Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Renaissance philosophy
Renaissance philosophy » Humanism
The Renaissance was characterized by the revival of interest in
mathematics, medicine, and Classical literature. The study of
mathematics and medicine sparked the scientific revolution of the 16th
and 17th centuries, while the study of Classical literature became the
foundation of the philosophy of Renaissance humanism. Generally
suspicious of science and indifferent to religion, humanism emphasized
anew the centrality of human beings in the universe and their supreme
value and importance. Characteristic of this emphasis was the Oration on
the Dignity of Man (1486) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, an Italian
Platonist philosopher and a leading member of the Platonic Academy of
Florence, organized by the city’s ruler, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92).
But the new emphasis on personal responsibility and the possibility of
self-creation as a work of art was in no small part a consequence of the
rediscovery of a series of crucial Classical texts, which served to
reverse the trends of medieval learning. Renaissance humanism was
predicated upon the victory of rhetoric over dialectic and of Plato over
Aristotle as the cramped format of Scholastic philosophical method gave
way to a Platonic discursiveness.
Much of this transformation had been prepared by Italian scholarly
initiative in the early 15th century. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), an
antiauthoritarian humanist, used the recently discovered manuscript of
Institutio oratoria by Quintilian (35–c. 96) to create new forms of
rhetoric and textual criticism. But even more important was the rebirth
of an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Plato in Medici Florence and at
the cultivated court of Urbino. Precisely to service this enthusiasm,
Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), head of the Platonic Academy, translated the
entire Platonic corpus into Latin by the end of the 15th century.
Except in the writings of Pico della Mirandola and of the Italian
philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the direct influence of
Platonism on Renaissance metaphysics is difficult to trace. The Platonic
account of the moral virtues, however, was admirably adapted to the
requirements of Renaissance education, serving as a philosophical
foundation of the Renaissance ideal of the courtier and gentleman. But
Plato also represented the importance of mathematics and the Pythagorean
attempt to discover the secrets of the heavens, the Earth, and the world
of nature in terms of number and exact calculation. This aspect of
Platonism influenced Renaissance science as well as philosophy. The
scientists Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630),
and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) owe a great deal to the general climate
of Pythagorean confidence in the explanatory power of number.
Platonism also affected the literary forms in which Renaissance
philosophy was written. Although very early medieval Platonists, such as
St. Augustine and John Scotus Erigena, occasionally used the dialogue
form, later Scholastics abandoned it in favour of the formal treatise,
of which the great “summae” of Alexander of Hales (c. 1170–1245) and
Aquinas were pristine examples. The Renaissance rediscovery of the
Platonic dialogues suggested the literary charm of this conversational
method to humanists, scientists, and political philosophers alike. Bruno
put forth his central insights in a dialogue, Concerning the Cause,
Principle, and One (1584); Galileo presented his novel mechanics in his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican
(1632); and even Machiavelli’s The Art of War (1521) takes the form of a
genteel conversation in a quiet Florentine garden.
Renaissance humanism was primarily a moral and a literary, rather
than a narrowly philosophical, movement. It flowered in figures with
broadly philosophical interests, such as Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536),
the erudite citizen of the world, and Sir Thomas More (1477–1535), the
learned but unfortunate chancellor of Henry VIII, as well as, in the
next generation, the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne
(1532–92). But the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics, which was
the work of humanism, profoundly affected the entire field of
Renaissance and early modern philosophy and science through the ancient
schools of philosophy to which it once more directed attention. In
addition to Platonism, the most notable of these schools were atomism,
Skepticism, and Stoicism. The discovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura
influenced Galileo, Bruno, and later Pierre Gassendi
(1592–1655), a
modern Epicurean, through the insights into nature reflected in this
work. The recovery of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism,
reprinted in 1562, produced a skeptical crisis in French philosophy that
dominated the period from Montaigne to Descartes. And the Stoicism of
Seneca and Epictetus became almost the official ethics of the
Renaissance, figuring prominently in the Essays (1580–88) of Montaigne,
in the letters that Descartes wrote to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia
(1618–79) and to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–89), and in the later
sections of the Ethics (1675) of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77).

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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, count di
Concordia
Italian scholar
born Feb. 24, 1463, Mirandola, duchy of Ferrara [Italy]
died Nov. 17, 1494, Florence
Main
Italian scholar and Platonist philosopher whose De hominis
dignitate oratio (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”), a
characteristic Renaissance work composed in 1486, reflected
his syncretistic method of taking the best elements from
other philosophies and combining them in his own work.
His father, Giovanni Francesco Pico, prince of the small
territory of Mirandola, provided for his precocious child’s
thorough humanistic education at home. Pico then studied
canon law at Bologna and Aristotelian philosophy at Padua
and visited Paris and Florence, where he learned Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Arabic. At Florence he met Marsilio Ficino, a
leading Renaissance Platonist philosopher.
Introduced to the Hebrew Kabbala, Pico became the first
Christian scholar to use Kabbalistic doctrine in support of
Christian theology. In 1486, planning to defend 900 theses
he had drawn from diverse Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin
writers, he invited scholars from all of Europe to Rome for
a public disputation. For the occasion he composed his
celebrated Oratio. A papal commission, however, denounced 13
of the theses as heretical, and the assembly was prohibited
by Pope Innocent VIII. Despite his ensuing Apologia for the
theses, Pico thought it prudent to flee to France but was
arrested there. After a brief imprisonment he settled in
Florence, where he became associated with the Platonic
Academy, under the protection of the Florentine prince
Lorenzo de’ Medici. Except for short trips to Ferrara, Pico
spent the rest of his life there. He was absolved from the
charge of heresy by Pope Alexander VI in 1492. Toward the
end of his life he came under the influence of the strictly
orthodox Girolamo Savonarola, martyr and enemy of Lorenzo.
Pico’s unfinished treatise against enemies of the church
includes a discussion of the deficiencies of astrology.
Though this critique was religious rather than scientific in
its foundation, it influenced the astronomer Johannes
Kepler, whose studies of planetary movements underlie modern
astronomy. Pico’s other works include an exposition of
Genesis under the title Heptaplus (Greek hepta, “seven”),
indicating his seven points of argument, and a synoptic
treatment of Plato and Aristotle, of which the completed
work De ente et uno (Of Being and Unity) is a portion.
Pico’s works were first collected in Commentationes Joannis
Pici Mirandulae (1495–96).
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Lorenzo Valla
Italian humanist
Latin Laurentius Vallensis
born 1407, Rome, Papal States [Italy]
died Aug. 1, 1457, Rome
Main
Italian humanist, philosopher, and literary critic who
attacked medieval traditions and anticipated views of the
Protestant reformers.
Valla was the son of a lawyer employed at the papal
court. His family was from Piacenza. Until he was 24 Lorenzo
spent most of his time in Rome, studying Latin grammar and
rhetoric. Unable to obtain a post as papal secretary in
1430, he left Rome and spent the next five years wandering
about northern Italy. He taught rhetoric at the University
of Pavia, where he made public his De voluptate (On
Pleasure), a dialogue about the nature of the true good.
That work surprised many of its readers by its
then-unfashionable defense of the Greek philosopher
Epicurus, who maintained that, with the attainment of
virtue, a wise man may live a life of prudent pleasure, free
from pain. Valla then went on to attack stoicism, the
philosophy of the control of the emotions through reason and
its advocacy of a simple life. Valla caused a still greater
sensation by an attack on the barbarous Latin used by the
celebrated 14th-century lawyer Bartolus. The law faculty at
Pavia took offense, and Valla found it expedient to leave.
He lived at Milan and Genoa before settling down, in
1435, as royal secretary and historian at the court of
Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples. He remained 13 years in
Alfonso’s service, and it was during this time that Valla,
then in his 30s, wrote most of his important books. His
Declamatio (Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of
Constantine), written in 1440, attacked the crude Latin of
its anonymous author and from that observation argued that
the document could not possibly have dated from the time of
Constantine. As King Alfonso was at war with Pope Eugenius
IV at this time, it was politically convenient to attack the
foundation of papal claims to temporal power in Italy. The
book was first printed in 1517 in Germany, the same year
that Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses,
criticizing papal policies. (See Researcher’s Note.)
Valla wrote other books in his years at Alfonso’s court.
In his brief dialogue De libero arbitrio (“On Free Will”),
Valla attacked the stoic philosopher Boethius (480–524/525),
who had attempted to reconcile man’s free will with God’s
foreknowledge; and in his Dialecticae disputationes
(“Dialectical Disputations”), Valla reduced Aristotle’s nine
“categories” to three (substance, quality, and action, which
corresponded to noun, adjective, and verb) and denounced as
barbarisms a number of the technical terms of scholastic
philosophy, such as “entity” and “quiddity.” Valla preferred
the language of ordinary people to the jargon of
professional philosophers. His “Disputations” was at once a
rhetorician’s attack on logic and an attempt to reduce
philosophical problems to linguistic ones. The Elegantiae
linguae Latinae (“Elegances of the Latin Language”), printed
in 1471, was the first textbook of Latin grammar to be
written since late antiquity; it became highly popular in
grammar schools all over Europe.
Valla could make even grammar polemical and shocked
contemporaries by his criticisms of the prose of the famous
Roman rhetorician Cicero. Similarly, his first book, written
when he was 20 and now lost, had apparently argued that
Quintilian, another Roman rhetorician, was a better stylist
than Cicero. Valla also produced a history of the reign of
Ferdinand of Aragon, Alfonso’s father. Characteristically,
he showed most interest in linguistic problems, such as how
to write in classical Latin about things that did not exist
in Roman times—e.g., cannons and parliaments. For his
offenses against the “dignity of history” he was attacked in
an Invective by Bartolomeo Facio, another humanist in
Alfonso’s service. Valla responded with his “Recriminations
Against Facio,” written in dialogue form and recalling the
debates among the court humanists, to which the king loved
to listen. This work also contains Valla’s celebrated
emendations to the text of the Roman historian Livy.
Meanwhile, Valla had become embroiled in another
controversy, theological this time, over his refusal to
believe that the Apostles’ Creed had been composed by the
Twelve Apostles. As a result, he was denounced by the clergy
and investigated by the Inquisition, which found him
heretical on eight counts, including his defense of Epicurus
and his criticisms of Aristotle’s categories. Only Alfonso’s
personal intervention saved him from the stake.
Valla left Naples in 1448 when Nicholas V, successor to
Eugenius IV and a supporter of humanists, appointed him
papal secretary, a post in which he was confirmed by
Nicholas’ successor in 1455. Valla also taught rhetoric in
Rome, where he remained until his death. In his 40s, he
composed his last major work, In Novum Testamentum ex
diversorum utriusque linguae codicum collatione adnotationes
(“Annotations on the New Testament Collected from Various
Codices in Each Language”), with the encouragement and
advice of two famous scholars, the cardinals Bessarion and
Nicholas of Cusa. The Adnotationes, not printed until 1505,
applied the methods of humanist philology to a sacred text.
Predictably, Valla was attacked for his disrespect to St.
Jerome, the presumed author of the Latin translation of the
Bible; during the Counter-Reformation the Adnotationes were
to be placed on the Index, the Roman Catholic church’s list
of condemned books. Valla also translated many works from
Greek into Latin. Early in his Naples days he had translated
Aesop’s fables, and Pope Nicholas commissioned him to
translate the historians Thucydides and Herodotus.
Despite his heavy literary commitments, Valla never
seemed to lack time or energy to engage in controversies.
The Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini had criticized
the “Elegances,” and Valla replied in his Antidoti in
Poggium (“Antidotes to Poggio”). Both scholars are seen at
their worst here, hurling at one another accusations of
ignorance, of barbarism, of plagiarism, and even worse.
Benedetto Morandi, a notary from Bologna, assailed Valla for
his disrespect in arguing that Livy had made mistakes about
Roman history; so Valla rebutted with his Confutatio in
Morandum (“Refutation of Morandi”). In a little dialogue, De
professione religiosorum (“On Monastic Vows”), Valla
criticized the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on
the grounds that what mattered was “not a vow, but
devotion.”
Valla’s last public appearance was characteristic of his
provocative, polemical style. In 1457 he was invited to
deliver an encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas to an audience of
Dominicans in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva at
Rome, to celebrate the saint’s anniversary. Valla, however,
delivered an antiencomium, a critique of St. Thomas’ style
and his interest in logic that advocated a return to the
theology of the Fathers of the church. It is uncertain
whether Valla was a priest or not. He certainly held
ecclesiastical benefices. He never married but had three
children by his Roman mistress.
An aggressive man, even for that age of intellectual
gladiators, Valla made enemies easily. A professional
heretic, he was well suited for his role as a critic of
authority and orthodoxy. As one colleague observed about his
notorious comparison of Cicero and Quintilian: Valla wrote
simply to disturb people. There is no doubt about his
success in this respect. More than 50 years later, in the
age of Luther and of the great European humanist Erasmus,
his barbs were still felt. Many of his criticisms of
established ideas were pedantic and quibbling, but some were
penetrating. He was disliked for his “impudence,”
“presumption,” “temerity,” and “sacrilege.” In an age when
many traditions were held sacred, Valla’s sacrilege
fulfilled an important intellectual and social function.
Ulick Peter Burke
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Marsilio Ficino
Italian philosopher and theologian
born Oct. 19, 1433, Figline, republic of Florence [Italy]
died Oct. 1, 1499, Careggi, near Florence
Main
Italian philosopher, theologian, and linguist whose
translations and commentaries on the writings of Plato and
other classical Greek authors generated the Florentine
Platonist Renaissance that influenced European thought for
two centuries.
Ficino was the son of a physician who was acquainted with
the Florentine ruler and patron of learning Cosimo de’
Medici. After being trained in Latin language and
literature, Ficino studied Aristotelian philosophy and
medicine, probably at Florence. He was introduced to the
Latin versions of the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists
by such Western writers as Augustine of Hippo (5th century)
and the leading medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas. He then
acquired a thorough knowledge of Greek in order to read and
interpret the classical philosophers in their original
texts. Supported by Cosimo de’ Medici and his successors, he
devoted the remainder of his life to the translation and
interpretation of Plato and the succeeding Platonic school,
whose thought he attempted to integrate more closely with
Christian theology.
In 1462 Ficino became head of the Platonic Academy of
Florence. Situated at the Medici villa at Careggi, outside
Florence, the academy with its endowment of Greek
manuscripts became one of the foremost intellectual centres
of Europe. Ficino’s numerous translations from Greek into
Latin include some Neoplatonic and early Christian writings
and, above all, the complete works of Plato and the
3rd-century Neoplatonist Plotinus. Finished about 1470 but
not printed until 1484, Ficino’s was the first complete
translation of Plato into any European language. His
versions of both Plato and Plotinus remained in general use
until the 18th century.
Ficino was ordained a priest in 1473 and later was named
a church official of Florence Cathedral. He was closely
identified with the Medici family as protégé and tutor, and
he retired to the Tuscan countryside after the expulsion of
the Medici from Florence in 1494.
Noteworthy among Ficino’s commentaries are those on
Plato’s Symposium (1469), also called De amore (“On Love”),
and on various treatises of Plotinus. Of his original
writings the Theologia Platonica (1482; “Platonic
Theology”), actually a philosophical study of the soul, and
the Liber de Christiana religione (1474; “Book on the
Christian Religion”) are the most significant. His thought
also was expressed in a collection of letters and in De vita
libri tres (1489; “Three Books on Life”), a series of tracts
on medicine and astrology.
Ficino revised the thought of Plato in a Renaissance
perspective. In conceiving the universe as a hierarchy of
substances that descends from God to matter, he was strongly
influenced by Neoplatonic and medieval views. Yet in
assigning to the human soul a privileged, central place in
this hierarchy and stressing that the soul through its
universal, infinite aspirations and thoughts links the
highest with the lowest beings and acts as a bond and knot
of the universe, Ficino reveals his affinity with the
thought of Renaissance humanism, which gave special emphasis
to man and his dignity. Seeing a parallel in the Platonic
and Christian concept of love, he explained in his
commentary on the Symposium that the highest form of human
love and friendship is a communion based ultimately on the
soul’s love for God. This theory of spiritual, or
“Platonic,” love dominated European poetry and literature
during the 16th century.
Ficino’s interpretation of Platonism greatly influenced
subsequent European thought. His teaching that man naturally
tends toward religion, distinguishing him from the lower
animals, and that all religions have a measure of truth,
appears to have inspired 17th-century deist thought as
exemplified in Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of
Cherbury. Not only the 17th-century Cambridge Platonists but
similar movements in France and Italy reflect Ficino’s
original Platonist revival.
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Giordano Bruno
Italian philosopher
original name Filippo Bruno, byname Il Nolano
born 1548, Nola, near Naples
died Feb. 17, 1600, Rome
Main
Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and
occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The
most notable of these were his theories of the infinite
universe and the multiplicity of worlds, in which he
rejected the traditional geocentric (or Earth-centred)
astronomy and intuitively went beyond the Copernican
heliocentric (Sun-centred) theory, which still maintained a
finite universe with a sphere of fixed stars. Bruno is,
perhaps, chiefly remembered for the tragic death he suffered
at the stake because of the tenacity with which he
maintained his unorthodox ideas at a time when both the
Roman Catholic and the Reformed churches were reaffirming
rigid Aristotelian and Scholastic principles in their
struggle for the evangelization of Europe.
Early life.
Bruno was the son of a professional soldier. He was named
Filippo at his baptism and was later called “il Nolano,”
after the place of his birth. In 1562 Bruno went to Naples
to study the humanities, logic, and dialectics
(argumentation). He was impressed by the lectures of G.V. de
Colle, who was known for his tendencies toward
Averroism—i.e., the thought of a number of Western Christian
philosophers who drew their inspiration from the
interpretation of Aristotle put forward by the Muslim
philosopher Averroës—and by his own reading of works on
memory devices and the arts of memory (mnemotechnical
works). In 1565 he entered the Dominican convent of San
Domenico Maggiore in Naples and assumed the name Giordano.
Because of his unorthodox attitudes, he was soon suspected
of heresy. Nevertheless, in 1572 he was ordained as a
priest. During the same year he was sent back to the
Neapolitan convent to continue his study of theology. In
July 1575 Bruno completed the prescribed course, which
generated in him an annoyance at theological subtleties. He
had read two forbidden commentaries by Erasmus and freely
discussed the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of
Christ; as a result, a trial for heresy was prepared against
him by the provincial father of the order, and he fled to
Rome in February 1576. There he found himself unjustly
accused of a murder. A second excommunication process was
started, and in April 1576 he fled again. He abandoned the
Dominican Order, and, after wandering in northern Italy, he
went in 1578 to Geneva, where he earned his living by
proofreading. Bruno formally embraced Calvinism; after
publishing a broadsheet against a Calvinist professor,
however, he discovered that the Reformed Church was no less
intolerant than the Catholic. He was arrested,
excommunicated, rehabilitated after retraction, and finally
allowed to leave the city. He moved to France, first to
Toulouse—where he unsuccessfully sought to be absolved by
the Catholic Church but was nevertheless appointed to a
lectureship in philosophy—and then in 1581 to Paris.
In Paris Bruno at last found a congenial place to work
and teach. Despite the strife between the Catholics and the
Huguenots (French Protestants), the court of Henry III was
then dominated by the tolerant faction of the Politiques
(moderate Catholics, sympathizers of the Protestant king of
Navarre, Henry of Bourbon, who became the heir apparent to
the throne of France in 1584). Bruno’s religious attitude
was compatible with this group, and he received the
protection of the French king, who appointed him one of his
temporary lecteurs royaux. In 1582 Bruno published three
mnemotechnical works, in which he explored new means to
attain an intimate knowledge of reality. He also published a
vernacular comedy, Il candelaio (1582; “The Candlemaker”),
which, through a vivid representation of contemporary
Neapolitan society, constituted a protest against the moral
and social corruption of the time.
In the spring of 1583 Bruno moved to London with an
introductory letter from Henry III for his ambassador Michel
de Castelnau. He was soon attracted to Oxford, where, during
the summer, he started a series of lectures in which he
expounded the Copernican theory maintaining the reality of
the movement of the Earth. Because of the hostile reception
of the Oxonians, however, he went back to London as the
guest of the French ambassador. He frequented the court of
Elizabeth I and became associated with such influential
figures as Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Dudley, the earl of
Leicester.
Works.
In February 1584 he was invited by Fulke Greville, a member
of Sidney’s circle, to discuss his theory of the movement of
the Earth with some Oxonian doctors; but the discussion
degenerated into a quarrel. A few days later he started
writing his Italian dialogues, which constitute the first
systematic exposition of his philosophy. There are six
dialogues, three cosmological—on the theory of the
universe—and three moral. In the Cena de le Ceneri (1584;
“The Ash Wednesday Supper”), he not only reaffirmed the
reality of the heliocentric theory but also suggested that
the universe is infinite, constituted of innumerable worlds
substantially similar to those of the solar system. In the
same dialogue he anticipated his fellow Italian astronomer
Galileo Galilei by maintaining that the Bible should be
followed for its moral teaching but not for its astronomical
implications. He also strongly criticized the manners of
English society and the pedantry of the Oxonian doctors. In
the De la causa, principio e uno (1584; Concerning the
Cause, Principle, and One) he elaborated the physical theory
on which his conception of the universe was based: “form”
and “matter” are intimately united and constitute the “one.”
Thus, the traditional dualism of the Aristotelian physics
was reduced by him to a monistic conception of the world,
implying the basic unity of all substances and the
coincidence of opposites in the infinite unity of Being. In
the De l’infinito universo e mondi (1584; On the Infinite
Universe and Worlds), he developed his cosmological theory
by systematically criticizing Aristotelian physics; he also
formulated his Averroistic view of the relation between
philosophy and religion, according to which religion is
considered as a means to instruct and govern ignorant
people, philosophy as the discipline of the elect who are
able to behave themselves and govern others. The Spaccio de
la bestia trionfante (1584; The Expulsion of the Triumphant
Beast), the first dialogue of his moral trilogy, is a satire
on contemporary superstitions and vices, embodying a strong
criticism of Christian ethics—particularly the Calvinistic
principle of salvation by faith alone, to which Bruno
opposes an exalted view of the dignity of all human
activities. The Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo (1585; “Cabal of
the Horse Pegasus”), similar to but more pessimistic than
the previous work, includes a discussion of the relationship
between the human soul and the universal soul, concluding
with the negation of the absolute individuality of the
former. In the De gli eroici furori (1585; The Heroic
Frenzies), Bruno, making use of Neoplatonic imagery, treats
the attainment of union with the infinite One by the human
soul and exhorts man to the conquest of virtue and truth.
In October 1585 Bruno returned to Paris, where he found a
changed political atmosphere. Henry III had abrogated the
edict of pacification with the Protestants, and the King of
Navarre had been excommunicated. Far from adopting a
cautious line of behaviour, however, Bruno entered into a
polemic with a protégé of the Catholic party, the
mathematician Fabrizio Mordente, whom he ridiculed in four
Dialogi, and in May 1586 he dared to attack Aristotle
publicly in his Centum et viginti articuli de natura et
mundo adversus Peripateticos (“120 Articles on Nature and
the World Against the Peripatetics”). The Politiques
disavowed him, and Bruno left Paris.
He went to Germany, where he wandered from one university
city to another, lecturing and publishing a variety of minor
works, including the Articuli centum et sexaginta (1588;
“160 Articles”) against contemporary mathematicians and
philosophers, in which he expounded his conception of
religion—a theory of the peaceful coexistence of all
religions based upon mutual understanding and the freedom of
reciprocal discussion. At Helmstedt, however, in January
1589 he was excommunicated by the local Lutheran Church. He
remained in Helmstedt until the spring, completing works on
natural and mathematical magic (posthumously published) and
working on three Latin poems—De triplici minimo et mensura
(“On the Threefold Minimum and Measure”), De monade, numero
et figura (“On the Monad, Number, and Figure”), and De
immenso, innumerabilibus et infigurabilibus (“On the
Immeasurable and Innumerable”)—which reelaborate the
theories expounded in the Italian dialogues and develop
Bruno’s concept of an atomic basis of matter and being. To
publish these, he went in 1590 to Frankfurt am Main, where
the senate rejected his application to stay. Nevertheless,
he took up residence in the Carmelite convent, lecturing to
Protestant doctors and acquiring a reputation of being a
“universal man” who, the Prior thought, “did not possess a
trace of religion” and who “was chiefly occupied in writing
and in the vain and chimerical imagining of novelties.”
Final years.
In August 1591, at the invitation of the Venetian patrician
Giovanni Mocenigo, Bruno made the fatal move of returning to
Italy. At the time such a move did not seem to be too much
of a risk: Venice was by far the most liberal of the Italian
states; the European tension had been temporarily eased
after the death of the intransigent pope Sixtus V in 1590;
the Protestant Henry of Bourbon was now on the throne of
France, and a religious pacification seemed to be imminent.
Furthermore, Bruno was still looking for an academic
platform from which to expound his theories, and he must
have known that the chair of mathematics at the University
of Padua was then vacant. Indeed, he went almost immediately
to Padua and, during the late summer of 1591, started a
private course of lectures for German students and composed
the Praelectiones geometricae (“Lectures on Geometry”) and
Ars deformationum (“Art of Deformation”). At the beginning
of the winter, when it appeared that he was not going to
receive the chair (it was offered to Galileo in 1592), he
returned to Venice, as the guest of Mocenigo, and took part
in the discussions of progressive Venetian aristocrats who,
like Bruno, favoured philosophical investigation
irrespective of its theological implications. Bruno’s
liberty came to an end when Mocenigo—disappointed by his
private lessons from Bruno on the art of memory and
resentful of Bruno’s intention to go back to Frankfurt to
have a new work published—denounced him to the Venetian
Inquisition in May 1592 for his heretical theories. Bruno
was arrested and tried. He defended himself by admitting
minor theological errors, emphasizing, however, the
philosophical rather than the theological character of his
basic tenets. The Venetian stage of the trial seemed to be
proceeding in a way that was favourable to Bruno; then,
however, the Roman Inquisition demanded his extradition, and
on Jan. 27, 1593, Bruno entered the jail of the Roman palace
of the Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office). During the seven-year
Roman period of the trial, Bruno at first developed his
previous defensive line, disclaiming any particular interest
in theological matters and reaffirming the philosophical
character of his speculation. This distinction did not
satisfy the inquisitors, who demanded an unconditional
retraction of his theories. Bruno then made a desperate
attempt to demonstrate that his views were not incompatible
with the Christian conception of God and creation. The
inquisitors rejected his arguments and pressed him for a
formal retraction. Bruno finally declared that he had
nothing to retract and that he did not even know what he was
expected to retract. At that point, Pope Clement VIII
ordered that he be sentenced as an impenitent and
pertinacious heretic. On Feb. 8, 1600, when the death
sentence was formally read to him, he addressed his judges,
saying: “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is
greater than mine in receiving it.” Not long after, he was
brought to the Campo de’ Fiori, his tongue in a gag, and
burned alive.
Influence.
Bruno’s theories influenced 17th-century scientific and
philosophical thought and, since the 18th century, have been
absorbed by many modern philosophers. As a symbol of the
freedom of thought, Bruno inspired the European liberal
movements of the 19th century, particularly the Italian
Risorgimento (the movement for national political unity).
Because of the variety of his interests, modern scholars are
divided as to the chief significance of his work. Bruno’s
cosmological vision certainly anticipates some fundamental
aspects of the modern conception of the universe; his
ethical ideas, in contrast with religious ascetical ethics,
appeal to modern humanistic activism; and his ideal of
religious and philosophical tolerance has influenced liberal
thinkers. On the other hand, his emphasis on the magical and
the occult has been the source of criticism as has his
impetuous personality. Bruno stands, however, as one of the
important figures in the history of Western thought, a
precursor of modern civilization.
Giovanni Aquilecchia
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Nicolaus Copernicus
Polish astronomer
Polish Mikołaj Kopernik
born Feb. 19, 1473, Toruń, Pol.
died May 24, 1543, Frauenburg, East Prussia [now Frombork,
Pol.]
Main
Polish astronomer who proposed that the planets have the Sun
as the fixed point to which their motions are to be
referred; that the Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting
the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and
that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this
axis account for the precession of the equinoxes. This
representation of the heavens is usually called the
heliocentric, or “Sun-centred,” system—derived from the
Greek helios, meaning “Sun.” Copernicus’s theory had
important consequences for later thinkers of the scientific
revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Kepler,
Descartes, and Newton. Copernicus probably hit upon his main
idea sometime between 1508 and 1514, and during those years
he wrote a manuscript usually called the Commentariolus
(“Little Commentary”). However, the book that contains the
final version of his theory, De revolutionibus orbium
coelestium libri vi (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions
of the Heavenly Orbs”), did not appear in print until 1543,
the year of his death.
Early life and education
Certain facts about Copernicus’s early life are well
established, although a biography written by his ardent
disciple Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–74) is unfortunately
lost. According to a later horoscope, Nicolaus Copernicus
was born on February 19, 1473, in Toruń, a city in
north-central Poland on the Vistula River south of the major
Baltic seaport of Gdańsk. His father, Nicolaus, was a
well-to-do merchant, and his mother, Barbara Watzenrode,
also came from a leading merchant family. Nicolaus was the
youngest of four children. After his father’s death,
sometime between 1483 and 1485, his mother’s brother Lucas
Watzenrode (1447–1512) took his nephew under his protection.
Watzenrode, soon to be bishop of the chapter of Varmia
(Warmia), saw to young Nicolaus’s education and his future
career as a church canon.
Between 1491 and about 1494 Copernicus studied liberal
arts—including astronomy and astrology—at the University of
Cracow (Kraków). Like many students of his time, however, he
left before completing his degree, resuming his studies in
Italy at the University of Bologna, where his uncle had
obtained a doctorate in canon law in 1473. The Bologna
period (1496–1500) was short but significant. For a time
Copernicus lived in the same house as the principal
astronomer at the university, Domenico Maria de Novara
(Latin: Domenicus Maria Novaria Ferrariensis; 1454–1504).
Novara had the responsibility of issuing annual astrological
prognostications for the city, forecasts that included all
social groups but gave special attention to the fate of the
Italian princes and their enemies. Copernicus, as is known
from Rheticus, was “assistant and witness” to some of
Novara’s observations, and his involvement with the
production of the annual forecasts means that he was
intimately familiar with the practice of astrology. Novara
also probably introduced Copernicus to two important books
that framed his future problematic as a student of the
heavens: Epitoma in Almagestum Ptolemaei (“Epitome of
Ptolemy’s Almagest”) by Johann Müller (also known as
Regiomontanus, 1436–76) and Disputationes adversus
astrologianm divinatricenm (“Disputations against Divinatory
Astrology”) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). The
first provided a summary of the foundations of Ptolemy’s
astronomy, with Regiomontanus’s corrections and critical
expansions of certain important planetary models that might
have been suggestive to Copernicus of directions leading to
the heliocentric hypothesis. Pico’s Disputationes offered a
devastating skeptical attack on the foundations of astrology
that reverberated into the 17th century. Among Pico’s
criticisms was the charge that, because astronomers
disagreed about the order of the planets, astrologers could
not be certain about the strengths of the powers issuing
from the planets.
Only 27 recorded observations are known for Copernicus’s
entire life (he undoubtedly made more than that), most of
them concerning eclipses, alignments, and conjunctions of
planets and stars. The first such known observation occurred
on March 9, 1497, at Bologna. In De revolutionibus, book 4,
chapter 27, Copernicus reported that he had seen the Moon
eclipse “the brightest star in the eye of the Bull,” Alpha
Tauri (Aldebaran). By the time he published this observation
in 1543, he had made it the basis of a theoretical claim:
that it confirmed exactly the size of the apparent lunar
diameter. But in 1497 he was probably using it to assist in
checking the new- and full-moon tables derived from the
commonly used Alfonsine Tables and employed in Novara’s
forecast for the year 1498.
In 1500 Copernicus spoke before an interested audience in
Rome on mathematical subjects, but the exact content of his
lectures is unknown. In 1501 he stayed briefly in Frauenburg
but soon returned to Italy to continue his studies, this
time at the University of Padua, where he pursued medical
studies between 1501 and 1503. At this time medicine was
closely allied with astrology, as the stars were thought to
influence the body’s dispositions. Thus, Copernicus’s
astrological experience at Bologna was better training for
medicine than one might imagine today. Copernicus later
painted a self-portrait; it is likely that he acquired the
necessary artistic skills while in Padua, since there was a
flourishing community of painters there and in nearby
Venice. In May 1503 Copernicus finally received a
doctorate—like his uncle, in canon law—but from an Italian
university where he had not studied: the University of
Ferrara. When he returned to Poland, Bishop Watzenrode
arranged a sinecure for him: an in absentia teaching post,
or scholastry, at Wrocław. Copernicus’s actual duties at the
bishopric palace, however, were largely administrative and
medical. As a church canon, he collected rents from
church-owned lands; secured military defenses; oversaw
chapter finances; managed the bakery, brewery, and mills;
and cared for the medical needs of the other canons and his
uncle. Copernicus’s astronomical work took place in his
spare time, apart from these other obligations. He used the
knowledge of Greek that he had acquired during his Italian
studies to prepare a Latin translation of the aphorisms of
an obscure 7th-century Byzantine historian and poet,
Theophylactus Simocattes. The work was published in Cracow
in 1509 and dedicated to his uncle. It was during the last
years of Watzenrode’s life that Copernicus evidently came up
with the idea on which his subsequent fame was to rest.
Copernicus’s reputation outside local Polish circles as
an astronomer of considerable ability is evident from the
fact that in 1514 he was invited to offer his opinion at the
church’s Fifth Lateran Council on the critical problem of
the reform of the calendar. The civil calendar then in use
was still the one produced under the reign of Julius Caesar,
and, over the centuries, it had fallen seriously out of
alignment with the actual positions of the Sun. This
rendered the dates of crucial feast days, such as Easter,
highly problematic. Whether Copernicus ever offered any
views on how to reform the calendar is not known; in any
event, he never attended any of the council’s sessions. The
leading calendar reformer was Paul of Middelburg, bishop of
Fossombrone. When Copernicus composed his dedication to De
revolutionibus in 1542, he remarked that “mathematics is
written for mathematicians.” Here he distinguished between
those, like Paul, whose mathematical abilities were good
enough to understand his work and others who had no such
ability and for whom his work was not intended.
Copernicus’s astronomical work
The contested state of planetary theory in the late 15th
century and Pico’s attack on astrology’s foundations
together constitute the principal historical considerations
in constructing the background to Copernicus’s achievement.
In Copernicus’s period, astrology and astronomy were
considered subdivisions of a common subject called the
“science of the stars,” whose main aim was to provide a
description of the arrangement of the heavens as well as the
theoretical tools and tables of motions that would permit
accurate construction of horoscopes and annual
prognostications. At this time the terms astrologer,
astronomer, and mathematician were virtually
interchangeable; they generally denoted anyone who studied
the heavens using mathematical techniques. Pico claimed that
astrology ought to be condemned because its practitioners
were in disagreement about everything, from the divisions of
the zodiac to the minutest observations to the order of the
planets. A second long-standing disagreement, not mentioned
by Pico, concerned the status of the planetary models. From
antiquity, astronomical modeling was governed by the premise
that the planets move with uniform angular motion on fixed
radii at a constant distance from their centres of motion.
Two types of models derived from this premise. The first,
represented by that of Aristotle, held that the planets are
carried around the centre of the universe embedded in
unchangeable, material, invisible spheres at fixed
distances. Since all planets have the same centre of motion,
the universe is made of nested, concentric spheres with no
gaps between them. As a predictive model, this account was
of limited value. Among other things, it had the distinct
disadvantage that it could not account for variations in the
apparent brightness of the planets since the distances from
the centre were always the same. A second tradition,
deriving from Claudius Ptolemy, solved this problem by
postulating three mechanisms: uniformly revolving,
off-centre circles called eccentrics; epicycles, little
circles whose centres moved uniformly on the circumference
of circles of larger radius (deferents); and equants. The
equant, however, broke with the main assumption of ancient
astronomy because it separated the condition of uniform
motion from that of constant distance from the centre. A
planet viewed from the centre c of its orbit would appear to
move sometimes faster, sometimes slower. As seen from the
Earth, removed a distance e from c, the planet would also
appear to move nonuniformly. Only from the equant, an
imaginary point at distance 2e from the Earth, would the
planet appear to move uniformly. A planet-bearing sphere
revolving around an equant point will wobble; situate one
sphere within another, and the two will collide, disrupting
the heavenly order. In the 13th century a group of Persian
astronomers at Marāgheh discovered that, by combining two
uniformly revolving epicycles to generate an oscillating
point that would account for variations in distance, they
could devise a model that produced the equalized motion
without referring to an equant point.
The Marāgheh work was written in Arabic, which Copernicus
did not read. However, he learned to do the Marāgheh
“trick,” either independently or through a still-unknown
intermediary link. This insight was the starting point for
his attempt to resolve the conflict raised by wobbling
physical spheres. Copernicus might have continued this work
by considering each planet independently, as did Ptolemy in
the Almagest, without any attempt to bring all the models
together into a coordinated arrangement. However, he was
also disturbed by Pico’s charge that astronomers could not
agree on the actual order of the planets. The difficulty
focused on the locations of Venus and Mercury. There was
general agreement that the Moon and Sun encircled the
motionless Earth and that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were
situated beyond the Sun in that order. However, Ptolemy
placed Venus closest to the Sun and Mercury to the Moon,
while others claimed that Mercury and Venus were beyond the
Sun.
In the Commentariolus, Copernicus postulated that, if the
Sun is assumed to be at rest and if the Earth is assumed to
be in motion, then the remaining planets fall into an
orderly relationship whereby their sidereal periods increase
from the Sun as follows: Mercury (88 days), Venus (225
days), Earth (1 year), Mars (1.9 years), Jupiter (12 years),
and Saturn (30 years). This theory did resolve the
disagreement about the ordering of the planets but, in turn,
raised new problems. To accept the theory’s premises, one
had to abandon much of Aristotelian natural philosophy and
develop a new explanation for why heavy bodies fall to a
moving Earth. It was also necessary to explain how a
transient body like the Earth, filled with meteorological
phenomena, pestilence, and wars, could be part of a perfect
and imperishable heaven. In addition, Copernicus was working
with many observations that he had inherited from antiquity
and whose trustworthiness he could not verify. In
constructing a theory for the precession of the equinoxes,
for example, he was trying to build a model based upon very
small, long-term effects. And his theory for Mercury was
left with serious incoherencies.
Any of these considerations alone could account for
Copernicus’s delay in publishing his work. (He remarked in
the preface to De revolutionibus that he had chosen to
withhold publication not for merely the nine years
recommended by the Roman poet Horace but for 36 years, four
times that period.) And, when a description of the main
elements of the heliocentric hypothesis was first published,
in the Narratio prima (1540 and 1541, “First Narration”), it
was not under Copernicus’s own name but under that of the
25-year-old Georg Rheticus. Rheticus, a Lutheran from the
University of Wittenberg, Germany, stayed with Copernicus at
Frauenburg for about two and a half years, between 1539 and
1542. The Narratio prima was, in effect, a joint production
of Copernicus and Rheticus, something of a “trial balloon”
for the main work. It provided a summary of the theoretical
principles contained in the manuscript of De revolutionibus,
emphasized their value for computing new planetary tables,
and presented Copernicus as following admiringly in the
footsteps of Ptolemy even as he broke fundamentally with his
ancient predecessor. It also provided what was missing from
the Commentariolus: a basis for accepting the claims of the
new theory.
Both Rheticus and Copernicus knew that they could not
definitively rule out all possible alternatives to the
heliocentric theory. But they could underline what
Copernicus’s theory provided that others could not: a
singular method for ordering the planets and for calculating
the relative distances of the planets from the Sun. Rheticus
compared this new universe to a well-tuned musical
instrument and to the interlocking wheel-mechanisms of a
clock. In the preface to De revolutionibus, Copernicus used
an image from Horace’s Ars poetica (“Art of Poetry”). The
theories of his predecessors, he wrote, were like a human
figure in which the arms, legs, and head were put together
in the form of a disorderly monster. His own representation
of the universe, in contrast, was an orderly whole in which
a displacement of any part would result in a disruption of
the whole. In effect, a new criterion of scientific adequacy
was advanced together with the new theory of the universe.
Publication of De revolutionibus
The presentation of Copernicus’s theory in its final form is
inseparable from the conflicted history of its publication.
When Rheticus left Frauenburg to return to his teaching
duties at Wittenberg, he took the manuscript with him in
order to arrange for its publication at Nürnberg, the
leading centre of printing in Germany. He chose the top
printer in the city, Johann Petreius, who had published a
number of ancient and modern astrological works during the
1530s. It was not uncommon for authors to participate
directly in the printing of their manuscripts, sometimes
even living in the printer’s home. However, Rheticus was
unable to remain and supervise. He turned the manuscript
over to Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), a theologian
experienced in shepherding mathematical books through
production as well as a leading political figure in the city
and an ardent follower of Luther (although he was eventually
expelled from the Lutheran church). In earlier communication
with Copernicus, Osiander had urged him to present his ideas
as purely hypothetical, and he now introduced certain
changes without the permission of either Rheticus or
Copernicus. Osiander added an unsigned “letter to the
reader” directly after the title page, which maintained that
the hypotheses contained within made no pretense to truth
and that, in any case, astronomy was incapable of finding
the causes of heavenly phenomena. A casual reader would be
confused about the relationship between this letter and the
book’s contents. Both Petreius and Rheticus, having trusted
Osiander, now found themselves double-crossed. Rheticus’s
rage was so great that he crossed out the letter with a
great red X in the copies sent to him. However, the city
council of Nürnberg refused to punish Petreius, and no
public revelation of Osiander’s role was made until Kepler
revealed it in his Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy) in 1609.
In addition, the title of the work was changed from the
manuscript’s “On the Revolutions of the Orbs of the World”
to “Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Orbs”—a change that appeared to mitigate the book’s claim to
describe the real universe.
Many of the details of these local publication struggles
enjoyed an underground history among 16th-century
astronomers long before Kepler published Osiander’s
identity. Ironically, Osiander’s “letter” made it possible
for the book to be read as a new method of calculation,
rather than a work of natural philosophy, and in so doing
may even have aided in its initially positive reception. It
was not until Kepler that Copernicus’s cluster of predictive
mechanisms would be fully transformed into a new philosophy
about the fundamental structure of the universe.
Legend has it that a copy of De revolutionibus was placed
in Copernicus’s hands a few days after he lost consciousness
from a stroke. He awoke long enough to realize that he was
holding his great book and then expired, publishing as he
perished. The legend has some credibility, although it also
has the beatific air of a saint’s life.
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Johannes Kepler
German astronomer
born December 27, 1571, Weil der Stadt, Württemberg
[Germany]
died November 15, 1630, Regensburg
Main
German astronomer who discovered three major laws of
planetary motion, conventionally designated as follows: (1)
the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one
focus; (2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a
planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector
between the central body and that arc (the “area law”); and
(3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of
the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of the radii of
their orbits (the “harmonic law”). Kepler himself did not
call these discoveries “laws,” as would become customary
after Isaac Newton derived them from a new and quite
different set of general physical principles. He regarded
them as celestial harmonies that reflected God’s design for
the universe. Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus
Copernicus’s Sun-centred system into a dynamic universe,
with the Sun actively pushing the planets around in
noncircular orbits. And it was Kepler’s notion of a physical
astronomy that fixed a new problematic for other important
17th-century world-system builders, the most famous of whom
was Newton.
Among Kepler’s many other achievements, he provided a new
and correct account of how vision occurs; he developed a
novel explanation for the behaviour of light in the newly
invented telescope; he discovered several new, semiregular
polyhedrons; and he offered a new theoretical foundation for
astrology while at the same time restricting the domain in
which its predictions could be considered reliable. A list
of his discoveries, however, fails to convey the fact that
they constituted for Kepler part of a common edifice of
knowledge. The matrix of theological, astrological, and
physical ideas from which Kepler’s scientific achievements
emerged is unusual and fascinating in its own right. Yet,
because of the highly original nature of Kepler’s
discoveries, it requires an act of intellectual empathy for
moderns to understand how such lasting results could have
evolved from such an apparently unlikely complex of ideas.
Although Kepler’s scientific work was centred first and
foremost on astronomy, that subject as then understood—the
study of the motions of the heavenly bodies—was classified
as part of a wider subject of investigation called “the
science of the stars.” The science of the stars was regarded
as a mixed science consisting of a mathematical and a
physical component and bearing a kinship to other like
disciplines, such as music (the study of ratios of tones)
and optics (the study of light). It also was subdivided into
theoretical and practical categories. Besides the theory of
heavenly motions, one had the practical construction of
planetary tables and instruments; similarly, the theoretical
principles of astrology had a corresponding practical part
that dealt with the making of annual astrological forecasts
about individuals, cities, the human body, and the weather.
Within this framework, Kepler made astronomy an integral
part of natural philosophy, but he did so in an
unprecedented way—in the process, making unique
contributions to astronomy as well as to all its auxiliary
disciplines.
Kepler’s social world
There was no “scientific community” as such in the late 16th
century. All schooling in Germany, as elsewhere, was under
the control of church institutions—whether Roman Catholic or
Protestant—and local rulers used the churches and the
educational systems as a means to consolidate the loyalty of
their populations. One means to this end was a system of
scholarships for poor boys who, once having been trained in
the schools of the duchy, would feel strong loyalty to the
local ruler. Kepler came from a very modest family in a
small German town called Weil der Stadt and was one of the
beneficiaries of the ducal scholarship; it made possible his
attendance at the Lutheran Stift, or seminary, at the
University of Tübingen, where he began his university
studies in 1589. It was expected that the boys who graduated
from these schools would go on to become schoolteachers,
ministers, or state functionaries. Kepler had planned to
become a theologian.
His life did not work out quite as he expected. As he
sometimes remarked, Divine Providence guided him to the
study of the stars, while he retained a profound sense that
his vocation was a religious one. As he later wrote, “I am
satisfied…to guard the gates of the temple in which
Copernicus makes sacrifices at the high altar.” It helped
also that, at Tübingen, the professor of mathematics was
Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), one of the most talented
astronomers in Germany. Maestlin had once been a Lutheran
pastor; he was also, privately, one of the few adherents of
the Copernican theory in the late 16th century, although
very cautious about expressing his views in print. Maestlin
lent Kepler his own heavily annotated copy of Copernicus’s
1543 book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi
(“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Orbs”). Kepler quickly grasped the main ideas in
Copernicus’s work and was tutored in its complex details by
Maestlin. He sensed intuitively that Copernicus had hit upon
an account of the universe that contained the mark of divine
planning—literally a revelation. Early in the 1590s, while
still a student, Kepler would make it his mission to
demonstrate rigorously what Copernicus had only guessed to
be the case. And he did so in an explicitly religious and
philosophical vocabulary.
Kepler was not alone in believing that nature was a book
in which the divine plan was written. He differed, however,
in the original manner and personal intensity with which he
believed his ideas to be embodied in nature. One of the
ideas to which he was most strongly attached—the image of
the Christian Trinity as symbolized by a geometric sphere
and, hence, the visible, created world—was literally a
reflection of this divine mystery (God the Father: centre;
Christ the Son: circumference; Holy Spirit: intervening
space). One of Kepler’s favourite biblical passages came
from John (1:14): “And the Word became flesh and lived among
us.” For him, this signified that the divine archetypes were
literally made visible as geometric forms (straight and
curved) that configured the spatial arrangement of tangible,
corporeal entities. Moreover, Kepler’s God was a dynamic,
creative being whose presence in the world was symbolized by
the Sun’s body as the source of a dynamic force that
continually moved the planets. The natural world was like a
mirror that precisely reflected and embodied these divine
ideas. Inspired by Platonic notions of innate ideas in the
soul, Kepler believed that the human mind was ideally
created to understand the world’s structure.
Astronomical work
The ideas that Kepler would pursue for the rest of his life
were already present in his first work, Mysterium
cosmographicum (1596; “Cosmographic Mystery”). In 1595,
while teaching a class at a small Lutheran school in Graz,
Austria, Kepler experienced a moment of illumination. It
struck him suddenly that the spacing among the six
Copernican planets might be explained by circumscribing and
inscribing each orbit with one of the five regular
polyhedrons. Since Kepler knew Euclid’s proof that there can
be five and only five such mathematical objects made up of
congruent faces, he decided that such self-sufficiency must
betoken a perfect idea. If now the ratios of the mean
orbital distances agreed with the ratios obtained from
circumscribing and inscribing the polyhedrons, then, Kepler
felt confidently, he would have discovered the architecture
of the universe. Remarkably, Kepler did find agreement
within 5 percent, with the exception of Jupiter, at which,
he said, “no one will wonder, considering such a great
distance.” He wrote to Maestlin at once: “I wanted to become
a theologian; for a long time I was restless. Now, however,
behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in
astronomy.”
Had Kepler’s investigation ended with the establishment
of this architectonic principle, he might have continued to
search for other sorts of harmonies; but his work would not
have broken with the ancient Greek notion of uniform
circular planetary motion. Kepler’s God, however, was not
only orderly but also active. In place of the tradition that
individual incorporeal souls push the planets and instead of
Copernicus’s passive, resting Sun, Kepler posited the
hypothesis that a single force from the Sun accounts for the
increasingly long periods of motion as the planetary
distances increase. Kepler did not yet have an exact
mathematical description for this relation, but he intuited
a connection. A few years later he acquired William
Gilbert’s groundbreaking book De Magnete, Magneticisque
Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (1600; “On the
Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet, the Earth”),
and he immediately adopted Gilbert’s theory that the Earth
is a magnet. From this Kepler generalized to the view that
the universe is a system of magnetic bodies in which, with
corresponding like poles repelling and unlike poles
attracting, the rotating Sun sweeps the planets around. The
solar force, attenuating inversely with distance in the
planes of the orbits, was the major physical principle that
guided Kepler’s struggle to construct a better orbital
theory for Mars.
But there was something more: the standard of empirical
precision that Kepler held for himself was unprecedented for
his time. The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe
(1546–1601) had set himself the task of amassing a
completely new set of planetary observations—a reform of the
foundations of practical astronomy. In 1600 Tycho invited
Kepler to join his court at Castle Benátky near Prague. When
Tycho died suddenly in 1601, Kepler quickly succeeded him as
imperial mathematician to Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II.
Kepler’s first publication as imperial mathematician was a
work that broke with the theoretical principles of Ptolemaic
astrology. Called De Fundamentis Astrologiae Certioribus
(1601; Concerning the More Certain Fundamentals of
Astrology), this work proposed to make astrology “more
certain” by basing it on new physical and harmonic
principles. It showed both the importance of astrological
practice at the imperial court and Kepler’s intellectual
independence in rejecting much of what was claimed to be
known about stellar influence. The relatively great
intellectual freedom possible at Rudolf’s court was now
augmented by Kepler’s unexpected inheritance of a critical
resource: Tycho’s observations. In his lifetime Tycho had
been stingy in sharing his observations. After his death,
although there was a political struggle with Tycho’s heirs,
Kepler was ultimately able to work with data accurate to
within 2′ of arc. Without data of such precision to back up
his solar hypothesis, Kepler would have been unable to
discover his “first law” (1605), that Mars moves in an
elliptical orbit. At one point, for example, as he tried to
balance the demand for the correct heliocentric distances
predicted by his physical model with a circular orbit, an
error of 6′ or 8′ appeared in the octants (assuming a circle
divided into eight equal parts). Kepler exclaimed, “Because
these 8′ could not be ignored, they alone have led to a
total reformation of astronomy.” Kepler’s reformation of
astronomy was of a piece with his reform of astrology’s
principles and Tycho’s radical improvement of the celestial
observations. Just as the spacing of the planets bore a
close relation to the polyhedral forms, so, too, Kepler
regarded only those rays hitting the Earth at the right
harmonic angles to be efficacious.
During the creative burst of the early Prague period
(1601–05) when Kepler won his “war on Mars” (he did not
publish his discoveries until 1609 in the Astronomia Nova
[New Astronomy]), he also wrote important treatises on the
nature of light and on the sudden appearance of a new star
(1606; De Stella Nova, “On the New Star”). Kepler first
noticed the star—now known to have been a supernova—in
October 1604, not long after a conjunction of Jupiter and
Saturn in 1603. The astrological importance of the
long-anticipated conjunction (such configurations take place
every 20 years) was heightened by the unexpected appearance
of the supernova. Typically, Kepler used the occasion both
to render practical predictions (e.g., the collapse of Islam
and the return of Christ) and to speculate theoretically
about the universe—for example, that the star was not the
result of chance combinations of atoms and that stars are
not suns.
Kepler’s interest in light was directly related to his
astronomical concerns: how a ray of light, coming from a
distant heavenly body located in the outer regions of space,
deflects when entering the denser atmosphere surrounding the
Earth; and then, in turn, what happens to light as it enters
the relatively denser medium of the human eye. These
problems had some medieval precedent, but, as usual, Kepler
treated them in his own individual way. Although a court
astronomer, Kepler chose a traditional academic form in
which to compose his ideas on light. He called it Ad
Vitellionem Paralipomena, Quibus Astronomiae Pars Optica
Traditur (1604; “Supplement to Witelo, in Which Is Expounded
the Optical Part of Astronomy”). Witelo (Latin: Vitellio)
had written the most important medieval treatise on optics.
But Kepler’s analysis of vision changed the framework for
understanding the behaviour of light. Kepler wrote that
every point on a luminous body in the field of vision emits
rays of light in all directions but that the only rays that
can enter the eye are those that impinge on the pupil, which
functions as a diaphragm. He also reversed the traditional
visual cone. Kepler offered a punctiform analysis, stating
that the rays emanating from a single luminous point form a
cone the circular base of which is in the pupil. All the
rays are then refracted within the normal eye to meet again
at a single point on the retina. For the first time the
retina, or the sensitive receptor of the eye, was regarded
as the place where “pencils of light” compose upside-down
images. If the eye is not normal, the second short interior
cone comes to a point not on the retina but in front of it
or behind it, causing blurred vision. For more than three
centuries eyeglasses had helped people see better. But
nobody before Kepler was able to offer a good theory for why
these little pieces of curved glass had worked.
After Galileo built a telescope in 1609 and announced
hitherto-unknown objects in the heavens (e.g., moons
revolving around Jupiter) and imperfections of the lunar
surface, he sent Kepler his account in Siderius Nuncius
(1610; The Sidereal Messenger). Kepler responded with three
important treatises. The first was his Dissertatio cum
Nuncio Sidereo (1610; “Conversation with the Sidereal
Messenger”), in which, among other things, he speculated
that the distances of the newly discovered Jovian moons
might agree with the ratios of the rhombic dodecahedron,
triacontahedron, and cube. The second was a theoretical work
on the optics of the telescope, Dioptrice (1611;
“Dioptrics”), including a description of a new type of
telescope using two convex lenses. The third was based upon
his own observations of Jupiter, made between August 30 and
September 9, 1610, and published as Narratio de Jovis
Satellitibus (1611; “Narration Concerning the Jovian
Satellites”). These works provided strong support for
Galileo’s discoveries, and Galileo, who had never been
especially generous to Kepler, wrote to him, “I thank you
because you were the first one, and practically the only
one, to have complete faith in my assertions.”
In 1611 Kepler’s life took a turn for the worse. His
wife, Barbara, became ill, and his three children contracted
smallpox; one of his sons died. Emperor Rudolf soon
abdicated his throne. Although Kepler hoped to return to an
academic post at Tübingen, there was resistance from the
theology faculty; Kepler’s irenic theological views and his
friendships with Calvinists and Catholics were
characteristic of his independence in all matters, and in
this case it did not help his cause. Meanwhile, Kepler was
appointed to the position (created for him) of district
mathematician in Linz. He continued to hold the position of
imperial mathematician under the new emperor, Matthias,
although he was physically removed from the court in Prague.
Kepler stayed in Linz until 1626, during which time creative
productions continued amid personal troubles—the death of
his wife and his exclusion from the Lutheran communion.
Although he was married again in 1613 (to Susanna
Reuttinger), five of his seven children from that marriage
died in childhood. After the Counter-Reformation came in
1625, Catholic authorities temporarily removed his library
and ordered his children to attend mass.
In 1615 Kepler used the occasion of a practical problem
to produce a theoretical treatise on the volumes of wine
barrels. His Stereometria Doliorum Vinariorum (“The
Stereometry of Wine Barrels”) was the first book published
in Linz. Kepler objected to the rule-of-thumb methods of
wine merchants to estimate the liquid contents of a barrel.
He also refused to be bound strictly by Archimedean methods;
eventually he extended the range of cases in which a surface
is generated by a conic section—a curve formed by the
intersection of a plane and a cone rotating about its
principal axis—by adding solids generated by rotation about
lines in the plane of the conic section other than the
principal axis.
The Linz authorities had anticipated that Kepler would
use most of his time to work on and complete the
astronomical tables begun by Tycho. But the work was
tedious, and Kepler continued his search for the world
harmonies that had inspired him since his youth. In 1619 his
Harmonice Mundi (Harmonies of the World) brought together
more than two decades of investigations into the archetypal
principles of the world: geometrical, musical, metaphysical,
astrological, astronomical, and those principles pertaining
to the soul. All harmonies were geometrical, including
musical ones that derived from divisions of polygons to
create “just” ratios (1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 3/5, 5/8)
rather than the irrational ratios of the Pythagorean scale.
When the planets figured themselves into angles demarcated
by regular polygons, a harmonic influence was impressed on
the soul. And the planets themselves fell into an
arrangement whereby their extreme velocity ratios conformed
with the harmonies of the just tuning system, a celestial
music without sound.
Finally, Kepler published the first textbook of
Copernican astronomy, Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae
(1618–21; Epitome of Copernican Astronomy). The title
mimicked Maestlin’s traditional-style textbook, but the
content could not have been more different. The Epitome
began with the elements of astronomy but then gathered
together all the arguments for Copernicus’s theory and added
to them Kepler’s harmonics and new rules of planetary
motion. This work would prove to be the most important
theoretical resource for the Copernicans in the 17th
century. Galileo and Descartes were probably influenced by
it. It was capped by the appearance of Tabulae Rudolphinae
(1627; “Rudolphine Tables”). The Epitome and the Rudolphine
Tables cast heliostatic astronomy and astrology into a form
where detailed and extensive counterargument would force
opponents to engage with its claims or silently ignore them
to their disadvantage. Eventually Newton would simply take
over Kepler’s laws while ignoring all reference to their
original theological and philosophical framework.
The last decade of Kepler’s life was filled with personal
anguish. His mother fell victim to a charge of witchcraft
that resulted in a protracted battle with her accusers,
lasting from 1615 until her exoneration in 1621; she died a
few months later. Kepler used all means at his disposal to
save his mother’s life and honour, but the travels, legal
briefs, and maneuvers that this support required seriously
disrupted his work. In 1627 Kepler found a new patron in the
imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein. Wallenstein sent
Kepler to Sagan in Silesia and supported the construction of
a printing press for him. In return Wallenstein expected
horoscopes from Kepler—and he accurately predicted “horrible
disorders” for March 1634, close to the actual date of
Wallenstein’s murder on February 25, 1634. Kepler was less
successful in his ever-continuing struggle to collect monies
owed him. In August 1630 Wallenstein lost his position as
commander in chief; in October Kepler left for Regensburg in
hopes of collecting interest on some Austrian bonds. But
soon after arriving he became seriously ill with fever, and
on November 15 he died. His grave was swept away in the
Thirty Years’ War, but the epitaph that he composed for
himself survived:
I used to measure the heavens,
now I shall measure the shadows of the earth.
Although my soul was from heaven,
the shadow of my body lies here.
Robert S. Westman
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Galileo
Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician
in full Galileo Galilei
born Feb. 15, 1564, Pisa [Italy]
died Jan. 8, 1642, Arcetri, near Florence
Main
Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician
who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of
motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the
development of the scientific method. His formulation of
(circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic
trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in
the study of motion. His insistence that the book of nature
was written in the language of mathematics changed natural
philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a
mathematical one in which experimentation became a
recognized method for discovering the facts of nature.
Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized
astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the
Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that
system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against
him.
Early life and career
Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, the
oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician who made
important contributions to the theory and practice of music
and who may have performed some experiments with Galileo in
1588–89 on the relationship between pitch and the tension of
strings. The family moved to Florence in the early 1570s,
where the Galilei family had lived for generations. In his
middle teens Galileo attended the monastery school at
Vallombrosa, near Florence, and then in 1581 matriculated at
the University of Pisa, where he was to study medicine.
However, he became enamoured with mathematics and decided to
make the mathematical subjects and philosophy his
profession, against the protests of his father. Galileo then
began to prepare himself to teach Aristotelian philosophy
and mathematics, and several of his lectures have survived.
In 1585 Galileo left the university without having obtained
a degree, and for several years he gave private lessons in
the mathematical subjects in Florence and Siena. During this
period he designed a new form of hydrostatic balance for
weighing small quantities and wrote a short treatise, La
bilancetta (“The Little Balance”), that circulated in
manuscript form. He also began his studies on motion, which
he pursued steadily for the next two decades.
In 1588 Galileo applied for the chair of mathematics at
the University of Bologna but was unsuccessful. His
reputation was, however, increasing, and later that year he
was asked to deliver two lectures to the Florentine Academy,
a prestigious literary group, on the arrangement of the
world in Dante’s Inferno. He also found some ingenious
theorems on centres of gravity (again, circulated in
manuscript) that brought him recognition among
mathematicians and the patronage of Guidobaldo del Monte
(1545–1607), a nobleman and author of several important
works on mechanics. As a result, he obtained the chair of
mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589. There,
according to his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani
(1622–1703), Galileo demonstrated, by dropping bodies of
different weights from the top of the famous Leaning Tower,
that the speed of fall of a heavy object is not proportional
to its weight, as Aristotle had claimed. The manuscript
tract De motu (On Motion), finished during this period,
shows that Galileo was abandoning Aristotelian notions about
motion and was instead taking an Archimedean approach to the
problem. But his attacks on Aristotle made him unpopular
with his colleagues, and in 1592 his contract was not
renewed. His patrons, however, secured him the chair of
mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught from
1592 until 1610.
Although Galileo’s salary was considerably higher there,
his responsibilities as the head of the family (his father
had died in 1591) meant that he was chronically pressed for
money. His university salary could not cover all his
expenses, and he therefore took in well-to-do boarding
students whom he tutored privately in such subjects as
fortification. He also sold a proportional compass, or
sector, of his own devising, made by an artisan whom he
employed in his house. Perhaps because of these financial
problems, he did not marry, but he did have an arrangement
with a Venetian woman, Marina Gamba, who bore him two
daughters and a son. In the midst of his busy life he
continued his research on motion, and by 1609 he had
determined that the distance fallen by a body is
proportional to the square of the elapsed time (the law of
falling bodies) and that the trajectory of a projectile is a
parabola, both conclusions that contradicted Aristotelian
physics.
Telescopic discoveries
At this point, however, Galileo’s career took a dramatic
turn. In the spring of 1609 he heard that in the Netherlands
an instrument had been invented that showed distant things
as though they were nearby. By trial and error, he quickly
figured out the secret of the invention and made his own
three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle
makers’ shops. Others had done the same; what set Galileo
apart was that he quickly figured out how to improve the
instrument, taught himself the art of lens grinding, and
produced increasingly powerful telescopes. In August of that
year he presented an eight-powered instrument to the
Venetian Senate (Padua was in the Venetian Republic). He was
rewarded with life tenure and a doubling of his salary.
Galileo was now one of the highest-paid professors at the
university. In the fall of 1609 Galileo began observing the
heavens with instruments that magnified up to 20 times. In
December he drew the Moon’s phases as seen through the
telescope, showing that the Moon’s surface is not smooth, as
had been thought, but is rough and uneven. In January 1610
he discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter. He also
found that the telescope showed many more stars than are
visible with the naked eye. These discoveries were
earthshaking, and Galileo quickly produced a little book,
Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), in which he
described them. He dedicated the book to Cosimo II de Medici
(1590–1621), the grand duke of his native Tuscany, whom he
had tutored in mathematics for several summers, and he named
the moons of Jupiter after the Medici family: the Sidera
Medicea, or “Medicean Stars.” Galileo was rewarded with an
appointment as mathematician and philosopher of the grand
duke of Tuscany, and in the fall of 1610 he returned in
triumph to his native land.
Galileo was now a courtier and lived the life of a
gentleman. Before he left Padua he had discovered the
puzzling appearance of Saturn, later to be shown as caused
by a ring surrounding it, and in Florence he discovered that
Venus goes through phases just as the Moon does. Although
these discoveries did not prove that the Earth is a planet
orbiting the Sun, they undermined Aristotelian cosmology:
the absolute difference between the corrupt earthly region
and the perfect and unchanging heavens was proved wrong by
the mountainous surface of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter
showed that there had to be more than one centre of motion
in the universe, and the phases of Venus showed that it
(and, by implication, Mercury) revolves around the Sun. As a
result, Galileo was confirmed in his belief, which he had
probably held for decades but which had not been central to
his studies, that the Sun is the centre of the universe and
that the Earth is a planet, as Copernicus had argued.
Galileo’s conversion to Copernicanism would be a key turning
point in the scientific revolution.
After a brief controversy about floating bodies, Galileo
again turned his attention to the heavens and entered a
debate with Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), a German Jesuit
and professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, about the nature
of sunspots (of which Galileo was an independent
discoverer). This controversy resulted in Galileo’s Istoria
e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti
(“History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their
Properties,” or “Letters on Sunspots”), which appeared in
1613. Against Scheiner, who, in an effort to save the
perfection of the Sun, argued that sunspots are satellites
of the Sun, Galileo argued that the spots are on or near the
Sun’s surface, and he bolstered his argument with a series
of detailed engravings of his observations.
Galileo’s Copernicanism
Galileo’s increasingly overt Copernicanism began to cause
trouble for him. In 1613 he wrote a letter to his student
Benedetto Castelli (1528–1643) in Pisa about the problem of
squaring the Copernican theory with certain biblical
passages. Inaccurate copies of this letter were sent by
Galileo’s enemies to the Inquisition in Rome, and he had to
retrieve the letter and send an accurate copy. Several
Dominican fathers in Florence lodged complaints against
Galileo in Rome, and Galileo went to Rome to defend the
Copernican cause and his good name. Before leaving, he
finished an expanded version of the letter to Castelli, now
addressed to the grand duke’s mother and good friend of
Galileo, the dowager Christina. In his Letter to the Grand
Duchess Christina, Galileo discussed the problem of
interpreting biblical passages with regard to scientific
discoveries but, except for one example, did not actually
interpret the Bible. That task had been reserved for
approved theologians in the wake of the Council of Trent
(1545–63) and the beginning of the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. But the tide in Rome was turning
against the Copernican theory, and in 1615, when the cleric
Paolo Antonio Foscarini (c. 1565–1616) published a book
arguing that the Copernican theory did not conflict with
scripture, Inquisition consultants examined the question and
pronounced the Copernican theory heretical. Foscarini’s book
was banned, as were some more technical and nontheological
works, such as Johannes Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican
Astronomy. Copernicus’s own 1543 book, De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium libri vi (“Six Books Concerning the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”), was suspended until
corrected. Galileo was not mentioned directly in the decree,
but he was admonished by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine
(1542–1621) not to “hold or defend” the Copernican theory.
An improperly prepared document placed in the Inquisition
files at this time states that Galileo was admonished “not
to hold, teach, or defend” the Copernican theory “in any way
whatever, either orally or in writing.”
Galileo was thus effectively muzzled on the Copernican
issue. Only slowly did he recover from this setback. Through
a student, he entered a controversy about the nature of
comets occasioned by the appearance of three comets in 1618.
After several exchanges, mainly with Orazio Grassi
(1583–1654), a professor of mathematics at the Collegio
Romano, he finally entered the argument under his own name.
Il saggiatore (The Assayer), published in 1623, was a
brilliant polemic on physical reality and an exposition of
the new scientific method. Galileo here discussed the method
of the newly emerging science, arguing:
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe,
which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book
cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend
the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
It is written in the language of mathematics, and its
characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric
figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand
a single word of it.
He also drew a distinction between the properties of
external objects and the sensations they cause in us—i.e.,
the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
Publication of Il saggiatore came at an auspicious moment,
for Maffeo Cardinal Barberini (1568–1644), a friend,
admirer, and patron of Galileo for a decade, was named Pope
Urban VIII as the book was going to press. Galileo’s friends
quickly arranged to have it dedicated to the new pope. In
1624 Galileo went to Rome and had six interviews with Urban
VIII. Galileo told the pope about his theory of the tides
(developed earlier), which he put forward as proof of the
annual and diurnal motions of the Earth. The pope gave
Galileo permission to write a book about theories of the
universe but warned him to treat the Copernican theory only
hypothetically. The book, Dialogo sopra i due massimi
sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic &
Copernican), was finished in 1630, and Galileo sent it to
the Roman censor. Because of an outbreak of the plague,
communications between Florence and Rome were interrupted,
and Galileo asked for the censoring to be done instead in
Florence. The Roman censor had a number of serious
criticisms of the book and forwarded these to his colleagues
in Florence. After writing a preface in which he professed
that what followed was written hypothetically, Galileo had
little trouble getting the book through the Florentine
censors, and it appeared in Florence in 1632.
In the Dialogue’s witty conversation between Salviati
(representing Galileo), Sagredo (the intelligent layman),
and Simplicio (the dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian), Galileo
gathered together all the arguments (mostly based on his own
telescopic discoveries) for the Copernican theory and
against the traditional geocentric cosmology. As opposed to
Aristotle’s, Galileo’s approach to cosmology is
fundamentally spatial and geometric: the Earth’s axis
retains its orientation in space as the Earth circles the
Sun, and bodies not under a force retain their velocity
(although this inertia is ultimately circular). But in
giving Simplicio the final word, that God could have made
the universe any way he wanted to and still made it appear
to us the way it does, he put Pope Urban VIII’s favourite
argument in the mouth of the person who had been ridiculed
throughout the dialogue. The reaction against the book was
swift. The pope convened a special commission to examine the
book and make recommendations; the commission found that
Galileo had not really treated the Copernican theory
hypothetically and recommended that a case be brought
against him by the Inquisition. Galileo was summoned to Rome
in 1633. During his first appearance before the Inquisition,
he was confronted with the 1616 edict recording that he was
forbidden to discuss the Copernican theory. In his defense
Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine, by then
dead, stating that he was admonished only not to hold or
defend the theory. The case was at somewhat of an impasse,
and, in what can only be called a plea bargain, Galileo
confessed to having overstated his case. He was pronounced
to be vehemently suspect of heresy and was condemned to life
imprisonment and was made to abjure formally. There is no
evidence that at this time he whispered, “Eppur si muove”
(“And yet it moves”). It should be noted that Galileo was
never in a dungeon or tortured; during the Inquisition
process he stayed mostly at the house of the Tuscan
ambassador to the Vatican and for a short time in a
comfortable apartment in the Inquisition building. (For a
note on actions taken by Galileo’s defenders and by the
church in the centuries since the trial, see BTW: Galileo’s
condemnation.) After the process he spent six months at the
palace of Ascanio Piccolomini (c. 1590–1671), the archbishop
of Siena and a friend and patron, and then moved into a
villa near Arcetri, in the hills above Florence. He spent
the rest of his life there. Galileo’s daughter Sister Maria
Celeste, who was in a nearby nunnery, was a great comfort to
her father until her untimely death in 1634.
Galileo was then 70 years old. Yet he kept working. In
Siena he had begun a new book on the sciences of motion and
strength of materials. There he wrote up his unpublished
studies that had been interrupted by his interest in the
telescope in 1609 and pursued intermittently since. The book
was spirited out of Italy and published in Leiden,
Netherlands, in 1638 under the title Discorsi e
dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze
attenenti alla meccanica (Dialogues Concerning Two New
Sciences). Galileo here treated for the first time the
bending and breaking of beams and summarized his
mathematical and experimental investigations of motion,
including the law of falling bodies and the parabolic path
of projectiles as a result of the mixing of two motions,
constant speed and uniform acceleration. By then Galileo had
become blind, and he spent his time working with a young
student, Vincenzo Viviani, who was with him when he died on
January 8, 1642.
Albert Van Helden
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John Scotus Erigena
Irish philosopher
also called Johannes Scotus Eriugena
born 810, Ireland
died c. 877
Main
theologian, translator, and commentator on several earlier
authors in works centring on the integration of Greek and
Neoplatonist philosophy with Christian belief.
From about 845, Erigena lived at the court of the West
Frankish king Charles II the Bald, near Laon (now in
France), first as a teacher of grammar and dialectics. He
participated in theological disputes over the Eucharist and
predestination and set forth his position on the latter in
De predestinatione (851; “On Predestination”), a work
condemned by church authorities. Erigena’s translations of
the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Maximus
the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Epiphanius,
commissioned by Charles, made those Greek patristic writings
accessible to Western thinkers.
Erigena’s familiarity with dialectics and with the ideas
of his theological predecessors was reflected in his
principal work, De divisione naturae (862–866; “On the
Division of Nature”), an attempt to reconcile the
Neoplatonist doctrine of emanation with the Christian tenet
of creation. The work classifies nature into (1) that which
creates and is not created; (2) that which creates and is
created; (3) that which does not create and is created; and
(4) that which does not create and is not created. The first
and the fourth are God as beginning and end; the second and
third are the dual mode of existence of created beings (the
intelligible and the sensible). The return of all creatures
to God begins with release from sin, physical death, and
entry into the life hereafter. Man, for Erigena, is a
microcosm of the universe because he has senses to perceive
the world, reason to examine the intelligible natures and
causes of things, and intellect to contemplate God. Through
sin man’s animal nature has predominated, but through
redemption man becomes reunited with God.
Though highly influential upon Erigena’s successors,
notably the Western mystics and the 13th-century
Scholastics, De divisione naturae eventually suffered
condemnation by the church because of its pantheistic
implications. The works of Erigena are in J.-P. Migne’s
Patrologia Latina, Vol. 122.
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Alexander of Hales
French theologian and philosopher
born c. 1170/85, Hales, Gloucestershire, Eng.
died 1245, Paris
Main
theologian and philosopher whose doctrines influenced the
teachings of such thinkers as St. Bonaventure and John of La
Rochelle. The Summa theologica, for centuries ascribed to
him, is largely the work of followers.
Alexander studied and taught in Paris, receiving the
degrees of master of arts (before 1210) and theology (1220).
He was archdeacon of Coventry in 1235 and became a
Franciscan (c. 1236). In Paris he founded the Schola Fratrum
Minorum, where he was the first holder, possibly until his
death, of the Franciscan chair.
Only the most general features of Alexander’s theology
and philosophy have been made clear: basically an
Augustinian, he had to some extent taken into account the
psychological, physical, and metaphysical doctrines of
Aristotle, while discarding popular Avicennian tenets of
emanations from a Godhead. The “Franciscan” theories of
matter and form in spiritual creatures, of the multiplicity
of forms, and of illumination combined with experience are
probably Alexander’s adaptations of similar theories of the
Augustinian and other traditions. His original works, apart
from sections of the Summa and of an Expositio regulae
(“Exposition of the Rule”), include a commentary on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard—the first to treat the Sentences,
rather than the Bible, as the basic text in theology;
Quaestiones disputatae antequam esset frater (“Questions
Before Becoming a Brother . . .”); Quodlibeta; sermons; and
a treatise on difficult words entitled Exoticon. Alexander
was known to the Scholastics by the title Doctor
Irrefragabilis (Impossible to Refute).
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Desiderius Erasmus
Dutch humanist and scholar
born Oct. 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland [now in The
Netherlands]
died July 12, 1536, Basel, Switz.
Main
humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern
Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also
an important figure in patristics and classical literature.
Using the philological methods pioneered by Italian
humanists, Erasmus helped lay the groundwork for the
historical-critical study of the past, especially in his
studies of the Greek New Testament and the Church Fathers.
His educational writings contributed to the replacement of
the older scholastic curriculum by the new humanist emphasis
on the classics. By criticizing ecclesiastical abuses, while
pointing to a better age in the distant past, he encouraged
the growing urge for reform, which found expression both in
the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. Finally, his independent stance in an
age of fierce confessional controversy—rejecting both
Luther’s doctrine of predestination and the powers that were
claimed for the papacy—made him a target of suspicion for
loyal partisans on both sides and a beacon for those who
valued liberty more than orthodoxy.
Early life and career
Erasmus was the second illegitimate son of Roger Gerard, a
priest, and Margaret, a physician’s daughter. He advanced as
far as the third-highest class at the chapter school of St.
Lebuin’s in Deventer. One of his teachers, Jan Synthen, was
a humanist, as was the headmaster, Alexander Hegius. The
schoolboy Erasmus was clever enough to write classical Latin
verse that impresses a modern reader as cosmopolitan.
After both parents died, the guardians of the two boys
sent them to a school in ’s Hertogenbosch conducted by the
Brethren of the Common Life, a lay religious movement that
fostered monastic vocations. Erasmus would remember this
school only for a severe discipline intended, he said, to
teach humility by breaking a boy’s spirit.
Having little other choice, both brothers entered
monasteries. Erasmus chose the Augustinian canons regular at
Steyn, near Gouda, where he seems to have remained about
seven years (1485–92). While at Steyn he paraphrased Lorenzo
Valla’s Elegantiae, which was both a compendium of pure
classical usage and a manifesto against the scholastic
“barbarians” who had allegedly corrupted it. Erasmus’
monastic superiors became “barbarians” for him by
discouraging his classical studies. Thus, after his
ordination to the priesthood (April 1492), he was happy to
escape the monastery by accepting a post as Latin secretary
to the influential Henry of Bergen, bishop of Cambrai. His
Antibarbarorum liber, extant from a revision of 1494–95, is
a vigorous restatement of patristic arguments for the
utility of the pagan classics, with a polemical thrust
against the cloister he had left behind: “All sound learning
is secular learning.”
Erasmus was not suited to a courtier’s life, nor did
things improve much when the bishop was induced to send him
to the University of Paris to study theology (1495). He
disliked the quasi-monastic regimen of the Collège de
Montaigu, where he lodged initially, and pictured himself to
a friend as sitting “with wrinkled brow and glazed eye”
through Scotist lectures. To support his classical studies,
he began taking in pupils; from this period (1497–1500) date
the earliest versions of those aids to elegant
Latin—including the Colloquia and the Adagia—that before
long would be in use in humanist schools throughout Europe.
The wandering scholar
In 1499 a pupil, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, invited
Erasmus to England. There he met Thomas More, who became a
friend for life. John Colet quickened Erasmus’ ambition to
be a “primitive theologian,” one who would expound Scripture
not in the argumentative manner of the scholastics but in
the manner of Jerome and the other Church Fathers, who lived
in an age when men still understood and practiced the
classical art of rhetoric. The impassioned Colet besought
him to lecture on the Old Testament at Oxford, but the more
cautious Erasmus was not ready. He returned to the Continent
with a Latin copy of St. Paul’s Epistles and the conviction
that “ancient theology” required mastery of Greek.
On a visit to Artois, Fr. (1501), Erasmus met the fiery
preacher Jean Voirier, who, though a Franciscan, told him
that “monasticism was a life more of fatuous men than of
religious men.” Admirers recounted how Voirier’s disciples
faced death serenely, trusting in God, without the solemn
reassurance of the last rites. Voirier lent Erasmus a copy
of works by Origen, the early Greek Christian writer who
promoted the allegorical, spiritualizing mode of scriptural
interpretation, which had roots in Platonic philosophy. By
1502 Erasmus had settled in the university town of Leuven
(Brabant [now in Belgium]) and was reading Origen and St.
Paul in Greek. The fruit of his labours was Enchiridion
militis Christiani (1503/04; Handbook of a Christian
Knight). In this work Erasmus urged readers to “inject into
the vitals” the teachings of Christ by studying and
meditating on the Scriptures, using the spiritual
interpretation favoured by the “ancients” to make the text
pertinent to moral concerns. The Enchiridion was a manifesto
of lay piety in its assertion that “monasticism is not
piety.” Erasmus’ vocation as a “primitive theologian” was
further developed through his discovery at Park Abbey, near
Leuven, of a manuscript of Valla’s Adnotationes on the Greek
New Testament, which he published in 1505 with a dedication
to Colet.
Erasmus sailed for England in 1505, hoping to find
support for his studies. Instead he found an opportunity to
travel to Italy, the land of promise for northern humanists,
as tutor to the sons of the future Henry VIII’s physician.
The party arrived in the university town of Bologna in time
to witness the triumphal entry (1506) of the warrior pope
Julius II at the head of a conquering army, a scene that
figures later in Erasmus’ anonymously published satiric
dialogue, Julius exclusus e coelis (written 1513–14). In
Venice Erasmus was welcomed at the celebrated printing house
of Aldus Manutius, where Byzantine émigrés enriched the
intellectual life of a numerous scholarly company. For the
Aldine press Erasmus expanded his Adagia, or annotated
collection of Greek and Latin adages, into a monument of
erudition with over 3,000 entries; this was the book that
first made him famous. The adage “Dutch ear” (auris Batava)
is one of many hints that he was not an uncritical admirer
of sophisticated Italy, with its theatrical sermons and its
scholars who doubted the immortality of the soul; his aim
was to write for honest and unassuming “Dutch ears.”
De pueris instituendis, written in Italy though not
published until 1529, is the clearest statement of Erasmus’
enormous faith in the power of education. With strenuous
effort the very stuff of human nature could be molded, so as
to draw out (e-ducare) peaceful and social dispositions
while discouraging unworthy appetites. Erasmus, it would
almost be true to say, believed that one is what one reads.
Thus the “humane letters” of classical and Christian
antiquity would have a beneficent effect on the mind, in
contrast to the disputatious temper induced by scholastic
logic-chopping or the vengeful amour propre bred into young
aristocrats by chivalric literature, “the stupid and
tyrannical fables of King Arthur.”
The celebrated Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly,
conceived as Erasmus crossed the Alps on his way back to
England and written at Thomas More’s house, expresses a very
different mood. For the first time the earnest scholar saw
his own efforts along with everyone else’s as bathed in a
universal irony, in which foolish passion carried the day:
“Even the wise man must play the fool if he wishes to beget
a child.”
Little is known of Erasmus’ long stay in England
(1509–14), except that he lectured at Cambridge and worked
on scholarly projects, including the Greek text of the New
Testament. His later willingness to speak out as he did may
have owed something to the courage of Colet, who risked
royal disfavour by preaching a sermon against war at the
court just as Henry VIII was looking for a good war in which
to win his spurs. Having returned to the Continent, Erasmus
made connections with the printing firm of Johann Froben and
traveled to Basel to prepare a new edition of the Adagia
(1515). In this and other works of about the same time
Erasmus showed a new boldness in commenting on the ills of
Christian society—popes who in their warlike ambition
imitated Caesar rather than Christ; princes who hauled whole
nations into war to avenge a personal slight; and preachers
who looked to their own interests by pronouncing the
princes’ wars just or by nurturing superstitious observances
among the faithful. To remedy these evils Erasmus looked to
education. In particular, the training of preachers should
be based on “the philosophy of Christ” rather than on
scholastic methods. Erasmus tried to show the way with his
annotated text of the Greek New Testament and his edition of
St. Jerome’s Opera omnia, both of which appeared from the
Froben press in 1516. These were the months in which Erasmus
thought he saw “the world growing young again,” and the full
measure of his optimism is expressed in one of the prefatory
writings to the New Testament: “If the Gospel were truly
preached, the Christian people would be spared many wars.”
Erasmus’ home base was now in Brabant, where he had
influential friends at the Habsburg court of the Netherlands
in Brussels, notably the grand chancellor, Jean Sauvage.
Through Sauvage he was named honorary councillor to the
16-year-old archduke Charles, the future Charles V, and was
commissioned to write Institutio principis Christiani (1516;
The Education of a Christian Prince) and Querela pacis
(1517; The Complaint of Peace). These works expressed
Erasmus’ own convictions, but they also did no harm to
Sauvage’s faction at court, which wanted to maintain peace
with France. It was at this time too that he began his
Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, each one
dedicated to a monarch or a prince of the church. He was
accepted as a member of the theology faculty at nearby
Leuven, and he also took keen interest in a newly founded
Trilingual College, with endowed chairs in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew. Ratio verae theologiae (1518) provided the rationale
for the new theological education based on the study of
languages. Revision of his Greek New Testament, especially
of the copious annotations, began almost as soon as the
first edition appeared. Though Erasmus certainly made
mistakes as a textual critic, in the history of scholarship
he is a towering figure, intuiting philological principles
that in some cases would not be formulated explicitly until
150 years after his death. But conservative theologians at
Leuven and elsewhere, mostly ignorant of Greek, were not
willing to abandon the interpretation of Scripture to
upstart “grammarians,” nor did the atmosphere at Leuven
improve when the second edition of Erasmus’ New Testament
(1519) replaced the Vulgate with his own Latin translation.
The Protestant challenge
From the very beginning of the momentous events sparked by
Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority, Erasmus’
clerical foes blamed him for inspiring Luther, just as some
of Luther’s admirers in Germany found that he merely
proclaimed boldly what Erasmus had been hinting. In fact,
Luther’s first letter to Erasmus (1516) showed an important
disagreement over the interpretation of St. Paul, and in
1518 Erasmus privately instructed his printer, Froben, to
stop printing works by Luther, lest the two causes be
confused. As he read Luther’s writings, at least those prior
to The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Erasmus
found much to admire, and he could even describe Luther, in
a letter to Pope Leo X, as “a mighty trumpet of Gospel
truth.” Being of a suspicious nature, however, he also
convinced himself that Luther’s fiercest enemies were men
who saw the study of languages as the root of heresy and
thus wanted to be rid of both at once. Hence he tugged at
the slender threads of his influence, vainly hoping to
forestall a confrontation that could only be destructive to
“good letters.” When he quit Brabant for Basel (December
1521), he did so lest he be faced with a personal request
from the Emperor to write a book against Luther, which he
could not have refused.
Erasmus’ belief in the unity of the church was
fundamental, but, like the Hollanders and Brabanters with
whom he was most at home, he recoiled from the cruel logic
of religious persecution. He expressed his views indirectly
through the Colloquia, which had started as schoolboy
dialogues but now became a vehicle for commentary. For
example, in the colloquy Inquisitio de fide (1522) a
Catholic finds to his surprise that Lutherans accept all the
dogmas of the faith, that is, the articles of the Apostles’
Creed. The implication is that bitter disputes like those
over papal infallibility or Luther’s doctrine of
predestination are differences over mere opinion, not over
dogmas binding on all the faithful. For Erasmus the root of
the schism was not theology but anticlericalism and lay
resentment of the laws and “ceremonies” that the clergy made
binding under pain of hell. As he wrote privately to the
Netherlandish pope Adrian VI (1522–23), whom he had known at
Leuven, there was still hope of reconciliation, if only the
church would ease the burden; this could be accomplished,
for instance, by granting the chalice to the laity and by
permitting priests to marry: “At the sweet name of liberty
all things will revive.”
When Adrian VI was succeeded by Clement VII, Erasmus
could no longer avoid “descending into the arena” of
theological combat, though he promised the Swiss reformer
Huldrych Zwingli that he would attack Luther in a way that
would not please the “pharisees.” De libero arbitrio (1524)
defended the place of human free choice in the process of
salvation and argued that the consensus of the church
through the ages is authoritative in the interpretation of
Scripture. In reply Luther wrote one of his most important
theological works, De servo arbitrio (1525), to which
Erasmus responded with a lengthy, two-part Hyperaspistes
(1526–27). In this controversy Erasmus lets it be seen that
he would like to claim more for free will than St. Paul and
St. Augustine seem to allow.
The years in Basel (1522–29) were filled with polemics,
some of them rather tiresome by comparison to the great
debate with Luther. Irritated by Protestants who called him
a traitor to the Gospel as well as by hyper-orthodox
Catholic theologians who repeatedly denounced him, Erasmus
showed the petty side of his own nature often enough.
Although there is material in his apologetic writings that
scholars have yet to exploit, there seems no doubt that on
the whole he was better at satiric barbs, such as the
colloquy representing one young “Pseudo-Evangelical” of his
acquaintance as thwacking people over the head with a Gospel
book to gain converts. Meanwhile he kept at work on the
Greek New Testament (there would be five editions in all),
the Paraphrases, and his editions of the Church Fathers,
including Cyprian, Hilary, and Origen. He also took time to
chastise those humanists, mostly Italian, who from a
“superstitious” zeal for linguistic purity refused to sully
their Latin prose with nonclassical terms (Ciceronianus,
1528).
Final years
In 1529, when Protestant Basel banned Catholic worship
altogether, Erasmus and some of his humanist friends moved
to the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau. He
refused an invitation to the Diet of Augsburg, where Philipp
Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession was to initiate the first
meaningful discussions between Lutheran and Catholic
theologians. He nonetheless encouraged such discussion in De
sarcienda ecclesiae concordia (1533), which suggested that
differences on the crucial doctrine of justification might
be reconciled by considering a duplex justitia, the meaning
of which he did not elaborate. Having returned to Basel to
see his manual on preaching (Ecclesiastes, 1535) through the
press, he lingered on in a city he found congenial; it was
there he died in 1536. Like the disciples of Voirier, he
seems not to have asked for the last sacraments of the
church. His last words were in Dutch: “Lieve God” (“dear
God”).
Influence and achievement
Always the scholar, Erasmus could see many sides of an
issue. But his hesitations and studied ambiguities were
appreciated less and less in the generations that followed
his death, as men girded for combat, theological or
otherwise, in the service of their beliefs. For a time,
while peacemakers on both sides had an opportunity to pursue
meaningful discussions between Catholics and Lutherans, some
of Erasmus’ practical suggestions and his moderate
theological views were directly pertinent. Even after
ecumenism dwindled to a mere wisp of possibility, there were
a few men willing to make themselves heirs of Erasmus’
lonely struggle for a middle ground, like Jacques-Auguste de
Thou in France and Hugo Grotius in the Netherlands;
significantly, both were strong supporters of state
authority and hoped to limit the influence of the clergy of
their respective established churches. This tradition was
perhaps strongest in the Netherlands, where Dirck
Volckertszoon Coornhert and others found support in Erasmus
for their advocacy of limited toleration for religious
dissenters. Meanwhile, however, the Council of Trent and the
rise of Calvinism ensured that such views were generally of
marginal influence. The Catholic Index expurgatorius of 1571
contained a long list of suspect passages to be deleted from
any future editions of Erasmus’ writings, and those
Protestant tendencies that bear some comparison to Erasmus’
defense of free will—current among the Philippists in
Germany and the Arminians in the Netherlands—were bested by
defenders of a sterner orthodoxy. Even in the classroom,
Erasmus’ preference for putting students directly in contact
with the classics gave way to the use of compendiums and
manuals of humanist rhetoric and logic that resembled
nothing so much as the scholastic curriculum of the past.
Similarly, the bold and independent scholarly temper with
which Erasmus approached the text of the New Testament was
for a long time submerged by the exigencies of theological
polemics.
Erasmus’ reputation began to improve in the late 17th
century, when the last of Europe’s religious wars was fading
into memory and scholars like Richard Simon and Jean Le
Clercq (the editor of Erasmus’ works) were once again taking
a more critical approach to biblical texts. By Voltaire’s
time, in the 18th century, it was possible to imagine that
the clever and rather skeptical Erasmus must have been a
philosophe before his time, one whose professions of
religious devotion and submission to church authority could
be seen as convenient evasions. This view of Erasmus,
curiously parallel to the strictures of his orthodox
critics, was long influential. Only in the past several
decades have scholars given due recognition to the fact that
the goal of his work was a Christianity purified by a deeper
knowledge of its historic roots. Yet it was not entirely
wrong to compare Erasmus with those Enlightenment thinkers
who, like Voltaire, defended individual liberty at every
turn and had little good to say about the various corporate
solidarities by which human society holds together. Some
historians would now trace the enduring debate between these
complementary aspects of Western thought as far back as the
12th century, and in this very broad sense Erasmus and
Voltaire are on the same side of a divide, just as, for
instance, Machiavelli and Rousseau are on the other. In a
unique manner that fused his multiple identities—as
Netherlander, Renaissance humanist, and pre-Tridentine
Catholic—Erasmus helped to build what may be called the
liberal tradition of European culture.
James D. Tracy
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Sir Thomas More
English humanist and statesman
also called Saint Thomas More
born February 7, 1478, London, England
died July 6, 1535, London; canonized May 19, 1935; feast day
June 22
Main
English humanist and statesman, chancellor of England
(1529–32), who was beheaded for refusing to accept King
Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. He is
recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
Early life and career
Thomas—the eldest son of John More, a lawyer who was later
knighted and made a judge of the King’s Bench—was educated
at one of London’s best schools, St. Anthony’s in
Threadneedle Street, and in the household of John Morton,
archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England. The
future cardinal, a shrewd judge of character, predicted that
the bright and winsome page would prove to be a “marvellous
man.” His interest sent the boy to the University of Oxford,
where More seems to have spent two years, mastering Latin
and undergoing a thorough drilling in formal logic.
About 1494 his father brought More back to London to
study the common law. In February 1496 he was admitted to
Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four legal societies preparing for
admission to the bar. In 1501 More became an “utter
barrister,” a full member of the profession. Thanks to his
boundless curiosity and a prodigious capacity for work, he
managed, along with the law, to keep up his literary
pursuits. He read avidly from Holy Scripture, the Church
Fathers, and the classics and tried his hand at all literary
genres.
Although bowing to his father’s decision that he should
become a lawyer, More was prepared to be disowned rather
than disobey God’s will. To test his vocation to the
priesthood, he resided for about four years in the
Carthusian monastery adjoining Lincoln’s Inn and shared as
much of the monks’ way of life as was practicable. Although
attracted especially to the Franciscan order, More decided
that he would best serve God and his fellowmen as a lay
Christian. More, however, never discarded the habits of
early rising, prolonged prayer, fasting, and wearing the
hair shirt. God remained the centre of his life.
In late 1504 or early 1505, More married Joan Colt, the
eldest daughter of an Essex gentleman farmer. She was a
competent hostess for non-English visitors, such as the
Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who was given permanent
rooms in the Old Barge on the Thames side in Bucklersbury in
the City of London, More’s home for the first two decades of
his married life. Erasmus wrote his Praise of Folly while
staying there.
The important negotiations More conducted in 1509 on
behalf of a number of London companies with the
representative of the Antwerp merchants confirmed his
competence in trade matters and his gifts as an interpreter
and spokesman. From September 1510 to July 1518, when he
resigned to be fully in the king’s service, More was one of
the two undersheriffs of London, “the pack-horses of the
City government.” He endeared himself to the Londoners—as an
impartial judge, a disinterested consultant, and “the
general patron of the poor.”
More’s domestic idyll came to a brutal end in the summer
of 1511 with the death, perhaps in childbirth, of his wife.
He was left a widower with four children, and within weeks
of his first wife’s death he married Alice Middleton, the
widow of a London mercer. She was several years his senior
and had a daughter of her own; she did not bear More any
children.
More’s History of King Richard III, written in Latin and
in English between about 1513 and 1518, is the first
masterpiece of English historiography. Though never
finished, it influenced succeeding historians. William
Shakespeare is indebted to More for his portrait of the
tyrant.
The Utopia
In May 1515 More was appointed to a delegation to revise an
Anglo-Flemish commercial treaty. The conference was held at
Brugge, with long intervals that More used to visit other
Belgian cities. He began in the Low Countries and completed
after his return to London his Utopia, which was published
at Leuven in December 1516. The book was an immediate
success with the audience for which More wrote it: the
humanists and an elite group of public officials.
Utopia is a Greek name of More’s coining, from ou-topos
(“no place”); a pun on eu-topos (“good place”) is suggested
in a prefatory poem. More’s Utopia describes a pagan and
communist city-state in which the institutions and policies
are entirely governed by reason. The order and dignity of
such a state provided a notable contrast with the
unreasonable polity of Christian Europe, divided by
self-interest and greed for power and riches, which More
described in Book I, written in England in 1516. The
description of Utopia is put in the mouth of a mysterious
traveler, Raphael Hythloday, in support of his argument that
communism is the only cure against egoism in private and
public life. Through dialogue More speaks in favour of the
mitigation of evil rather than its cure, human nature being
fallible. Among the topics discussed by More in Utopia were
penology, state-controlled education, religious pluralism,
divorce, euthanasia, and women’s rights. The resulting
demonstration of his learning, invention, and wit
established his reputation as one of the foremost humanists.
Soon translated into most European languages, Utopia became
the ancestor of a new literary genre, the utopian romance.
Career as king’s servant
On May 1, 1517, a mob of London apprentices attacked foreign
merchants in the city. More’s role in quenching this Evil
May Day riot inspired a scene, attributed to Shakespeare, in
Sir Thomas More, a composite Elizabethan play. More’s
success in the thorny negotiations with the French at Calais
and Boulogne (September to December 1517) over suits born of
the recent war made it harder for him to dodge royal
service. That year he became a member of the king’s council
and from October was known as master of requests. He
resigned his City office in 1518. While yielding to
pressure, he embraced the chance of furthering peace and
reform. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, now looked ready
to implement some of the political ideas of the Christian
humanists.
Between 1515 and 1520 More campaigned spiritedly for
Erasmus’s religious and cultural program—Greek studies as
the key to a theology renewed by a return to the Bible and
the Church Fathers—in poems commending Erasmus’s New
Testament. More’s Latin poems were published in 1518 under
one cover between his Utopia and Erasmus’s Epigrammata; they
are extremely varied in metre and matter, their main topics
being government, women, and death.
Erasmus offered his London friend as a model for the
intelligentsia of Europe in letters to the German humanist
Ulrich von Hutten (1519); the Paris scholar Germain de Brie
(1520), with whom More had just engaged in a polemic; and
Guillaume Budé, whom More had met in June 1520 at the Field
of Cloth of Gold, the meeting ground, near Calais, between
Henry VIII and Francis I. According to Erasmus, simplicity
was More’s mark in food and dress. He shrank from nothing
that imparted an innocent pleasure, even of a bodily kind.
He had a speaker’s voice and a memory that served him well
for extempore rejoinders. “Born for friendship,” he could
extract delight from the dullest people or things. His
family affections were warm yet unobtrusive. He gave freely
and gladly, expecting no thanks. Amid his intense
professional activity, he found hours for prayer and for
supervising his domestic school. Most of his charges were
girls, to whom he provided the most refined Classical and
Christian education.
In 1520 and 1521 More took part in talks, at Calais and
Brugge, with the emperor Charles V and with the Hansa
merchants. In 1521 he was made undertreasurer and knighted.
His daughter Margaret married William Roper, a lawyer. For
Henry VIII’s Defense of the Seven Sacraments, More acted as
“a sorter out and placer of the principal matters.” When
Martin Luther hit back, More vindicated the king in a
learned, though scurrilous, Responsio ad Lutherum (1523). In
addition to his routine duties at the Exchequer, More served
throughout these years as “Henry’s intellectual courtier,”
secretary, and confidant. He welcomed foreign envoys,
delivered official speeches, drafted treaties, read the
dispatches exchanged between the king and Wolsey, and
answered in the king’s name. Often he rode posthaste between
the cardinal’s headquarters at Westminster and Henry’s
various hunting residences. In April 1523 More was elected
speaker of the House of Commons; while loyally striving to
secure the government’s ends, he made a plea for truer
freedom of speech in Parliament. The universities—Oxford in
1524, Cambridge in 1525—made him their high steward.
By 1524 More had moved to Chelsea. The Great House he
built there bore the stamp of his philosophy, its gallery,
chapel, and library all geared toward studious and prayerful
seclusion. In 1525 he was promoted to chancellor of the
duchy of Lancaster, which put a large portion of northern
England under his judiciary and administrative control.
On More’s return from an embassy to France in the summer
of 1527, Henry VIII “laid the Bible open before him” as
proof that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had
failed to produce a male heir, was void, even incestuous,
because of her previous marriage to Henry’s late brother.
More tried in vain to share the king’s scruples, but long
study confirmed his view that Catherine was the king’s true
wife. After being commissioned in March 1528 by Bishop
Tunstall of London to read all heretical writings in the
English language in order to refute them for the sake of the
unlearned, More published seven books of polemics between
1529 and 1533—the first and best being A Dialogue Concerning
Heresies.
Years as chancellor of England
Together with Tunstall, More attended the congress of
Cambrai at which peace was made between France and the Holy
Roman Empire in 1529. Though the Treaty of Cambrai
represented a rebuff to England and, more particularly, a
devastating reverse for Cardinal Wolsey’s policies, More
managed to secure the inclusion of his country in the treaty
and the settlement of mutual debts. When Wolsey fell from
power, having failed in his foreign policy and in his
efforts to procure the annulment of the king’s marriage to
Catherine, More succeeded him as lord chancellor on October
26, 1529.
On November 3, 1529, More opened the Parliament that was
later to forge the legal instruments for his death. As the
king’s mouthpiece, More indicted Wolsey in his opening
speech and, in 1531, proclaimed the opinions of universities
favourable to the divorce; but he did not sign the letter of
1530 in which England’s nobles and prelates, including
Wolsey, pressured the pope to declare the first marriage
void, and he tried to resign in 1531, when the clergy
acknowledged the king as their supreme head, albeit with the
clause “as far as the law of Christ allows.”
More’s longest book, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer,
in two volumes (1532 and 1533), centres on “what the church
is.” To the stress of stooping for hours over his manuscript
More ascribed the sharp pain in his chest, perhaps angina,
which he invoked when begging Henry to free him from the
yoke of office. This was on May 16, 1532, the day when the
governing body (synod) of the church in England delivered to
the crown the document by which they promised never to
legislate or so much as convene without royal assent, thus
placing a layperson at the head of the spiritual order.
More meanwhile continued his campaign for the old faith,
defending England’s antiheresy laws and his own handling of
heretics, both as magistrate and as writer, in two books of
1533: the Apology and the Debellacyon. He also laughs away
the accusation of greed leveled by William Tyndale,
translator of parts of the first printed English Bible.
More’s poverty was so notorious that the hierarchy collected
£5,000 to recoup his polemical costs, but he refused this
grant lest it be construed as a bribe.
Indictment, trial, and execution
More’s refusal to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, whom
Henry married after his divorce from Catherine in 1533,
marked him out for vengeance. Several charges of accepting
bribes recoiled on the heads of his accusers. In February
1534 More was included in a bill of attainder for alleged
complicity with Elizabeth Barton, who had uttered prophecies
against Henry’s divorce, but he produced a letter in which
he had warned the nun against meddling in affairs of state.
He was summoned to appear before royal commissioners on
April 13 to assent under oath to the Act of Succession,
which declared the king’s marriage with Catherine void and
that with Anne valid. This More was willing to do,
acknowledging that Anne was in fact anointed queen. But he
refused the oath as then administered because it entailed a
repudiation of papal supremacy. On April 17, 1534, he was
imprisoned in the Tower. More welcomed prison life. But for
his family responsibilities, he would have chosen for
himself “as strait a room and straiter too,” as he said to
his daughter Margaret, who after some time took the oath and
was then allowed to visit him. In prison, More wrote A
Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, a masterpiece of
Christian wisdom and of literature.
His trial took place on July 1, 1535. Richard Rich, the
solicitor general, a creature of Thomas Cromwell, the
unacknowledged head of the government, testified that the
prisoner had, in his presence, denied the king’s title as
supreme head of the Church of England. Despite More’s
scathing denial of this perjured evidence, the jury’s
unanimous verdict was “guilty.” Before the sentence was
pronounced, More spoke “in discharge of his conscience.” The
unity of the church was the main motive of his martyrdom.
His second objection was that “no temporal man may be head
of the spirituality.” Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, to
which he also referred as the cause for which they “sought
his blood,” had been the occasion for the assaults on the
church: among his judges were the new queen’s father,
brother, and uncle.
More was sentenced to the traitor’s death—“to be drawn,
hanged, and quartered”—which the king changed to beheading.
During five days of suspense, More prepared his soul to meet
“the great spouse” and wrote a beautiful prayer and several
letters of farewell. He walked to the scaffold on Tower
Hill. “See me safe up,” he said to the lieutenant, “and for
my coming down let me shift for myself.” He told the
onlookers to witness that he was dying “in the faith and for
the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant
and God’s first.” He altered the ritual by blindfolding
himself, playing “a part of his own” even on this awful
stage.
The news of More’s death shocked Europe. Erasmus mourned
the man he had so often praised, “whose soul was more pure
than any snow, whose genius was such that England never had
and never again will have its like.” The official image of
More as a traitor did not gain credence even in Protestant
lands.
Assessment
Though the triumph of Anglicanism brought about a certain
eclipse of Thomas More, the publication of the state papers
restored a fuller and truer picture of More, preparing
public opinion for his beatification (1886). He was
canonized by Pius XI in May 1935. Though the man is greater
than the writer and though nothing in his life “became him
like the leaving of it,” his “golden little book” Utopia has
earned him greater fame than the crown of martyrdom or the
million words of his English works.
Erasmus’s phrase describing More as omnium horarum homo
was rendered later as “a man for all seasons” and was given
currency by Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1960).
Monuments to More have been placed in Westminster Hall, the
Tower of London, and the Chelsea Embankment, all in London.
In the words of the English Catholic apologist G.K.
Chesterton, More “may come to be counted the greatest
Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in
English History.”
The Rev. Germain P. Marc’hadour
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Michel de Montaigne
French writer and philosopher
in full Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
born Feb. 28, 1533, Château de Montaigne, near Bordeaux,
France
died Sept. 23, 1592, Château de Montaigne
Main
French writer whose Essais (Essays) established a new
literary form. In his Essays he wrote one of the most
captivating and intimate self-portraits ever given, on a par
with Augustine’s and Rousseau’s.
Living, as he did, in the second half of the 16th
century, Montaigne bore witness to the decline of the
intellectual optimism that had marked the Renaissance. The
sense of immense human possibilities, stemming from the
discoveries of the New World travelers, from the rediscovery
of classical antiquity, and from the opening of scholarly
horizons through the works of the humanists, was shattered
in France when the advent of the Calvinistic Reformation was
followed closely by religious persecution and by the Wars of
Religion (1562–98). These conflicts, which tore the country
asunder, were in fact political and civil as well as
religious wars, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and
cruelty. At once deeply critical of his time and deeply
involved in its preoccupations and its struggles, Montaigne
chose to write about himself—“I am myself the matter of my
book,” he says in his opening address to the reader—in order
to arrive at certain possible truths concerning man and the
human condition, in a period of ideological strife and
division when all possibility of truth seemed illusory and
treacherous.
Life
Born in the family domain of Château de Montaigne in
southwestern France, Michel Eyquem spent most of his life at
his château and in the city of Bordeaux, 30 miles to the
west. The family fortune had been founded in commerce by
Montaigne’s great-grandfather, who acquired the estate and
the title of nobility. His grandfather and his father
expanded their activities to the realm of public service and
established the family in the noblesse de robe, the
administrative nobility of France. Montaigne’s father,
Pierre Eyquem, served as mayor of Bordeaux.
As a young child Montaigne was tutored at home according
to his father’s ideas of pedagogy, which included the
creation of a cosseted ambience of gentle encouragement and
the exclusive use of Latin, still the international language
of educated people. As a result the boy did not learn French
until he was six years old. He continued his education at
the College of Guyenne, where he found the strict discipline
abhorrent and the instruction only moderately interesting,
and eventually at the University of Toulouse, where he
studied law. Following in the public-service tradition begun
by his grandfather, he entered into the magistrature,
becoming a member of the Board of Excise, the new tax court
of Périgueux, and, when that body was dissolved in 1557, of
the Parliament of Bordeaux, one of the eight regional
parliaments that constituted the French Parliament, the
highest national court of justice. There, at the age of 24,
he made the acquaintance of Étienne de la Boétie, a meeting
that was one of the most significant events in Montaigne’s
life. Between the slightly older La Boétie (1530–63), an
already distinguished civil servant, humanist scholar, and
writer, and Montaigne an extraordinary friendship sprang up,
based on a profound intellectual and emotional closeness and
reciprocity. In his essay On Friendship Montaigne wrote in a
very touching manner about his bond with La Boétie, which he
called perfect and indivisible, vastly superior to all other
human alliances. When La Boétie died of dysentery, he left a
void in Montaigne’s life that no other being was ever able
to fill, and it is likely that Montaigne started on his
writing career, six years after La Boétie’s death, in order
to fill the emptiness left by the loss of the irretrievable
friend.
In 1565 Montaigne was married, acting less out of love
than out of a sense of familial and social duty, to
Françoise de la Chassaigne, the daughter of one of his
colleagues at the Parliament of Bordeaux. He fathered six
daughters, five of whom died in infancy, whereas the sixth,
Léonore, survived him.
In 1569 Montaigne published his first book, a French
translation of the 15th-century Natural Theology by the
Spanish monk Raymond Sebond. He had undertaken the task at
the request of his father, who, however, died in 1568,
before its publication, leaving to his oldest son the title
and the domain of Montaigne.
In 1570 Montaigne sold his seat in the Bordeaux
Parliament, signifying his departure from public life. After
taking care of the posthumous publication of La Boétie’s
works, together with his own dedicatory letters, he retired
in 1571 to the castle of Montaigne in order to devote his
time to reading, meditating, and writing. His library,
installed in the castle’s tower, became his refuge. It was
in this round room, lined with a thousand books and
decorated with Greek and Latin inscriptions, that Montaigne
set out to put on paper his essais, that is, the probings
and testings of his mind. He spent the years from 1571 to
1580 composing the first two books of the Essays, which
comprise respectively 57 and 37 chapters of greatly varying
lengths; they were published in Bordeaux in 1580.
Although most of these years were dedicated to writing,
Montaigne had to supervise the running of his estate as
well, and he was obliged to leave his retreat from time to
time, not only to travel to the court in Paris but also to
intervene as mediator in several episodes of the religious
conflicts in his region and beyond. Both the Roman Catholic
king Henry III and the Protestant king Henry of Navarre—who
as Henry IV would become king of France and convert to Roman
Catholicism—honoured and respected Montaigne, but extremists
on both sides criticized and harassed him.
After the 1580 publication, eager for new experiences and
profoundly disgusted by the state of affairs in France,
Montaigne set out to travel, and in the course of 15 months
he visited areas of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
and Italy. Curious by nature, interested in the smallest
details of dailiness, geography, and regional
idiosyncrasies, Montaigne was a born traveler. He kept a
record of his trip, his Journal de voyage (not intended for
publication and not published until 1774), which is rich in
picturesque episodes, encounters, evocations, and
descriptions.
While still in Italy, in the fall of 1581, Montaigne
received the news that he had been elected to the office his
father had held, that of mayor of Bordeaux. Reluctant to
accept, because of the dismal political situation in France
and because of ill health (he suffered from kidney stones,
which had also plagued him on his trip), he nevertheless
assumed the position at the request of Henry III and held it
for two terms, until July 1585. While the beginning of his
tenure was relatively tranquil, his second term was marked
by an acceleration of hostilities between the warring
factions, and Montaigne played a crucial role in preserving
the equilibrium between the Catholic majority and the
important Protestant League representation in Bordeaux.
Toward the end of his term the plague broke out in Bordeaux,
soon raging out of control and killing one-third of the
population.
Montaigne resumed his literary work by embarking on the
third book of the Essays. After having been interrupted
again, by a renewed outbreak of the plague in the area that
forced Montaigne and his family to seek refuge elsewhere, by
military activity close to his estate, and by diplomatic
duties, when Catherine de Médicis appealed to his abilities
as a negotiator to mediate between herself and Henry of
Navarre—a mission that turned out to be
unsuccessful—Montaigne was able to finish the work in 1587.
The year 1588 was marked by both political and literary
events. During a trip to Paris Montaigne was twice arrested
and briefly imprisoned by members of the Protestant League
because of his loyalty to Henry III. During the same trip he
supervised the publication of the fifth edition of the
Essays, the first to contain the 13 chapters of Book III, as
well as Books I and II, enriched with many additions. He
also met Marie de Gournay, an ardent and devoted young
admirer of his writings. De Gournay, a writer herself, is
mentioned in the Essays as Montaigne’s “covenant daughter”
and was to become his literary executrix. After the
assassination of Henry III in 1589, Montaigne helped to keep
Bordeaux loyal to Henry IV. He spent the last years of his
life at his château, continuing to read and to reflect and
to work on the Essays, adding new passages, which signify
not so much profound changes in his ideas as further
explorations of his thought and experience. Different
illnesses beset him during this period, and he died after an
attack of quinsy, an inflammation of the tonsils, which had
deprived him of speech. His death occurred while he was
hearing mass in his room.
The Essays
Montaigne saw his age as one of dissimulation, corruption,
violence, and hypocrisy, and it is therefore not surprising
that the point of departure of the Essays is situated in
negativity: the negativity of Montaigne’s recognition of the
rule of appearances and of the loss of connection with the
truth of being. Montaigne’s much-discussed skepticism
results from that initial negativity, as he questions the
possibility of all knowing and sees the human being as a
creature of weakness and failure, of inconstancy and
uncertainty, of incapacity and fragmentation, or, as he
wrote in the first of the essays, as “a marvelously vain,
diverse, and undulating thing.” His skepticism is reflected
in the French title of his work, Essais, or “Attempts,”
which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or of
confident opinion but a project of trial and error, of
tentative exploration. Neither a reference to an established
genre (for Montaigne’s book inaugurated the term essay for
the short prose composition treating a given subject in a
rather informal and personal manner) nor an indication of a
necessary internal unity and structure within the work, the
title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and
of continuous assessment.
Montaigne’s skepticism does not, however, preclude a
belief in the existence of truth but rather constitutes a
defense against the danger of locating truth in false,
unexamined, and externally imposed notions. His skepticism,
combined with his desire for truth, drives him to the
rejection of commonly accepted ideas and to a profound
distrust of generalizations and abstractions; it also shows
him the way to an exploration of the only realm that
promises certainty: that of concrete phenomena and primarily
the basic phenomenon of his own body-and-mind self. This
self, with all its imperfections, constitutes the only
possible site where the search for truth can start, and it
is the reason Montaigne, from the beginning to the end of
the Essays, does not cease to affirm that “I am myself the
matter of my book.” He finds that his identity, his “master
form” as he calls it, cannot be defined in simple terms of a
constant and stable self, since it is instead a changeable
and fragmented thing, and that the valorization and
acceptance of these traits is the only guarantee of
authenticity and integrity, the only way of remaining
faithful to the truth of one’s being and one’s nature rather
than to alien semblances.
Yet, despite his insistence that the self guard its
freedom toward outside influences and the tyranny of imposed
customs and opinions, Montaigne believes in the value of
reaching outside the self. Indeed, throughout his writings,
as he did in his private and public life, he manifests the
need to entertain ties with the world of other people and of
events. For this necessary coming and going between the
interiority of the self and the exteriority of the world,
Montaigne uses the image of the back room: human beings have
their front room, facing the street, where they meet and
interact with others, but they need always to be able to
retreat into the back room of the most private self, where
they may reaffirm the freedom and strength of intimate
identity and reflect upon the vagaries of experience. Given
that always-available retreat, Montaigne encourages contact
with others, from which one may learn much that is useful.
In order to do so, he advocates travel, reading, especially
of history books, and conversations with friends. These
friends, for Montaigne, are necessarily men. While none can
ever replace La Boétie, it is possible to have interesting
and worthwhile exchanges with men of discernment and wit. As
for his relations with women, Montaigne wrote about them
with a frankness unusual for his time. The only
uncomplicated bond is that of marriage, which reposes, for
Montaigne, on reasons of family and posterity and in which
one invests little of oneself. Love, on the other hand, with
its emotional and erotic demands, comports the risk of
enslavement and loss of freedom. Montaigne, often designated
as a misogynist, does in fact recognize that men and women
are fundamentally alike in their fears, desires, and
attempts to find and affirm their own identity and that only
custom and adherence to an antiquated status quo establish
the apparent differences between the sexes, but he does not
explore the possibility of overcoming that fundamental
separation and of establishing an intellectual equality.
Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the
inhabitants of the New World, with whom he had become
acquainted through his lively interest in oral and written
travel accounts and through his meeting in 1562 with three
Brazilian Indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de
Villegagnon had brought back to France. Giving an example of
cultural relativism and tolerance, rare in his time, he
finds these people, in their fidelity to their own nature
and in their cultural and personal dignity and sense of
beauty, greatly superior to the inhabitants of western
Europe, who in the conquests of the New World and in their
own internal wars have shown themselves to be the true
barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the New
World’s natives by their conquerors provoke his indignation
and compassion.
Involvement in public service is also a part of
interaction with the world, and it should be seen as a duty
to be honourably and loyally discharged but never allowed to
become a consuming and autonomy-destroying occupation.
Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning
the independence and freedom of the self and the importance
of social and intellectual intercourse in all his writings
and in particular in his essay on the education of children.
There, as elsewhere, he advocates the value of concrete
experience over abstract learning and of independent
judgment over an accumulation of undigested notions
uncritically accepted from others. He also stresses,
throughout his work, the role of the body, as in his candid
descriptions of his own bodily functions and in his
extensive musings on the realities of illness, of aging, and
of death. The presence of death pervades the Essays, as
Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with the
inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the tyranny
of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of nature’s
exigencies, inherent in life’s expectations and limitations.
Montaigne seems to have been a loyal if not fervent Roman
Catholic all his life, but he distrusted all human pretenses
to knowledge of a spiritual experience which is not attached
to a concretely lived reality. He declined to speculate on a
transcendence that falls beyond human ken, believing in God
but refusing to invoke him in necessarily presumptuous and
reductive ways.
Although Montaigne certainly knew the classical
philosophers, his ideas spring less out of their teaching
than out of the completely original meditation on himself,
which he extends to a description of the human being and to
an ethics of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance.
The Essays are the record of his thoughts, presented not in
artificially organized stages but as they occurred and
reoccurred to him in different shapes throughout his
thinking and writing activity. They are not the record of an
intellectual evolution but of a continuous accretion, and he
insists on the immediacy and the authenticity of their
testimony. To denote their consubstantiality with his
natural self, he describes them as his children, and, in an
image of startling and completely nonpejorative earthiness,
as the excrements of his mind. As he refuses to impose a
false unity on the spontaneous workings of his thought, so
he refuses to impose a false structure on his Essays. “As my
mind roams, so does my style,” he wrote, and the multiple
digressions, the wandering developments, the savory,
concrete vocabulary, all denote that fidelity to the
freshness and the immediacy of the living thought.
Throughout the text he sprinkles anecdotes taken from
ancient as well as contemporary authors and from popular
lore, which reinforce his critical analysis of reality; he
also peppers his writing with quotes, yet another way of
interacting with others, that is, with the authors of the
past who surround him in his library. Neither anecdotes nor
quotes impinge upon the autonomy of his own ideas, although
they may spark or reinforce a train of thought, and they
become an integral part of the book’s fabric.
Montaigne’s Essays thus incorporate a profound skepticism
concerning the human being’s dangerously inflated claims to
knowledge and certainty but also assert that there is no
greater achievement than the ability to accept one’s being
without either contempt or illusion, in the full realization
of its limitations and its richness.
Readership
Throughout the ages the Essays have been widely and
variously read, and their readers have tended to look to
them, and into them, for answers to their own needs. Not all
his contemporaries manifested the enthusiasm of Marie de
Gournay, who fainted from excitement at her first reading.
She did recognize in the book the full force of an unusual
mind revealing itself, but most of the intellectuals of the
period preferred to find in Montaigne a safe reincarnation
of stoicism. Here started a misunderstanding that was to
last a long time, save in the case of the exceptional
reader. The Essays were to be perused as an anthology of
philosophical maxims, a repository of consecrated wisdom,
rather than as the complete expression of a highly
individual thought and experience. That Montaigne could
write about his most intimate reactions and feelings, that
he could describe his own physical appearance and
preferences, for instance, seemed shocking and irrelevant to
many, just as the apparent confusion of his writing seemed a
weakness to be deplored rather than a guarantee of
authenticity.
In the 17th century, when an educated nobility set the
tone, he was chiefly admired for his portrayal of the
honnête homme, the well-educated, nonpedantic man of
manners, as much at home in a salon as in his study, a
gentleman of smiling wisdom and elegant, discreet
disenchantment. In the same period, however, religious
authors such as Francis of Sales and Blaise Pascal deplored
his skepticism as anti-Christian and denounced what they
interpreted as an immoral self-absorption. In the
pre-Revolutionary 18th century the image of a dogmatically
irreligious Montaigne continued to be dominant, and Voltaire
and Denis Diderot saw in him a precursor of the free thought
of the Enlightenment. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however,
the encounter with the Essays was differently and
fundamentally important, as he rightly considered Montaigne
the master and the model of the self-portrait. Rousseau
inaugurated the perception of the book as the entirely
personal project of a human being in search of his identity
and unafraid to talk without dissimulation about his
profound nature. In the 19th century some of the old
misunderstandings continued, but there was a growing
understanding and appreciation of Montaigne not only as a
master of ideas but also as the writer of the particular,
the individual, the intimate—the writer as friend and
familiar. Gustave Flaubert kept the Essays on his bedside
table and recognized in Montaigne an alter ego, as would, in
the 20th century, authors such as André Gide, Michel Butor,
and Roland Barthes.
The Essays were first translated into English by John
Florio in 1603, and Anglophone readers have included Francis
Bacon, John Webster, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron,
William Makepeace Thackeray, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia
Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley.
Today Montaigne continues to be studied in all aspects of
his text by great numbers of scholars and to be read by
people from all corners of the earth. In an age that may
seem as violent and absurd as his own, his refusal of
intolerance and fanaticism and his lucid awareness of the
human potential for destruction, coupled with his belief in
the human capacity for self-assessment, honesty, and
compassion, appeal as convincingly as ever to the many who
find in him a guide and a friend.
Tilde A. Sankovitch
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Pierre Gassendi
French mathematician, philosopher, and scientist
Gassendi also spelled Gassend
born Jan. 22, 1592, Champtercier, Provence, France
died Oct. 24, 1655, Paris
Main
French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, who
revived Epicureanism as a substitute for Aristotelianism,
attempting in the process to reconcile mechanistic atomism
with the Christian belief in an infinite God.
Early life and career
Born into a family of commoners, Gassendi received his early
education at Digne and Reiz. He studied at universities in
Digne and Aix-en-Provence and received a doctorate in
theology at the university in Avignon in 1614. After being
ordained a priest in 1616 he was appointed professor of
philosophy at Aix-en-Provence. There he delivered critical
lectures on the thought of Aristotle from 1617 to 1622, when
the new Jesuit authorities of the university, who
disapproved of Gassendi’s anti-Aristotelianism, compelled
him to leave. Gassendi’s work Exercitationes paradoxicae
adversus Aristoteleos (“Paradoxical Exercises Against the
Aristotelians”), the first part of which was published in
1624, contains an attack on Aristotelianism and an early
version of his mitigated skepticism. Gassendi thereafter
engaged in many scientific studies with his patron,
Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, until the latter’s death in
1637. A considerable portion of his researches during this
period involved astronomical observations, including his
discovery in 1631 of the perihelion of Mercury (the point of
the planet’s closest approach to the Sun).
Skepticism and atomism
In 1641 the theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne
invited Gassendi and several other eminent thinkers to
contribute comments on the manuscript of René Descartes’s
Meditations (1641); Gassendi’s comments, in which he argued
that Descartes had failed to establish the reality and
certainty of innate ideas, were published in the second
edition of the Meditations (1642) as the fifth set of
objections and replies. Gassendi enlarged upon these
criticisms in his Disquisitio metaphysica, seu duitationes
et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et
responsa (1644; “Metaphysical Disquisition; or, Doubts and
Instances Against the Metaphysics of René Descartes and
Responses”).
In 1645 Gassendi was appointed professor of mathematics
at the Collège Royal in Paris. During the remainder of the
decade he published a work on the new astronomy, Institutio
astronomica juxta hypotheseis tam veteram quam Copernici et
Tychonis Brahei (1647; “Astronomical Instruction According
to the Ancient Hypotheses as Well as Those of Copernicus and
Tycho Brahe”), as well as two of his three major works on
Epicurean philosophy, De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647; “On
the Life and Death of Epicurus”) and Animadversiones in
decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est de vita, moribus,
placitisque Epicuri (1649; “Observations on Book X of
Diogenes Laërtius, Which Is About the Life, Morals, and
Opinions of Epicurus”).
In his final Epicurean work, Syntagma philosophicum
(“Philosophical Treatise”), published posthumously in 1658,
Gassendi attempted to find what he called a middle way
between skepticism and dogmatism. He argued that, while
metaphysical knowledge of the “essences” (inner natures) of
things is impossible, by relying on induction and the
information provided by “appearances” one can acquire
probable knowledge of the natural world that is sufficient
to explain and predict experience. Adopting a view
characteristic of ancient Skepticism, Gassendi held that
experienced events can be taken as signs of what is beyond
experience. Smoke suggests fire, sweat suggests that there
are pores in the skin, and the multitude of events suggests
that there is an atomic world underlying them. The best
theory of such a world, in Gassendi’s opinion, is the
ancient atomism expounded by Epicurus (341–270 bce),
according to which atoms are eternal, differently shaped,
and moving at different speeds. Gassendi argued that such
atoms must have some of the physical features of the visible
objects they constitute, such as extension, size, shape,
weight, and solidity. The atoms collide and agglomerate,
resulting in events in the perceptible world. A mechanical
model of atomic movement and agglomeration, ultimately based
on experience, would allow one to discover probabilistic
empirical laws, to make predictions, and to explain
relationships between different kinds of phenomena. Because
the phenomenal world is thus related to the atomic world,
there is no need to explain events in terms of purposes,
goals, or final causes, as in Scholastic and Aristotelian
teleology.
Gassendi believed that there was no conflict between his
mechanistic atomism and the doctrines of Roman Catholicism;
indeed, he took pains to emphasize their compatibility.
Although he was a heliocentrist, he presented his
astronomical views in a way that made them at least
superficially consistent with the teachings of the church,
which had condemned Galileo for his heliocentrism in 1633.
Although Gassendi’s atomism was as complete an account of
nature as any other scientific theory of its time, it was
eventually replaced by the physics of Sir Isaac Newton. No
important discoveries are attributed to Gassendi’s
scientific program.
Religious and moral views
Gassendi rejected the Epicurean account of the human soul,
according to which it is material but composed of lighter
and more subtle atoms than those of other things. Souls are
genuinely immaterial, and their existence is known through
faith. Likewise, his theology, unlike Epicurus’s, did not
conceive of God as a material body. God’s existence is
proved by the harmony evident in nature. Following Epicurus,
Gassendi held that the proper goal of human life is
happiness, which consists in the peace of the soul and the
absence of bodily pain.
It has long been debated whether Gassendi was really a
secret libertine—a freethinker in matters of religion and
morals. Although he was a close associate of some notorious
religious skeptics and even took part in their retreats, he
was also good friends with some leading church figures, such
as the theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne. Indeed,
Gassendi and Mersenne had quite similar views about science
and its foundations. Gassendi’s associations with a wide
range of other intellectual figures, including Thomas Hobbes
and Blaise Pascal, lend themselves to varied
interpretations.
Influence and assessment
In 1648 Gassendi resigned his post at the Collège Royal
because of poor health. After nearly five years in Provence
he returned to Paris in 1653, taking up residence in the
house of his new patron, Henri-Louis Habert, lord of Montmor.
He died there two years later.
Gassendi’s ideas were extremely influential in the 17th
century. Although his works were originally published as
huge Latin tomes, a French abridgement of them appeared in
the second half of the century, as did English translations
of various excerpts. His ideas were taught in Jesuit schools
in France, in English universities, and even in newly
founded schools in North America. Because Gassendi’s
epistemological views seem to be echoed in major sections of
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690),
one of the founding works of British empiricism, some
scholars have concluded that Locke was directly influenced
by Gassendi. It is interesting to note in this connection
that the Syntagma was published in English in Thomas
Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–62), a work that Locke
knew. Locke also met some of Gassendi’s disciples during his
exile in France.
At the turn of the 21st century there was growing
interest in Gassendi’s critique of Cartesianism, and his
scientific researches were shedding new light on the early
development of botany, geology, and other fields. He is now
regarded as an original thinker of the first rank.
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Benedict de Spinoza
Dutch-Jewish philosopher
Hebrew forename Baruch, Latin forename Bendictus, Portuguese
Bento De Espinosa
(English: )
born Nov. 24, 1632, Amsterdam
died Feb. 21, 1677, The Hague
Main
Dutch-Jewish philosopher, the foremost exponent of
17th-century Rationalism.
Early life and career.
Spinoza’s grandfather and father were Portuguese and had
been crypto-Jews after the Spanish Inquisition had compelled
them to embrace Christianity. Later, after Holland’s
successful revolt against Spain and the granting of
religious freedom, they found refuge in Amsterdam. His
mother, who also came from Portugal, died when Benedict was
barely six years old. The Spinozas were prosperous merchants
and respected members of the Jewish community, and it may be
assumed that Spinoza attended the school for Jewish boys
founded in Amsterdam in about 1638. Outside school hours the
boys had private lessons in secular subjects. Spinoza was
taught Latin by a German scholar, who may also have taught
him German; and he knew to some extent all of the other
significant continental languages. In March 1654 Benedict’s
father died. There was some litigation over the estate, with
Benedict’s only surviving stepsister claiming it all.
Benedict won the lawsuit but allowed her to retain nearly
everything.
His studies so far had been mainly Jewish, but he was an
independent thinker and had found more than enough in his
Jewish studies to wean him from orthodox doctrines and
interpretations of Scripture; moreover, the tendency to
revolt against tradition and authority was much in the air
in the 17th century. But the Jewish religious leaders in
Amsterdam were fearful that heresies (which were no less
anti-Christian than anti-Jewish) might give offense in a
country that did not yet regard the Jews as citizens.
Spinoza soon incurred the disapproval of the synagogue
authorities. In conversations with other students, he had
held that there is nothing in the Bible to support the views
that God had no body, that angels really exist, or that the
soul is immortal; and he had also expressed his belief that
the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the
Bible) was no wiser in physics or even in theology than were
they, the students. The Jewish authorities, after trying
vainly to silence Spinoza with bribes and threats,
excommunicated him in July 1656, and he was banished from
Amsterdam for a short period by the civil authorities. There
is no evidence that he had really wanted to break away from
the Jewish community, and indeed the scanty knowledge
available would suggest the opposite. On Dec. 5, 1655, for
example, he had attended the synagogue and made an offering
that, in view of his poverty, must have been a rare event
for him, and, about the time of his excommunication, he had
addressed a defense of his views to the synagogue.
Among Spinoza’s Christian acquaintances was Franciscus
van den Enden, who was a former Jesuit, an ardent classical
scholar, and something of a poet and dramatist and who had
opened a school in Amsterdam. For a time, Spinoza stayed
with him, helping with the teaching of the schoolchildren
and receiving aid in his own further education. In this way
he improved his knowledge of Latin, learned some Greek, and
was introduced to Neoscholastic philosophy. It may have also
been through van den Enden’s school that Spinoza became
acquainted with the “new philosophy” of René Descartes,
later acknowledged to be the father of modern philosophy.
Spinoza’s other Christian acquaintances were mostly of the
Collegiants, a brotherhood that later merged with the
Mennonites; they were especially interested in Cartesianism,
the dualistic philosophy of Descartes and his followers.
At the same time, he was becoming expert at making
lenses, supporting himself partly by grinding and polishing
lenses for spectacles, telescopes, and microscopes; he also
did tutoring. A kind of reading and discussion circle for
the study of religious and philosophical problems came into
being under the guidance of Spinoza. In order to collect his
thoughts, however, and reduce them to a system, he withdrew
in 1660 to Rijnsburg, a quiet village on the Rhine, near
Leiden. Rijnsburg was the headquarters of the Collegiants,
and Spinoza’s lodgings there were with a surgeon named
Hermann Homan. In Homan’s cottage Spinoza wrote Korte
Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand
(written c. 1662; Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, and
His Well-Being, 1910) and Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione (“Treatise on the Correction of the
Understanding”), both of which were ready by April 1662. He
also completed the greater part of his geometrical version
of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae and the first book of
his Ethica. Spinoza’s attitude in these works already showed
a departure from Cartesianism. It was also during this stay
that he met Heinrich Oldenburg, soon to become one of the
two first secretaries of the Royal Society in London.
Influence of Descartes and the geometrical method.
His version of Descartes’s Principia was prepared while
Spinoza was giving instruction in the philosophy of
Descartes to a private pupil. It was published by his
Cartesian friends under the title Renati des Cartes
Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I et II, More Geometrico
Demonstratae, per Benedictum de Spinoza (1663), with an
introduction explaining that Spinoza did not share the views
expressed in the book. This was the only book published in
Spinoza’s lifetime with his name on the title page.
The philosophy of Spinoza may thus be regarded as a
development from and a reaction to that of his contemporary
Descartes (1596–1650). Though it has been argued that
Spinoza was also much influenced by medieval philosophy
(especially Jewish), he seems to have been much more
conscious of the Cartesian influence, and his most striking
doctrines are most easily understood as solutions of
Cartesian difficulties. Clearly, he had studied Descartes in
detail. He accepted Descartes’s physics in general, though
he did express some dissatisfaction with it toward the end
of his life. As for the Cartesian metaphysics, he found
three unsatisfactory features: the transcendence of God, the
substantial dualism of mind and body, and the ascription of
free will both to God and to human beings. In Spinoza’s
eyes, those doctrines made the world unintelligible. It was
impossible to explain the relation between God and the world
or between mind and body or to account for events occasioned
by free will.
The publication of Spinoza’s version of Descartes’s
Principia had been intended to prepare the way for that of
his own philosophy, for he had both to secure the patronage
of influential men and to show the more philosophically
minded that his rejection of Cartesianism was not out of
ignorance.
Spinoza became dissatisfied with the informal method of
exposition that he had adopted in the Korte Verhandeling and
the De Intellectus Emendatione and turned instead to the
geometrical method in the manner of Euclid’s Elements. He
assumed without question that it is possible to construct a
system of metaphysics that will render it completely
intelligible. It is therefore possible, in his view, to
present metaphysics deductively—that is, as a series of
theorems derived by necessary steps from self-evident
premises expressed in terms that are either self-explanatory
or defined with unquestionable correctness. His masterpiece,
the Ethica, was set out in this manner—Ordine Geometrico
Demonstrata, according to the reading of its subtitle. Its
first part, “De Deo” (“Concerning God”), was finished and in
the hands of his friends early in 1663. Initially the work
was intended to have three parts only, but it eventually
appeared (in 1677) in five parts. Spinoza’s desire for an
impersonal presentation was probably his chief motive for
adopting the geometrical method, appreciating that the
method guarantees true conclusions only if the axioms are
true and the definitions correct. Spinoza, like his
contemporaries, held that definitions are not arbitrary but
that there is a sense in which they may be correct or
incorrect.
The question was discussed at length in his unfinished
Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. A sound definition, he
held, should make clear the possibility or the necessity of
the existence of the object defined. Because the Ethica
begins with the definition of “substance,” the necessary
existent, the entire system is vulnerable to anyone
disputing that definition, however cogent the subsequent
reasoning may be. In fact, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a
Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, pointed out,
though the system is closely knit, its demonstrations do not
proceed with mathematical rigour.
Period of the “Ethica.” In June 1663 Spinoza moved to
Voorburg, near The Hague, and it appears that by June 1665
he was nearing the completion of the three-part version of
the Ethica. During the next few years, however, he was at
work on his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which was
published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1670. This work
aroused great interest and was to go through five editions
in as many years. It was intended “to show that not only is
liberty to philosophize compatible with devout piety and
with the peace of the state, but that to take away such
liberty is to destroy the public peace and even piety
itself.” As this work shows, Spinoza was far ahead of his
time in advocating the application of the historical method
to the interpretation of the biblical sources. He argued
that the inspiration of the prophets of the Old Testament
extended only to their moral and practical doctrines and
that their factual beliefs were merely those appropriate to
their time and are not philosophically significant. Complete
freedom of scientific and metaphysical speculation is
therefore consistent with all that is important in the
Bible. Miracles are explained as natural events
misinterpreted and stressed for their moral effect.
In May 1670 Spinoza moved to The Hague, where he remained
until his death. He began to compose a Hebrew grammar,
Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, but did not finish
it; instead, he returned to the Ethica, although the
prospect of its publication became increasingly remote.
There were many denunciations of his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus as an instrument “forged in hell by a
renegade Jew and the devil.” When the Ethica was completed
in 1675, Spinoza had to abandon the idea of publishing it,
though manuscript copies were circulated among his close
friends.
Last years and posthumous influence.
Spinoza concentrated his attention on political problems and
began his Tractatus Politicus, which he did not live to
finish. During the post-Ethica period, he was visited by
several important people, among them Ehrenfried Walter von
Tschirnhaus (in 1675), a scientist and philosopher, and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in 1676), like Spinoza, one of
the foremost Rationalists of the time. Leibniz, having heard
of Spinoza as an authority on optics, had sent him an
optical tract and had then received from Spinoza a copy of
the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which deeply interested
him. According to Leibniz’ own account, he “conversed with
him often and at great length.” Spinoza, however, was now in
an advanced stage of consumption, aggravated by the inhaling
of glass dust from the polishing of lenses in his shop. He
died in 1677, leaving no heir, and his few possessions were
sold by auction. These included about 160 books, the catalog
of which has been preserved.
In accordance with Spinoza’s previous instructions,
several of his friends prepared his manuscripts secretly for
the press, and they were sent to a publisher in Amsterdam.
The Opera Posthuma (Dutch version: Nagelate Schriften),
published before the end of 1677, was composed of the Ethica,
Tractatus Politicus, and Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione, as well as letters and the Hebrew grammar. His
Stelkonstige reeckening van den regenboog (“On the Rainbow”)
and his Reeckening van kanssen (“On the Calculation of
Chances”) were printed together in 1687. The Korte
Verhandeling was lost to the world until E. Boehmer’s
publication of it in 1852.
Spinoza has an assured place in the intellectual history
of the Western world, though his direct influence on
technical philosophy has not been great. Throughout the 18th
century he was almost universally decried as an atheist—or
sometimes used as a cover for the detailing of atheist
ideas. The tone had been set by Pierre Bayle, a Skeptical
philosopher and encyclopaedist, in whose Dictionnaire
historique et critique Spinozism was described as “the most
monstrous hypothesis imaginable, the most absurd”; and even
David Hume, a Scottish Skeptic and historian, felt obliged
to speak of the “hideous hypothesis” of Spinoza.
Spinoza was rendered intellectually respectable by the
efforts of literary critics, especially of the Germans G.E.
Lessing and J.W. von Goethe and the English poet S.T.
Coleridge, who admired the man and found austere excitement
in his works, in which they saw an intensely religious
attitude entirely divorced from dogma. Spinoza has also been
much studied by professional philosophers since the
beginning of the 19th century. Both absolute Idealists and
Marxists have read their own doctrines into his work, and
Empiricists, while rejecting his metaphysical approach, have
developed certain detailed suggestions from his theory of
knowledge and psychology.
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