Second most important was weather magic used to quiet storms and bring rain for the crops. As would be expected, there were many specialists offering weather magic, but few details have survived compared with those who specialized in bringing bad weather, especially hail and drought to destroy a neighbor’s crops.
Love and sex magic probably was the third most common form of magic, with revenge magic close behind. Love magic took many forms. Often it was used to cause a particular person to fall in love with the individual who purchased or performed the magic in order to gain a spouse. Often too, it was used for purposes of seduction. Sex magic was mainly the erectile dysfunction treatment of the times, purchased by men suffering from impotence, or by their wives. Not surprisingly there also was an extensive store of magic meant to cause impotence or to suppress sexual desires. Indeed, St. Hildegard of Bingen wrote extensive instructions about how to use mandrake root to suppress sexuality—oddly enough mandrake was far more often used to cause sexual desire and fertility, as in Genesis 30:14–16.
Revenge magic was widely known as
maleficia
or “evil doings” and consisted of attempts to harm others directly by causing death or injury, or indirectly by damaging crops or livestock. Archeology has turned up many magical curses scratched on lead tablets, one of which reads: “I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts, and memory.” Seven nails had been pounded through the sheet of lead on which this curse was written.
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Lawsuits brought against malefactors often presented evidence that “magical amulets” had been discovered under the plaintiffs’ thresholds or even under their beds, placed there by the accused in order to do them harm.
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There also are many recorded cases, especially in medieval Switzerland, of lawsuits filed against persons accused of causing storms to destroy their neighbor’s crops.
Sometimes magic was used in pursuit of wealth, including a variety of efforts to turn base metals into gold. And, of course, there were various magical efforts to read the future, not only via astrology, but also through study of various arcane texts such as the
kabbalah.
However none of these kinds of magical activities involved the general population. Finally, there were all manner of minor magical techniques used by everyone to bring them good luck.
Church Magic
The Christian hierarchy objected to popular magic not because it was superstitious nonsense (in fact they believed it worked), but because it was rooted in paganism and competed with the church for support. Hence massive efforts were made not merely to suppress it, but to replace it.
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As would be expected, the greatest emphasis was placed on providing church forms of medical magic.
As already noted in chapter 11, from early days the church transformed the thousands of healing springs, wells, and shrines into Christian sites, often associated with a saint or martyr. The church also sanctioned and promulgated many magical procedures for the treatment of specific health problems. However, unlike the treatments offered by the village Wise Ones, medical church magic very seldom was combined with herbs or physical procedures, but usually consisted entirely of Christianized spells and incantations. For example, a recommended treatment for someone with a speck in her or his eye was for the priest to pray:
Thus I adjure you, O speck, by the living God and the holy God, to disappear from the eye of the servant of God (name of victim), whether you are black, red, or white. May Christ make you go away. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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When a woman suffered from menstrual problems, the cure was to write these words on a slip of paper, “By Him, and with Him, and in Him,” and then to place the slip of paper on the woman’s forehead.
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The church also provided a great deal of weather magic. Weather crosses, blessed by a local priest, were erected in fields as far back as the sixth century, to protect against hail and high winds,
86
and church bells often were rung to drive away thunderstorms.
87
And, of course, it was common to have a local priest pray for rain, as needed.
Although the church made vigorous efforts to provide medical and weather magic, it entirely rejected both love and revenge magic. The former was resoundingly condemned as bordering on rape when used to charm women and as violating the individual free will of both men and women. Of course, condemnation did not eliminate it. In fact, given the intensity of market demand, Christian variants of love magic arose—albeit they were forbidden—and even Christian clergy sometimes were involved in their use. For example, a priest in Modena confessed in 1585 that he had acceded to the request of a local noblewoman to baptize a piece of magnet thus giving it the power to attract her husband away from promiscuous women.
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Revenge magic also was condemned as unchristian as well as antisocial, giving an uncontested market to those laypersons willing to deal in
maleficia.
An additional advantage enjoyed by lay magical practitioners was proximity—at a time when many places lacked a priest, there were Wise Ones in every village and hamlet, since they were local people, very often midwives, on whom their neighbors depended for medical as well as magical services.
Not surprisingly, popular magic soon was infused with elements of church magic. Many spells and formulations made use of holy water taken from church fonts. “People said the Lord’s Prayer while casting lead to tell fortunes. They... invoked the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to protect chickens from hawks and humans from the evil eye.... Village healers cured cattle of worms by spitting three times in appeal to the Trinity.... They concocted infusions of baptismal water against bed-wetting.”
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The mixture of church and nonchurch magic was so extensive that people even bound amulets into the swaddling clothes of infants, to ward off enchantments when they took them to be baptized.
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Theology and Tragedy
All magic works some of the time. Many magical medical treatments and other uses of church magic often seemed successful—the desired outcome was gained. But because the nonchurch magic also succeeded (probably more often than church magic because it was usually associated with herbal and other physical treatments, some of which were effective), it could not be dislodged by church magic. That raised a dangerous question.
Christianity is a theological religion. It isn’t satisfied with mystery and meditation, but relentlessly seeks to ground its entire system of beliefs in logic and reason. This has many admirable features, including the way the Christian commitment to rationalism provided a model for the development of Western science. But when confronted with magic, this aspect of Christianity turned out to have tragic consequences. In other cultural settings magic is usually taken for granted. Thus, the ancient Romans and Greeks devoted little or no effort to explaining why magic works—as it appears to do, at least some of the time. But Christian thinkers demanded to know
why
magic works. A clear answer could easily be provided for why church magic worked. God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, sometimes Mary, and various saints and angels were the active agents; when church magic failed it was because these supernatural beings had decided it should not work in a given instance. Clearly, however, these hallowed figures did not cause nonchurch magic to work.
Who
then? The answer seemed equally obvious: evil supernatural beings, especially Satan. From there it was a short, obvious step to deducing that thousands of Wise Ones all across Europe were involved in satanic dealings. The witch hunts were born.
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The European conception of witchcraft was entirely the product of theological reflection; there was no basis for it in the popular magical culture. As the celebrated Norman Cohn (1915–2007) reported: “Nowhere, in the surviving [medieval] books on magic, is there a hint of Satanism. Nowhere is it suggested that the magician should ally himself with the demonic hosts, or do evil to win the favour of the Prince of Evil.”
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As the equally celebrated Richard Kieckhefer put it: “The introduction of diabolism... [resulted] from a desire of the literate elite to make sense of [magic].”
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Thus it was university professors who played the leading roles in generating and sustaining the terrible witch hunts that stormed across Europe.
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And it was the continuing magical activities of the peasants and urban lower classes in particular that gave substance to the witch hunts.
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Ironically, despite the nearly universal belief to the contrary, the earliest, most vigorous, and most effective opposition to the witch hunts came from the Spanish Inquisition (see chapter 19). It was the inquisitors who never lost sight of the fact that the Wise Ones were performing magic in good conscience and were not knowingly involved in pacts with the devil.
Conclusion
M
EDIEVAL TIMES WERE NOT
the “Age of Faith.” For the vast majority of medieval Europeans, their “religious” beliefs were a hodgepodge of pagan, Christian, and superstitious fragments; they seldom went to church; and they placed greater faith in the magic of the Wise Ones than in the services of the clergy. The frequent claims that empty churches and low levels of religious activity in Europe today reflect a steep decline in piety are wrong—it was always thus. As Martin Luther summed up in 1529, after recognizing the failure of his campaign to educate and arouse the general public: “Dear God help us.... The common man, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine; and indeed many pastors are in effect unfit and incompetent to teach. Yet they all are called Christians, are baptized, and enjoy the holy sacraments—even though they cannot recite either the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed or the Commandments. They live just like animals.”
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Chapter Sixteen
Faith and the Scientific “Revolution”
E
VERYONE KNOWS THAT IT TOOK
Columbus years to raise the funds needed to launch his famous voyage of discovery because of the unanimous opposition by church scholars and officials, all of whom were certain that the world must be flat. Hence if anyone sailed west to reach the Far East, they would simply fall off the edge of the earth. As reported by the famous Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), founder and first president of Cornell University, and author of the extremely influential two-volume study
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom:
The warfare of Columbus [with religion] the world knows well: how the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how sundry wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations from Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine; how even after he was triumphant, and after his voyage had greatly strengthened the theory of the earth’s sphericity... the Church by its highest authority solemnly stumbled and persisted in going astray.... [T]he theological barriers to this geological truth yielded but slowly.... Many conscientious [religious] men oppose the doctrine for two hundred years longer.
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Unfortunately, nearly every word of White’s account is a lie—as are so many of the other stories he wrote about conflicts between religion and science in his now discredited, but long-esteemed, work. Long before the fifteenth century, every educated European, including Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round.
2
Sphere
was the title of the most popular medieval textbook on astronomy, written early in the thirteenth century. The opposition Columbus encountered was not about the shape of the earth, but about the fact that he was wildly wrong about the circumference of the globe. He estimated it was about 2,800 miles from the Canary Islands to Japan. In reality it is about 14,000 miles. His opponents knew how far it was and opposed his voyage on grounds that Columbus and his men would all die at sea. Had the Western Hemisphere not been there, and no one knew it existed, the
Niña,
Pinta,
and
Santa Maria
might as well have fallen off the earth, for everyone aboard would have died of thirst and starvation.
Amazingly enough, there is no hint about Columbus having to prove that the earth is round in any contemporary accounts, not in his own
Journal
nor in his son’s
History of the Admiral
. The story was entirely unknown until more than three hundred years later when it suddenly appeared in a biography of Columbus published in 1828. The author? Washington Irving (1783–1859), best known for his fiction: in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
he introduced the Headless Horseman.
3
Although the tale about Columbus and the flat earth is equally fictional, Irving presented it as fact. Almost at once the story was eagerly embraced by historians who were so certain of the wickedness and stupidity of the medieval church that they felt no need to seek any additional confirmation, although some of them must have realized that the story had appeared out of nowhere. Anyway, that’s how the tradition that Columbus proved the world was round got into all the textbooks.
Far more serious is that many similar falsehoods about the conflict between science and religion were made up by famous writers such as Voltaire and Gibbon during the “Enlightenment”—the same folks who invented the “Dark Ages”—and these fabrications have been repeated and added to ever since by militant atheists such as A. D. White, Bertrand Russell, and Richard Dawkins. The truth is that not only did Christianity not impede the rise of science; it was essential to it, which is why science arose only in the Christian West! Moreover, there was no sudden “Scientific Revolution”; the great achievements of Copernicus, Newton, and the other stalwarts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the product of normal scientific progress stretching back for centuries. But first it will be clarifying to define science.
What Is Science?
S
CIENCE IS NOT JUST
technology, nor is it simply knowledge. Many societies have known how to build dams and bridges, but have had no understanding of physics. The same can be said about the extensive knowledge of animal and plant life possessed by many societies that had no glimmer of the science of biology. For example, all but the most primitive societies can identify the seeds of many plants and know how to plant them and make them grow. But only societies having advanced science know why and how seeds are formed and how they develop into new plants.
Science is a
method
utilized in
organized efforts
to formulate
explanations of nature,
always subject to modifications and corrections through
systematic observations
. Thus science consists of two components:
theory
and
research
. Theorizing is the explanatory aspect of science. Scientific theories are
abstract statements
about why and how some portion of nature (including human social life) fits together and works. Of course, not all abstract statements, not even those offering explanations of nature, qualify as scientific theories; otherwise theology would be a science. Instead, abstract statements are scientific only if it is possible to deduce from them some definite predictions and prohibitions about what will be observed. Scientific research consists of making observations that are relevant to the predictions and prohibitions from a theory. If the observations contradict what has been deduced from the theory, then we know that the theory is wrong and must be rejected or modified. By “organized efforts” it is recognized that science is not merely random discovery. Instead, scientists pursue their efforts systematically, intentionally, and collectively—even scientists who work alone do not do so in isolation. From earliest days, scientists have constituted networks and have been very communicative.
This definition of science excludes all efforts through most of human history to explain and control the natural world. Most of these prior efforts are not science because until more recent times “technical progress—sometimes considerable—was mere empiricism,” as the revered Marc Bloch (1886–1944) put it.
4
That is, progress was the product of observation and of trial and error, but was lacking in explanations—in theorizing. These prescientific funds of information are best described as lore, skills, wisdom, techniques, crafts, technology, engineering, learning, or simply knowledge. But, until such observations are linked to testable theories, they remain merely “facts.” Charles Darwin put it very well: “About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at that rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.”
5
Of course, Darwin was a man of very narrow interests since many observations are of great value without having any scientific implications (one can enjoy a full moon without scrambling to see if it fits with modern astronomical predictions). But Darwin was correct about what is a scientific observation: its purpose is to test a theory.
Clearly, then, science is limited to statements about natural and material reality, about things that are at least in principle observable. Hence there are entire realms of discourse that science is unable to address, including such matters as the existence of God. Nor can there be a physics of miracles.
For all the intellectual achievements of the classical Greeks or Eastern philosophers, their work was not scientific since their observations were without regard for theories and their theorizing ignored observational tests. For example, Aristotle (384–322
BCE
) taught that the speed at which objects fall to earth is proportional to their weight, heavy things falling much faster than light things. Had he taken a stroll to any nearby cliff, taking along a big rock and a little one, he could have observed that this is false. But Aristotle was not a scientist. Nobody was until a few Europeans slowly evolved the scientific method in medieval times.
The Scholastic Origins of Science
J
UST AS THERE WERE
no “Dark Ages,” there was no “Scientific Revolution.” Rather, the notion of a Scientific Revolution was invented to discredit the medieval church by claiming that science burst forth in full bloom (thus owing no debts to prior Scholastic scholars) only when a weakened Christianity no longer could suppress it. This claim usually is illustrated by a number of stories of discovery and repression that are as false as the story of Columbus and the flat earth. A first step was to discredit the achievements of the Scholastics or school men of the medieval era. John Locke (1632–1704) condemned the Scholastics as lost in trivial concerns, as great “mintmasters” of useless terms as an “expedient to cover their ignorance.”
6
Others accused them of pursuing absurd interests such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Eventually the word
scholastic
became an epithet defined as “pedestrian and dogmatic” according to most dictionaries. But in fact the great scientific achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were produced by a group of scholars notable for their piety, who were based in Christian universities, and whose brilliant achievements were carefully built upon an invaluable legacy of centuries of brilliant Scholastic scholarship.
7
Copernicus and Normal Science
Since the start of the “Scientific Revolution” is usually attributed to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) it is appropriate to examine him and his intellectual predecessors to demonstrate that his was a work of “normal” science.
According to the fashionable account, Copernicus was an obscure Catholic canon in far-off Poland, an isolated genius who somehow discovered that, contrary to what everyone believed, the earth revolves around the sun. Moreover, the story goes, the church made unrelenting efforts to suppress this view.
There is far more fiction than fact in this account. Rather than being some obscure Pole, Copernicus received a superb education at the best Italian universities of the time: Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. The idea that the earth circles the sun did not come to him out of the blue; he was taught the essential fundamentals leading to the heliocentric model of the solar system by his Scholastic professors. What Copernicus added was not a leap, but the implicit next step in a long line of discovery and innovation stretching back for centuries.
Because the Greeks thought vacuums could not exist, they assumed that the universe was a sphere filled with transparent matter. If so, the movement of all heavenly bodies would need to constantly overcome friction. To solve this problem, many Greek philosophers transformed the sun, moon, stars, and other bodies into living creatures having the capacity to move on their own, and others imagined various sorts of pushers in the form of gods and spirits. Early Christian scholars assumed that angels pushed the heavenly bodies along their courses. It was the famous English Franciscan monk William of Ockham (1295–1349)—he of Ockham’s razor—who did away with the pushers by recognizing that space is a frictionless vacuum. He then anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion by proposing that once God had set the heavenly bodies in motion, they would remain in motion ever after since there was no force to counter their motion.
The next vital step toward the heliocentric model was taken by Nicole d’Oresme (1325–1382), the most brilliant (and sadly neglected) of the Scholastic scientists, who, among many other major achievements, firmly established that the earth turns on its axis, thus giving the illusion that the other heavenly bodies circle the earth. D’Oresme served for many years as rector of the University of Paris and ended his career as bishop of Lisieux. The idea that the earth rotates had occurred to many people through the centuries, but two objections had always made it seem implausible. First, if the earth turns, why wasn’t there a constant and powerful wind from the east, caused by the rotation of the earth in that direction? Second, why did an arrow shot straight up into the air not fall well behind (or in front of) the shooter? Since this does not happen, since the arrow comes straight back down, the earth cannot turn. Building on the work of Jean Buridan (1295–1358), his predecessor as rector of the University of Paris, d’Oresme proposed that there is no wind from the east because the motion of the earth is imparted to all objects on the earth or close by, including the atmosphere. This also explains why arrows fall straight back down: they not only have vertical impetus imposed on them by the bow, but they also have horizontal impetus conferred on them by the turning earth.
Then came Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a German who became bishop of Brixen and then was elevated to cardinal in 1448. He was educated at the great Italian University of Padua, where he learned that the earth turns in response to “an impetus conferred upon it at the beginning of time.” Having noted that “as we see from its shadow in eclipses... the earth is smaller than the sun” but larger than the moon, Nicholas went on to observe that “whether a man is on the earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless center, and that all other things are in motion.”
8
It followed that humans need not trust their perceptions that the earth is stationary.
All of this prior theorizing was well known to Copernicus—having been carefully summed-up in Albert of Saxony’s
Physics,
the first edition of which was published at Padua in 1492, just prior to Copernicus’s becoming a student there.