On Scientific Revolutions and European-ness

By Robin Reich

The Problem: “Only Europeans could engage in the kind of scientific discovery that we engage with, that, that will to kind of, keep going, that will to follow reason to its very limit, even if it shatters everything that you thought before. There’s only Europeans have went through these tumults of Reformations, of Enlightenment, of, you know, turning on ourselves. Only Europeans can be like this.” (Richard Spencer)

The Response:

This kind of claim about European scientific advancement comes up again and again, and even as an open-minded person is compelled to fight against the bigotry behind this statement, it is important to recognize that even historians working on the history of science have difficulty grappling with how Europe as a whole came to dominate scientific thought, starting around the fifteenth century. The bigotry in this statement is not in challenging the idea that non-Europeans had sophisticated scientific ideas, or that they participated in the production of science; it is in the claim that Europeans are uniquely capable of open-mindedness, of following logic to the point that it challenges our most firmly-held beliefs. The issue with this statement is that it assumes scientific innovation is linear with a single origin. But if we as a society are going to really appreciate the increasingly massive role scientific research plays in our lives, we are going to have to confront the fact that innovation does not develop according to plan, and that ideas come from a lot of different sources. This is especially clear if we go back to the time before the Scientific Revolution, the time Spencer is referring to, when a trans-regional polyglot community jointly created the concept we now call science. 

Let us begin with what we know about science, then. To our modern sensibilities, science is the systematic study of the world around us, which we divide into categories such as organic matter (biology) or the laws that govern the movement of matter (physics). This systematic study is conducted in a logical manner, wherein we frame a question, posit an answer, collect data, and draw conclusions: the scientific method. We hold that trustworthy results in this method are reproducible. To medieval peoples broadly, science was simply the study of knowledge writ large – the word “science” comes from the Latin scientia meaning knowledge, and it has a direct counterpart in Arabic, ‘ilm, which in the Middle Ages similarly meant knowledge and now means science. Medieval science could include methods for deriving knowledge (logic, geometry) or the observation of the natural world (astronomy, the natural sciences) or thoughts on the guiding principles behind these systems (philosophy, mathematics).

The divisions between these fields were not sharp, and often included discourses on many topics we would not now consider science, such as astrology (predicting events based on the movements of planets and constellations) and dream interpretation, which historians denote collectively as the “occult sciences”. But more confusingly for the modern reader is the intense involvement of religion in topics of medieval science, especially since modern debates like evolution have pitted scientific theory against literal biblical interpretation. Religion and science were neither diametrically opposed in medieval thought, nor did one come directly from the other. Instead, there existed a spectrum of religious involvement in scientific thought, and this was unilaterally true across Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and central Asia. Sometimes, religious texts or ideas were used to supply answers to unanswerable questions. In the twelfth century, thinkers across these regions, from a range of religions, became concerned with the ultimate origin of the world and its functions, and scholars debated the degree to which God was involved, whether God had merely created autonomous systems or if at every moment God was constantly recreating the entire world. This question is both scientific and religious in nature.

The breadth of the studies allowed medieval thinkers to be creative and flexible in answering such massive questions, which in turn allowed the questions to change. It was in the pursuit of expansive questions about the nature of the universe that medieval thinkers crafted the disciplines that would eventually become modern science. Medieval thinkers, wondering how God created the matter of the physical world, experimented with producing artificial imitations of natural substances – these experiments and the systematic study surrounding them was the late-medieval science of alchemy, and as this study became the systematic organization of matter it evolved into the modern science of chemistry. Medieval thinkers did not set out to uncover the objectively true system of organization of matter – they set out to understand how matter is created, and in thinking broadly about that topic, developed a notion of systematic order and objectivity.

When we talk about these scientific innovators, it is tempting to point to specific people whose contributions we now consider especially important, and to see them only in their most immediate context. This line of thinking has led those not on Spencer's side of this argument to point to the wealth of so-called "Islamic science" of the Middle Ages and declare that in fact Europe had nothing to do with any kind of scientific advancement before the fifteenth century. But when we begin to consider Islamic science, it is immediately clear that this category is not bounded geographically, linguistically, or even religiously as the term would suggest. In fact, a quick overview of medieval Islamic science reveals that scientific innovation is hard to pin down and is as wide-ranging and indirect in its path as the ideas themselves described above.

Common identifying features that we might use to describe people from Europe show up repeatedly in sources typically considered “Islamic” - the authors are often Christian, living in Europe, and writing in European languages. For instance, the ninth-century Syrian physician Qusta ibn Luqa was in fact Christian - although his name is usually written in Arabic, in English we would call him Constantine son of Luke, named in honor of the first Christian Roman emperor. Or the eleventh-century (likely Tunisian) translator Constantine the African, who, despite his epithet, issued all of his writings in Latin from the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, near Naples, Italy. And then, of course, is the huge volume of scientific work produced in Spain before 1492 (when Muslims and Jews were unilaterally expelled). There are Muslims such as the twelfth-century philosopher of Cordoba, Ibn Rushd, who was so popular in Latin in the following centuries he is more commonly known as Averroes (his Latinized name). This period in Spain also produced a substantial number of Latin translations of scientific texts that had arrived in Arabic, but many of which were actually of Classical Greek or Latin origin, such as the geography of Ptolemy, the philosophy of Aristotle, or the mathematics of Euclid. Do we consider these works European or Islamic? Are they medieval or Classical?

Can we even consider Classical authors themselves to have been European? Dioscorides, for example, the Classical originator of both botany and encyclopedic organization in the Roman Empire during the first century AD, was from what is now Turkey, and conducted his research in what is now Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya. Even Greece was not considered Europe until the Greek nationalist movement of the nineteenth century.

Conversely, could so-called Islamic science continue to be considered such once it became part of the scientific corpus of Latin Europe? Among the most widely-read texts translated during this era was the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, a Persian physician of the eleventh century, which was used as a medical textbook in Europe through the eighteenth century. The origin of that text may be Islamic or Persian, but it took on a life of its own in Latin Europe, so perhaps it does not properly belong to either category. And certainly the origin of these texts was not lost on Latin Europeans of this era, since these translations were primarily done by monks living in walled Christian communities, at the request of their superiors in the church establishment. Peter the Venerable (Abbot of the monastery of Cluny in France) even commissioned the translation of the Qur'an into Latin.

The science of this era, then, was not only produced in an environment that blurs identity, but was knowingly and intentionally moved about. Even the supposedly original European science of this period cannot be separated from an ambiguous religious, linguistic, and geographical history. For instance, authors of this period hailing from Germany have no obvious connection to translated Arabic science, such as the prolific Abbess Hildegard von Bingen or the technical writer-monk Theophilus, since they were writing at the start of the translation movement (around the turn of the twelfth century) and far away from its epicenters on the Mediterranean. And yet Hildegard’s discussion of world systems and the origin of matter in her Causae et Curae is similar enough to those of al-Razi, a tenth-century Persian physician, that they could certainly have been participating in the same conversation. Similarly, although Theophilus’s writings never explicitly mention alchemy (which at this time was the science of metals and was in his time a pursuit only in the eastern Mediterranean), his descriptions of how to work metal and his understanding of it as a substance agrees completely with his Arabic and Byzantine predecessors. Therefore, it is not that this science ultimately originated in Christian Europe or in the Islamic Middle East, but that it developed gradually by moving around a much larger area that included both (and, if we want to complicate matters further, often responded to ideas coming from China and India and knowledge of raw materials from sub-saharan Africa).

            The science that we know now was not created in a European bubble. It is inextricable from a world context – it cannot be attributed to just one linguistic, ethnic, or cultural group. It developed slowly, almost by committee, taking many detours as questions and interests changed. In the process, science itself changed and became the systematic method of inquiry we use today. To say that it moved along a trajectory from ignorance to enlightenment is to ignore that science today is an often imprecise pursuit, that it still draws on wisdom from many sources and searches for creative ways to answer big questions. Looking back to medieval science, then, is a matter of seeing current science in a more realistic light.

Suggested Reading:

Secondary Literature

Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization

Burman, Translating the Qur’an in Latin Christendom

Burnett and Jacquart, Constantine the African and ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majousi

Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages

Flood, Objects of Translation

Garcia-Ballester, Galen and Galenism

Gazquez, Attitude of the Medieval Latin Translators Towards the Arabic Sciences

Goitein, A Mediterranean Society

Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century

Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution

Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy

Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine

Newman and Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry”

Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not

Pormann and Savage-Smith, Islamic Medicine

Remensnyder, La Conquistadora

Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

Smith, Body of the Artisan

Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean

Primary Literature

Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine

Galen, On the Critical Days (Cooper, Galen, De Diebus Decretoriis, From Greek into Arabic)

Hildegard of Bingen, On Causes and Cures

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Medicine of the Prophet