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From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net

A Categorical Mistake: ‘Science’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Religion’ in the Middle
Ages.

By Joanne Edge

August 13, 2019 by Andreas Sommer

Dr. Joanne Edge specialises in late-medieval and early modern European
social and cultural history, with an emphasis on medicine and the
‘occult’ sciences: divination, magic and astrology. She did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of London,
and held a four-year postdoctoral position as Assistant Editor on the
Casebooks Project at the University of Cambridge. She is currently
Latin Manuscripts Cataloguer at the John Rylands Library, University
of Manchester.

The last two decades have seen the rise of the Irritating STEM Bro.™
Two well-known examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson and Steven Pinker:
Great Men from Important Science Backgrounds who blithely talk and
write about the history of their topic as if they are expertly
qualified polymaths. Both use the word ‘medieval’ pejoratively, and
see the history of science as an inexorable, teleological march of
progress from the fantastic Classical Period to the Terrible Medieval
Dark Ages and then woo Renaissance! And then things gradually getting
better and better until hurrah! We are enlightened and clever in the
21st century!

Quite simply, though, this is insulting, ahistorical nonsense. The
problem, which Irritating STEM Bros™ don’t understand – or more likely don’t want to acknowledge – is that our modern categories of
‘science’, ‘religion’, and ‘magic’ do not map in any meaningful way onto the medieval period. So let’s first examine this problem of
categories.

Anachronistic Misnomers

‘Scientia’ in medieval Latin simply meant ‘knowledge’: the investigation of the material world and its properties was called
‘natural philosophy’. So ‘medieval science’ is a difficult concept for starters. To be ‘religious’ in the Middle Ages was to be a member of a monastic order, and the opposite of this was ‘secular’. The very idea
of being religious in the modern sense was only really conceived of
when there was a widespread idea of not being religious ­–we have the
19th century to thank for this meaning of the word.

Moreover, ‘theology’ and ‘philosophy’ were not separate disciplines at this time. The framework of Western European thought in the Middle
Ages was largely one of Christianity combined with ancient philosophy (Aristotle being the most significant), which had been transmitted to
the Middle Ages largely via the Greco-Arabic translations of the 12th
century. So: medieval thinkers did not conceive of what we call
‘religion’ and what we call ‘science’ as separate, mutually exclusive categories.

Let’s move on then, to ‘magic’. If there was ever a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ word, magic would be it:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass).
So what did it mean? It depends who you ask. Medieval thinkers and
writers used several Latin words to mean the sort of practices we
might deem occult – sortilege, superstitio, magia and more. But those practising such impermissible arts might think they were acting as
perfectly pious Christians, and magic rituals often included
invocations to God or angels. How were these invocations different to
orthodox prayers to God? I could spend hours trying to define medieval
magic without getting anywhere: not one definition is completely
satisfactory.

There are also significant overlaps between ‘magic’ and ‘science’ in the Middle Ages – a good example being astrology. Was this legitimate
science based on logical principles of the observation of the heavens,
or an illicit act of divination that operated via the meddling of
demons? Again, it would depend who you asked.

So: what we call ‘religion’, ‘magic’ and ‘science’ were not separate
categories (or even necessarily concepts) in the Middle Ages.

Let’s now take a look at where the Irritating STEM Bros™ get it – probably wilfully – wrong.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘Alternative History’

Tyson notoriously likes to refer to the irrational, religious,
superstitious ‘Dark Ages’ as a counterpoint to the rational,
scientific, logical world of modern science. Here’s one example: in
January 2016, Tyson tweeted that the idea of a round earth was “lost
to the Dark Ages”:

This is categorically untrue. But even if medieval thinkers had
thought the earth was flat, that would have been OK: the idea that we
only value what people in the past ‘got right’ is part of the same
problem. In fact, the medievals-as-flat-earthers idea was one of the
many myths started and perpetuated in the 19th century: medieval
philosophers generally conceived of a round earth. There’s even a
whole Wikipedia page dedicated to this exact topic which is broadly
accurate. But something tells me Tyson chooses to ignore it because it
this doesn’t fit with his narrative of irrational, superstitious
Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages didn’t espouse one monolithic set of values or ideas
(as I often tell my students, medieval people didn’t share a brain).
The word ‘medieval’ itself is anachronistic: a term applied
retrospectively by Renaissance thinkers onwards to indicate a time
that was neither ‘Classical’ nor ‘Renaissance’ but ‘in the middle’ – a
time where ‘progress’ ended and the ‘discoveries’ of the Classical world could be continued after a time of stagnation. How Renaissance
and later thinkers conceived of and used the Middle Ages, as a
contrast to their own time is interesting in terms of what it says
about them and their own times. But it’s not something appropriate for
Tyson and his contemporaries to do.

On the other hand, it is jaw-droppingly arrogant to assume that modern
science has everything sorted out, just fine, and that we’re heading
for further, linear progress. That’s not to say that as a disabled
person I’m not glad for the medication and therapy that I’ve been able
to access thanks to evidence-based medicine and randomised
double-blind trials: just that we must place ourselves in our own
context just as we must those in the past. Tyson does himself and his
subject no favours by continuing to represent what is complex as
simple.

Steven Pinker’s Religion of Progress

Psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our
Nature: Why Violence Has Declined has as its central thesis the idea
that violence has declined over time, and that we now live in the most
peaceful era yet. This is, he tells us, due to five main developments:
the monopolisation on the use of force by the judiciary stemming from
the rise of the modern nation-state (as expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan of the mid-17th century); commerce, feminisation,
cosmopolitanism and the ‘escalator of reason’.

It’s this last factor, which is of most interest here, this ‘escalator
of reason’ which says that we now apply ‘rationality’ to human
affairs. This, Pinker tells us, means there’s less violence in modern
society than there was because we’re more rational. And he’s not shy
to use the Awful Irrational Medieval Dark Ages as a counterpoint to
the Brilliant Post-Enlightenment Modern Times of Awesome.

But are we more rational than our medieval counterparts? What does ‘rational’ even mean?

People in the past were in general no less ‘stupid’ or ‘clever’ than
we are. Medieval thinkers were certainly as rational as modern ones,
if we consider that they worked from a different set of assumptions
from our own.

For example, let’s return to astrology, in the later Middle Ages
widely considered to be a sophisticated way of making sense of the
cosmos and of mundane life. If you accept the central tenet of
astrology – that the position of the heavens has an effect on worldly
matters – then astrology is perfectly ‘rational’. It works according
to its own internal, very complex rules. Of course not every medieval
thinker believed fully in astrology and there were several
contemporary sceptics including John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) and
Nicole Oresme (c. 1320-1382). Seeing the effect the moon had on the
tides, and apparently on menstruation, was very visible, tangible
evidence of the effect of the planets on the mundane world.

Astronomical tables for working out the best times for bloodletting
from a folding almanac. BL Harley 5311, leaf H (made in 1406): (f. 5r
here). Image credit: British Library, London.
And what about medieval medicine, often reduced in the media to dung
poultices, leeches and witchcraft? The orthodox medicine of the Middle
Ages was basically the orthodox medicine of antiquity, based on the
teachings of Hippocrates and Galen. And while it certainly doesn’t
resemble anything that we might think would ‘work’ for our ailments
today, it was based on the notion of humoral theory, which followed
logical principles: that the body’s four ‘humours’ – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – all had to be kept in balance for the
body to be healthy.

This is why bloodletting and laxatives were such common treatments for
illness and not in fact the irrational practices of superstitious
people. So, if you accept the basic humoral framework, then humoral
medicine is ‘rational’. Many medieval writers and practitioners
followed a range of medical practice alongside humoral theory, as
evidenced from surviving manuscripts. These ranged from tried and
tested remedies to occult magic. Humoral theory was just one mode of
thought, though the dominant one among educated elites.


A physician letting blood. BL Sloane 2435 f. 11v, (produced in
northern France c. 1285). Image credit: British Library, London.
Pinker’s entire book is a case for the modern era, a panegyric to what
he sees as ‘progress’, and a build up to his 2016 work, Enlightenment
Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress which of
course follows the same thesis: the Enlightenment was brilliant and
everything is better now than it was before. But this is simplistic
rubbish. Pinker does exactly what he accuses medieval thinkers of –
not relying on rigorous evidence. He cherry picks evidence, which
suits his thesis and quotes historians of the Enlightenment out of
context to back his over-simplistic teleological narrative.

Pinker and Tyson see ‘science’ and ‘religion’ (which they seem to conflate with ‘magic’) as immutable, separate categories that can
never intertwine. But as I hope I’ve shown, the truth is far more
complex than that, and we do our medieval ancestors a profound
disservice by blanketly dismissing them and their practices as
‘irrational’ and ‘superstitious’.

What is interesting about the Middle Ages is precisely how different
it was to our own time yet also how similar. And it is finding the
familiar in the alien – the internal logic of astrology, for example –
that makes this topic endlessly fascinating. Tyson and Pinker take
what is interesting and ask all the wrong questions. Was there science
in the Middle Ages? No, not as we would know it today. But many
medieval modes of thinking conformed to their own internal logic: a
logic based on quite a different framework to our own.

Source: https://t.co/618QtXnEud?amp=1


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com

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