand in hand, however, a genuine respect {490} for the proper science of the heavens. Contemporary with Tertullian, and like him one of the great Christian masters of the period, was Clement Alexandria. To the Catholic astronomer of to-day it is gratifying to find this Father of the Egyptian Church giving generous testimony to the worth of astronomical science. With just discrimination he praises astronomy as "leading the soul nearer to the creative power, as helpful to navigation and husbandry, and as making the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false."
Another contemporary, Hippolytus, was indeed unsparing in his denunciation of astrology. In a treatise of eleven quarto pages, contained in his "Refutation of All Heresies," he riddled with merciless logic the vain pretensions of the Greek astrologers. But he showed that he had no quarrel with a well ordered study of the heavens, by giving liberal praise to Ptolemy, the ablest of the astronomers.
A Universal Teaching.--In far distant Syria, then a choice realm in the Church's patrimony, there was at the beginning of the third century another school of Christian philosophers who joined with their brethren in West and East in waging war on the same dread enemy. A Syrian work, called the Book of the Astrologers, has two quarto pages of excellent quality recounting and scoring the absurdities of current astrological practices. It is so like Hippolytus' work that one seems an echo of the other.
Perhaps the most interesting of all these concordant denunciations is that found in the "Recognitions of Clement," a patristic writing probably of the third century. Here the treatises on astrology run to full ten chapters, a sign that the author had abundant knowledge of the subject. In this work astrology is refuted particularly from the moral point of view. It is convicted of the double charge of being fatalistic in its tendency and subversive of all morality. "Men's conduct," says the author's thesis, "is due to their own free will and not to the configuration of the planets."
Golden Age of Patristic Literature.--So ran on in perfect unity and harmony the steady flow of patristic teaching. It reached its climax, as we should expect to find, in the heroic writers of the fourth century, the golden era of patrology. Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, re-echoed the voices of the past in pronouncing astrology the work of demons. An Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, confirmed the decision of his predecessors by protesting against the amalgamation of astrology with the true science of nature.
So effectual indeed was the opposition to astrology of the earlier Christian writers, confirmed by the masters of the post-Nicene period, that the practice came to be regarded by all the faithful as a superstition and a danger, and continued to be so esteemed down to the time of the Crusades. For a full millennium, Christian Europe midst all its vicissitudes was spared the absurdities of astrological belief and practice, thanks to the patristic school of writers.
A Surprising Omission.--We have thought it well to bring to light these none too well-known facts regarding one important part of the astronomical teachings of the Fathers. How they could have {491} escaped the attention of Andrew D. White, or how he could have failed to find place for them in his voluminous work, it is difficult to understand.
His book bristles with accounts of superstitions, always telling against the theologians, and in favor of the scientists. But astrology is absent even from the index of his work. Had he allotted it a chapter, his numerous readers would have learned that one great school of theological writers, enduring for a thousand years, did wage war on a certain sort of science, to wit, the pseudo-science of astrology.
For Americans it is very probable that the chapter in the history of science which will demonstrate most clearly that there was not only no opposition on the part of the Popes or the Church authorities to the teachings of science or its development, but on the contrary encouragement and patronage, in spite of our English traditions to the contrary, is that which gives even very briefly the story of the evolution of science and its teaching on the American continent. Notwithstanding the very prevalent impression, indeed we might say the practically universal persuasion, that there was nothing worth while talking about in any department of education in America before the nineteenth century, except what little there was in the English colonies, and while it is confidently assumed that above all science received no attention from our Southern neighbors, Spanish America not only surpassed English America in education, but far outdistanced English America in what was accomplished for scientific research and the evolution of the knowledge of a large number of scientific subjects in a great many ways.
Even those among us who thought themselves well read in American history have, as a rule, known almost nothing of this until comparatively recent years. Professor Bourne of Yale, whose untimely death deprived the United States of a distinguished historical scholar, was the first to point out emphatically how far ahead of the English were the Spanish colonies in every mode of education, but particularly in the cultivation of science. In many places Prescott had more than hinted at this, but the materials for the whole story were not available until our time.
Some of Bourne's paragraphs represent a severe arraignment of the ignorance that has characterized so much of our supposed knowledge of the Spanish Americans and their culture in the past. After reading them it is easy to realize the truth of the expression that another distinguished university man from the United States made use of not long ago, after having visited the South American countries. He declared that it was time for North Americans to wake up and discover South America. Literally we have known almost nothing about it, indeed in a certain sense we have known much less than nothing, since we were quite sure that we knew {493} practically all there was to know while failing to know much that as Americans we ought to have known.
Two Spanish-American universities were founded under Papal charters almost a full century before Harvard as our first small college in English America began its career. Harvard was not to be a university in any proper sense of the term for a full century and a half after its foundation, while the universities of Mexico and Peru, largely under the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities and owing nearly everything to Church patronage under the Spanish Crown, had all the essential university faculties before the close of the sixteenth century. In spite of the predominant Church influence, which, if we were to credit former English traditions, must have been fatal to the evolution of science, Professor Bourne's researches show that in the sixteenth century the Spanish-American universities were already doing such scientific work as the students in English America became interested in only during the nineteenth century. Obviously I prefer to quote Professor Bourne's own words for such startling assertions. He said in his chapter on "The Transmission of Culture" in his volume in The American Nation Series, "Spain in America":
"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."
Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chanca, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen (Ferdinand and Isabella) and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, was appointed by the Crown to accompany Columbus on his second expedition, partly for the sake of the health of those who went, but also in order to make scientific notes on American subjects. The report {494} of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the state of science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, Spanish knowledge of and interest in botany and metallurgy, as well as certain phases of zoology and other scientific departments, which serves to show how wide was the training in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago. Dr. Chanca's epistle was republished as one of the Miscellaneous Publications of the Smithsonian Institution and a series of articles with regard to him from the pen of Dr. Fernandez de Ybarra has appeared in medical and other journals of the United States. Chanca is the author of a medical work on the Treatment of Pleurisy, published after his return in 1506, and a commentary on Arnold of Villanova's De conservanda juventute et retardanda senectute, "The Conservation of Youth and the Retardation of Old Age." Such a work is all the more interesting at this time because we know of De Soto's search for a "Fountain of Youth" in Florida and the popular belief in the existence of some such fabled miracle-worker for the old. Indeed most people seem inclined to think that such an idea represented very characteristically the naive medical science of the time. The Fountain of Youth was only like the many wonderful remedies--nearly always they are announced to have come from long distances--that are supposed to renew youthful vigor and which are sold so plentifully in our time. To take such popular notions as an index of the medical science of either that time or our own is quite absurd. The genuine medical science of this period is, as I have shown in my volume "The Century of Columbus," a never-ending source of surprise by its anticipation of many ideas that are usually supposed to be much later in origin and not a few of which are fondly supposed to be original discoveries of our time.
Evidently Spanish interest in science was broad and deep and this is confirmed by the story of the medical schools in connection with these Spanish-American universities which is of special significance. My own medical alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, whose medical school was the first in the United States, erected a tablet some years ago in which it was at least hinted that this was the oldest medical school in America. A few years later, on the erection of a second tablet to the earliest medical faculty, additional knowledge having come in the meantime, the inscription on this was worded so as to refer to the first school of medicine in North America.
HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page 272), is the oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest hospital in America was that of Santa Fé (in Mexico) founded in 1531 by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality and all the works of charity (A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock, New York).
The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about 1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical teaching in the United States was organized about 1770. During the course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics. The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the same time.
With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards.
From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology, ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants, especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to {496} compile works of serious character which are well known by those who are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in India and South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material, plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful investigation.
Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined only to the upper classes nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where, under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments, the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were actually anticipating for the young Indians some of the modes of vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused among us at the present time.
No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec priesthood relaxed its bonds and the masses were relieved from the earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost untellable in its {497} completeness, brought the natives of the country that they had invaded to ruin and practically obliteration. This experiment in applied sociology so successfully accomplished must be placed to the credit of the Spaniards also, and it stands out with all the more interest by contrast with English neglect of duty.
While seeing so clearly all that was accomplished in Mexico under the influence of the Church for education and social progress and scientific teaching and training in the arts and crafts and trades, Professor Bourne cannot quite bring himself to condemn entirely the almost complete failure that characterized all the relations of the English-speaking peoples to the natives here in America and he even seems to find some justification for their harsh treatment of the Indians. I think that our point of view generally has changed a great deal in this matter even in the last ten or fifteen years since we have come to recognize our social obligations more clearly and, above all, have come to appreciate better what is meant by "the white man's burden" in his relations to the dark-skinned peoples who are lower in the scale of civilization than we are. The Civil War did much to correct American notions on this point, but our attention to problems in the Philippines has done even more. I shall leave Professor Bourne's paragraph to speak for itself and each reader to say for himself whether the English method of dealing with the Indian is justified by comparison with the ruthless processes of nature as Professor Bourne would hint.
"Far different was the advancing frontier in English America with its clean sweep, its clash of elemental human forces. Our own method prepared a home for a more advanced civilization and a less variously mixed population and its present fruits seem to justify it as the ruthless processes of nature are justified; but a comparison of the two systems does not warrant self-righteousness on the part of the English in America."
Indeed we might well say far from it, for the almost literal obliteration of the Indian in North America as of the natives in Australia and New Zealand, only so much more complete there, represents ever to be regretted blots on the history of civilization for which there can be no possible justification.
Professor Bourne does not hesitate to continue the comparison of Spanish and English America down even to our own time and in doing so points out that our advances which have for the time being put us so far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed population with so many barbarous elements {498} in them to keep up with our comparatively homogeneous population, homogeneous at least in the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe. While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for the Spanish Americans is all the more telling.
"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam."
If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of Columbus" (Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914), it will be quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the early sixteenth century.
"During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."
If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature, in the application of the arts to municipal life and, above {499} all, in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant America in scientific education and research until the untimely break from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political disturbances.
Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science."
What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous Gothic ancestors.
Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe.
The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who, if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent literature, its interest in education and {501} in scholarship, its development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and constitutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science disappears.
I have illustrated the lack of knowledge of the true history of science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what President White advances as facts. It can be illustrated still better, however, from another book written twenty years before President White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the time, some of them classics in science and most of them representing important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its "facts."
Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a very striking career. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine, which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes, using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world. He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840 successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which attracted deserved attention and anticipated not a little of Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist, reported these observations {502} to the academy of Naples. Draper's text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for many years in our medical schools.
It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the shape of membership in foreign scientific societies, honorable mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America. His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a great many European teachers and students. All this gave added distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered by many to have made an almost final summary of this important controversy.
Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all, for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy of any and every social progress that might lead to the real development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503} dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.
It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds from any further currents of information.
Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up, and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the feeling that people with religious convictions are prone to see only one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This attitude of scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human.
Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the original documents--has shown us that there were magnificent developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, when the Church was in control of the educational institutions and of every phase of {504} academic work. The story of the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the latest results of scholarship in the matter.
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 64]
[Footnote 64: 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 {505} 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 65]
[Footnote 65: 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 66]
[Footnote 66: 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 {506} 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."