The Popes and Science Part 27

In the Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis expresses a sentiment quite similar to theirs. "Surely a humble husbandman that serveth G.o.d, is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, is occupied in studying the course of the heavens." Like the Fathers, a Kempis had reason to be disgusted with the astronomy of his time, for it was beginning to be impregnated again with the virus of Astrology. By refusing to follow such pseudo-scientific teachings, both a Kempis and the Fathers did a real if seemingly negative service to the science of astronomy.

"He was born under a lucky star." Language of this sort, used now only in pleasantry, recalls a form of superst.i.tion which was once accepted seriously by all men throughout the civilized world. In many a period, mankind has believed literally that the stars and planets exercised a real influence in shaping human lives. And there have been many epochs, ancient, medieval, and even modern, when astrology, the telling of fortunes by the stars, was given a rank among the learned professions.

Even now there occur occasional sporadic outbreaks of the same superst.i.tion. Along with other quacks and necromancers, astrologers are still occasionally in evidence, advertising their trade through the columns of the press. Indeed it is affirmed by the Catholic Encyclopedia that the growth of occultistic ideas is reintroducing astrology into society.

_Errors of Astrology_.--Whatever the popularity of this practice in the past, and whatever its prospective vogue in the near future, it is to be set down without qualification or hesitation as a delusion and a snare. To suppose that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human conduct is in its origin a pagan error, closely allied with the pagan myth that the sun, moon and stars are presided over by as many separate deities. Only thus could have originated the delusion that Jupiter and Venus would procure a blessed destiny, and Mars and Saturn a troubled one, for the children born at the time of their rising.

Nor can the cult be justified by an array of the names of those who have been its votaries. It is true that many astronomers in the {489} past, including the great Kepler himself, have practised the astrological art, casting horoscopes for their clients. But in most cases it would be found, at least in the modern period, that these scientists merely yielded through tolerance to the weakness of their age. In true astronomy there is no place whatever for astrology.

Besides being groundless the practice is to be condemned for its perilous moral tendencies. Distracting the soul from the worship of the spiritual G.o.d, who alone governs the universe, it subst.i.tutes for His action that of mere material objects, stars and planets, which it thus elevates to the rank of lesser G.o.ds or demons.

Pretending to forecast from birth what each man's course in life shall be, it robs the will of its proper share in moulding human conduct.

_The Christian Fathers_.--An interesting testimony to the former prevalence of this erroneous belief is found in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, "Guy Mannering," whose whole plot turns upon the fulfilment of an astrological prediction. Reading the history at hand the novelist had learned what complete sway the cult had formerly exercised, almost down to the time of his writing. It would have interested the celebrated author to know that there was, however, one long period in which astrology was absolutely and effectually excluded from Christian Europe. For over a thousand years Christendom remained free from this blight, thanks to the teachings of the Fathers of the Church.

In discussing the relations of the Fathers towards the astral science, we have already shown how they purged it of some of its grossest errors. But their princ.i.p.al service to the science remains now to be told. For amongst all the vagaries of the science of the heavens, astrology is both in theory and in practice the most deplorable. That the Fathers placed the weight of their great authority in the scale against this superst.i.tion, is one of the most praiseworthy of their achievements.

_First Efforts at Reform_.--At the time that the Fathers began to write, in the century just following the labors of the Apostles, astrology formed everywhere an integral part of the science of astronomy. It was taught in all the schools, Chaldean, Jewish, Grecian and Roman. Almost from the beginning the defenders of the Christian faith proceeded to attack this pernicious error, realizing how inimical it was to the spread of truth which Christ had come to impart. Already in his address to the Greeks, Tatian was heard denouncing the absurdities of Grecian astronomy and astrology. This was in the middle of the second century, just at the close of what is called the Apostolic Period.

A little later, Tertullian, the famed apologist of the then flourishing African Church, placed himself on record as the uncompromising enemy of astrology. With his usual vehemence of language he declared that "of astrologers there should be no speaking even" among Christians; and went to the length of saying that "he cannot hope for heaven whose finger or wand abuses the heavens." These and many similar utterances may be found in his Treatise on Idolatry.

_Respect for True Astrology_.--With this denunciation of magic and idolatry there went hand in hand, however, a genuine respect {490} for the proper science of the heavens. Contemporary with Tertullian, and like him one of the great Christian masters of the period, was Clement Alexandria. To the Catholic astronomer of to-day it is gratifying to find this Father of the Egyptian Church giving generous testimony to the worth of astronomical science. With just discrimination he praises astronomy as "leading the soul nearer to the creative power, as helpful to navigation and husbandry, and as making the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false."

Another contemporary, Hippolytus, was indeed unsparing in his denunciation of astrology. In a treatise of eleven quarto pages, contained in his "Refutation of All Heresies," he riddled with merciless logic the vain pretensions of the Greek astrologers. But he showed that he had no quarrel with a well ordered study of the heavens, by giving liberal praise to Ptolemy, the ablest of the astronomers.

_A Universal Teaching_.--In far distant Syria, then a choice realm in the Church's patrimony, there was at the beginning of the third century another school of Christian philosophers who joined with their brethren in West and East in waging war on the same dread enemy. A Syrian work, called the Book of the Astrologers, has two quarto pages of excellent quality recounting and scoring the absurdities of current astrological practices. It is so like Hippolytus' work that one seems an echo of the other.

Perhaps the most interesting of all these concordant denunciations is that found in the "Recognitions of Clement," a patristic writing probably of the third century. Here the treatises on astrology run to full ten chapters, a sign that the author had abundant knowledge of the subject. In this work astrology is refuted particularly from the moral point of view. It is convicted of the double charge of being fatalistic in its tendency and subversive of all morality.

"Men's conduct," says the author's thesis, "is due to their own free will and not to the configuration of the planets."

_Golden Age of Patristic Literature_.--So ran on in perfect unity and harmony the steady flow of patristic teaching. It reached its climax, as we should expect to find, in the heroic writers of the fourth century, the golden era of patrology. Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, re-echoed the voices of the past in p.r.o.nouncing astrology the work of demons. An Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, confirmed the decision of his predecessors by protesting against the amalgamation of astrology with the true science of nature.

So effectual indeed was the opposition to astrology of the earlier Christian writers, confirmed by the masters of the post-Nicene period, that the practice came to be regarded by all the faithful as a superst.i.tion and a danger, and continued to be so esteemed down to the time of the Crusades. For a full millennium, Christian Europe midst all its vicissitudes was spared the absurdities of astrological belief and practice, thanks to the patristic school of writers.

_A Surprising Omission_.--We have thought it well to bring to light these none too well-known facts regarding one important part of the astronomical teachings of the Fathers. How they could have {491} escaped the attention of Andrew D. White, or how he could have failed to find place for them in his voluminous work, it is difficult to understand.

His book bristles with accounts of superst.i.tions, always telling against the theologians, and in favor of the scientists. But astrology is absent even from the index of his work. Had he allotted it a chapter, his numerous readers would have learned that one great school of theological writers, enduring for a thousand years, did wage war on a certain sort of science, to wit, the pseudo-science of astrology.

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APPENDIX VIII.

SCIENCE IN AMERICA.

For Americans it is very probable that the chapter in the history of science which will demonstrate most clearly that there was not only no opposition on the part of the Popes or the Church authorities to the teachings of science or its development, but on the contrary encouragement and patronage, in spite of our English traditions to the contrary, is that which gives even very briefly the story of the evolution of science and its teaching on the American continent.

Notwithstanding the very prevalent impression, indeed we might say the practically universal persuasion, that there was nothing worth while talking about in any department of education in America before the nineteenth century, except what little there was in the English colonies, and while it is confidently a.s.sumed that above all science received no attention from our Southern neighbors, Spanish America not only surpa.s.sed English America in education, but far outdistanced English America in what was accomplished for scientific research and the evolution of the knowledge of a large number of scientific subjects in a great many ways.

Even those among us who thought themselves well read in American history have, as a rule, known almost nothing of this until comparatively recent years. Professor Bourne of Yale, whose untimely death deprived the United States of a distinguished historical scholar, was the first to point out emphatically how far ahead of the English were the Spanish colonies in every mode of education, but particularly in the cultivation of science. In many places Prescott had more than hinted at this, but the materials for the whole story were not available until our time.

Some of Bourne's paragraphs represent a severe arraignment of the ignorance that has characterized so much of our supposed knowledge of the Spanish Americans and their culture in the past. After reading them it is easy to realize the truth of the expression that another distinguished university man from the United States made use of not long ago, after having visited the South American countries. He declared that it was time for North Americans to wake up and _discover_ South America. Literally we have known almost nothing about it, indeed in a certain sense we have known much less than nothing, since we were quite sure that we knew {493} practically all there was to know while failing to know much that as Americans we ought to have known.

Two Spanish-American universities were founded under Papal charters almost a full century before Harvard as our first small college in English America began its career. Harvard was not to be a university in any proper sense of the term for a full century and a half after its foundation, while the universities of Mexico and Peru, largely under the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities and owing nearly everything to Church patronage under the Spanish Crown, had all the essential university faculties before the close of the sixteenth century. In spite of the predominant Church influence, which, if we were to credit former English traditions, must have been fatal to the evolution of science, Professor Bourne's researches show that in _the sixteenth century_ the Spanish-American universities were already doing such scientific work as the students in English America became interested in only during the _nineteenth century_. Obviously I prefer to quote Professor Bourne's own words for such startling a.s.sertions.

He said in his chapter on "The Transmission of Culture" in his volume in The American Nation Series, "Spain in America":

"Not all the inst.i.tutions of learning founded in Mexico in the _sixteenth century_ can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers _they surpa.s.sed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century_. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology.

Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican inst.i.tutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's '_Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana,_' Duran's '_Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana_' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."

Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chanca, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen (Ferdinand and Isabella) and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, was appointed by the Crown to accompany Columbus on his second expedition, partly for the sake of the health of those who went, but also in order to make scientific notes on American subjects. The report {494} of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the state of science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, Spanish knowledge of and interest in botany and metallurgy, as well as certain phases of zoology and other scientific departments, which serves to show how wide was the training in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago.

Dr. Chanca's epistle was republished as one of the Miscellaneous Publications of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution and a series of articles with regard to him from the pen of Dr. Fernandez de Ybarra has appeared in medical and other journals of the United States. Chanca is the author of a medical work on the Treatment of Pleurisy, published after his return in 1506, and a commentary on Arnold of Villanova's _De conservanda juventute et r.e.t.a.r.danda senectute_, "The Conservation of Youth and the r.e.t.a.r.dation of Old Age." Such a work is all the more interesting at this time because we know of De Soto's search for a "Fountain of Youth" in Florida and the popular belief in the existence of some such fabled miracle-worker for the old. Indeed most people seem inclined to think that such an idea represented very characteristically the naive medical science of the time. The Fountain of Youth was only like the many wonderful remedies--nearly always they are announced to have come from long distances--that are supposed to renew youthful vigor and which are sold so plentifully in our time. To take such popular notions as an index of the medical science of either that time or our own is quite absurd. The genuine medical science of this period is, as I have shown in my volume "The Century of Columbus," a never-ending source of surprise by its antic.i.p.ation of many ideas that are usually supposed to be much later in origin and not a few of which are fondly supposed to be original discoveries of our time.

Evidently Spanish interest in science was broad and deep and this is confirmed by the story of the medical schools in connection with these Spanish-American universities which is of special significance. My own medical _alma mater_, the University of Pennsylvania, whose medical school was the first in the United States, erected a tablet some years ago in which it was at least hinted that this was the oldest medical school in America. A few years later, on the erection of a second tablet to the earliest medical faculty, additional knowledge having come in the meantime, the inscription on this was worded so as to refer to the first school of medicine in North America.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page 272), is the oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest hospital in America was that of Santa Fe (in Mexico) founded in 1531 by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality and all the works of charity (_A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock, New York_).]

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The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about 1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical teaching in the United States was organized about 1770. During the course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics.

The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the same time.

With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards.

From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology, ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants, especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to {496} compile works of serious character which are well known by those who are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in India and South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material, plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful investigation.

Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined only to the upper cla.s.ses nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where, under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments, the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were actually antic.i.p.ating for the young Indians some of the modes of vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused among us at the present time.

No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec priesthood relaxed its bonds and the ma.s.ses were relieved from the earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost untellable in its {497} completeness, brought the natives of the country that they had invaded to ruin and practically obliteration.

This experiment in applied sociology so successfully accomplished must be placed to the credit of the Spaniards also, and it stands out with all the more interest by contrast with English neglect of duty.

While seeing so clearly all that was accomplished in Mexico under the influence of the Church for education and social progress and scientific teaching and training in the arts and crafts and trades, Professor Bourne cannot quite bring himself to condemn entirely the almost complete failure that characterized all the relations of the English-speaking peoples to the natives here in America and he even seems to find some justification for their harsh treatment of the Indians. I think that our point of view generally has changed a great deal in this matter even in the last ten or fifteen years since we have come to recognize our social obligations more clearly and, above all, have come to appreciate better what is meant by "the white man's burden" in his relations to the dark-skinned peoples who are lower in the scale of civilization than we are. The Civil War did much to correct American notions on this point, but our attention to problems in the Philippines has done even more. I shall leave Professor Bourne's paragraph to speak for itself and each reader to say for himself whether the English method of dealing with the Indian is justified by comparison with the ruthless processes of nature as Professor Bourne would hint.

"Far different was the advancing frontier in English America with its clean sweep, its clash of elemental human forces. Our own method prepared a home for a more advanced civilization and a less variously mixed population and its present fruits seem to justify it as the ruthless processes of nature are justified; but a comparison of the two systems does not warrant self-righteousness on the part of the English in America."

Indeed we might well say far from it, for the almost literal obliteration of the Indian in North America as of the natives in Australia and New Zealand, only so much more complete there, represents ever to be regretted blots on the history of civilization for which there can be no possible justification.

Professor Bourne does not hesitate to continue the comparison of Spanish and English America down even to our own time and in doing so points out that our advances which have for the time being put us so far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed population with so many barbarous elements {498} in them to keep up with our comparatively h.o.m.ogeneous population, h.o.m.ogeneous at least in the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe.

While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for the Spanish Americans is all the more telling.

"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, _more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, inst.i.tutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science_. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam."

If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of Columbus" (_Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914_), it will be quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the early sixteenth century.