Bruna Frascolla
From its origin, Christianity has been an essentially universalist and exoteric religion. The apostles were given the mission of spreading the good news to all of humanity, and Saint Paul emphasized that there would be neither Jew nor Greek; that is, that ethnic distinctions would no longer have religious relevance.
From its origin, Christianity has been an essentially universalist and exoteric religion. The apostles were given the mission of spreading the good news to all of humanity, and Saint Paul emphasized that there would be neither Jew nor Greek; that is, that ethnic distinctions would no longer have religious relevance.
The expansion of Christianity was quite atypical, as it depended on convincing an empire that, initially, did not tolerate the new faith. However, the very culture of that empire left a gap that would shape much of Christianity: the appreciation for philosophy, knowledge, and rationality in general. Although Rome had a normal paganism as its public religion, without philosophical sophistication, the Empire's attitude towards philosophy was as reverent as possible, and the Romans gave thinkers immense freedom to seek all kinds of knowledge, without taboos for faith. Thus, the movement that began among poor fishermen in peripheral Judea was encouraged by the Roman environment to become intellectualized and to master philosophy. Christianity followed, in a painful and tortuous way, the path that Greek culture had quickly and comfortably taken in the Roman Empire.
But there is also an intrinsic factor in Christianity that made it suitable for following such a path. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, have rigid written rules that are confused with customary laws and do not leave a noble room for the exercise of rationality. Applying Sharia law, designed for nomadic tribes of the Middle Ages, is difficult. Living as an ultra-Orthodox Jew is equally difficult. In Christianity, there was initially the teaching of Jesus, which had nothing to tie its future developments to the Jewish reality of the first century. On the contrary: the old law was left behind, and a Christian would not have to worry about the endless Jewish food taboos, nor about circumcision. Now, if the law is not already given, it is necessary to use reason to create it in various countries, eras, and institutions. The Church has its Canon Law, which draws from Roman Law.
Thus, we can say that Christianity is the most rationalistic of the religions that exists since Antiquity. Perhaps the only one to coherently harbor a certain rationalism, since, while paganism simply remained silent in the face of speculation and gave freedom, Christianity saw reason as a gift from God, and took rational speculation very seriously. Knowing the truth - whether of the natural world or of matters of faith - is a noble and necessary task to avoid all kinds of error. Only with a great deal of Protestant and, later, Enlightenment propaganda is it possible to represent the civilization of the Aristotelian St. Thomas Aquinas as a well of obscurantism and irrationalism. This is an anachronistic projection of Protestantism itself; after all, it was Luther who declared that reason is the devil's whore and, therefore, an enemy of faith.
If Western Christianity was, in a way, rationalist, then Western Europe has spent more time as rationalist than as Christian - and from this we can conclude that the Protestant Reformation was more traumatic for suppressing rationalism than for suppressing Catholicism. So much so that, when invited to choose between faith and reason, the Western European give faith up.
It is not surprising, therefore, that modern science appeared in Catholic areas and prospered in Western Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant or Enlightenment's. Since Protestant and Enlightenment propaganda rewrites history, it is worth remembering or informing that the great milestone of modern science - the Copernican Revolution - was initiated by a Pole (Copernicus), continued by an Italian (Galileo), and found in a Frenchman (Descartes, who was no Huguenot) the first philosopher capable of creating a metaphysics to underpin the new non-Aristotelian physics that the Copernican Revolution presupposed (after all, in Aristotelianism, the earth is at the center of the universe because it is the heaviest element, and everything above the moon is composed of the element ether, the lightest of all).
In fact, Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) only ended up on the Index in the 17th century, and the Church maintained a great deal of speculative freedom in natural philosophy (which encompassed physics and astronomy): Copernicus presents, in theory, a new model of astronomical calculation - although all readers understood very well that it would be very difficult for the natural philosophy endorsed by the Church to explain why this calculation model was so accurate.
It turns out that it wasn't necessary to be a Catholic defender of Aristotelianism to be bothered by heliocentrism. For religious reasons, Luther and Melanchthon were bothered and undertook a campaign against Copernicus. There were those who tried to square the circle, that is, to maintain geocentrism and the Copernican calculation model. Thus, the Lutheran astronomer Tycho Brahe created a model in which the planets revolved around the sun, and the sun revolved around the earth.
The problem of the universal Church with heliocentrism was not elaborated in terms of faith versus reason. The problem was that the Church already had, so to speak, a complete official philosophy that encompassed physics and astronomy: Aristotelianism Christianized by Thomas Aquinas. And if the Church was willing to accept a lot of speculation, that didn't mean it was willing to suddenly declare its natural philosophy false, without having anything to put in its place. That's practically what Galileo did, overconfident because he was a friend of the pope.
The Protestant world, which in principle would be resistant to Copernicus and the "devil's whore," was encouraged by the possibility of studying nature to show that the Catholic Church relied on a false philosophy - and, from being frankly irrationalist, it became convinced that it was a defender of the freedom of men of science against the wickedness and obscurantism of the Inquisition. In addition to religious freedom, the Protestant world now demanded scientific freedom.
Protestants could have closed themselves off and invented a Lutheran physics, a Calvinist astronomy, just as the Soviets created a Soviet biology (Lysenkoism). For some reason, however, the overwhelming majority of Protestant scientists admitted into the realm of science what they denied to faith: universality. True science would also have to be true for Catholic scientists - who, instead of heeding the prohibitions of the Index and adhering to official science, maintained exchanges with Protestant scientists. Thus, the universality, banished by the Protestant Reformation, returns to the scene through science. Therein lies the origin of scientism: if science becomes the common ground of a society of various religions, then scientists end up invested with political and moral authority.
It so happens, however, that this choice of science as common ground has a precedent in the Middle Ages, and precisely with Aristotelianism. The exegesis of Aristotle's work led Jews, Christians, and Muslims to read and comment on it, thus recognizing a rational authority independent of faith. If we consider the existence of this medieval dialogue, the scope of Byzantine scholarship, and even more so, the great achievements of the Muslims (who revolutionized mathematics), it becomes difficult to understand why they did not participate in the creation of modern science, nor did they have an analogous development in parallel.
Here, we have seen why modern science and scientism emerged in Western Europe. It remains to be seen why they did not emerge elsewhere.