A Time When Science and Religion Agreed

Dover, a small town 20 miles south of the capital of Pennsylvania, became the most recent battleground in the so-called war between science and religion. Just hours after Judge John E. Jones III handed

Of course, some aspects of science and religion have been in conflict for centuries. But for those who hope better times might be ahead, it is worth taking a look at a time when both science and religion were in basic agreement about the shape of the cosmos - that time was the Middle Ages in Western Europe. This period, beginning in the 1100s and ending in the 1500s, saw knowledge, trade and commerce expand rapidly across Europe. It also saw the creation of some of the greatest masterpieces of western culture. Dante's "Divine Comedy," the cathedral at Chartres, the theology of Aquinas, and all of the various legends of King Arthur were born in this world lit by fire. Trade with the Arab world laid important intellectual foundations in the sciences, particularly in math.

But greatest of all the inventions of the middle Ages, according to the literary historian C.S. Lewis, was the model of the universe shared by artists, architects, poets, theologians, philosophers and scientists. The coherent view of the cosmos common to thinkers of the first half of the second millennium was comprehensive, beautiful, and, unfortunately, wrong. Before I describe this great creation, I'll dispel a couple of widely held myths about the people who preceded us. Specifically, no educated person since about 300 B.C. has believed the earth to be other than a sphere of roughly 4,000 miles in radius.

Along with the myth that medieval people believed the earth was flat, is the idea that people living in that time believed in the geocentric model of the universe because they thought the earth was the most important spot in the galaxy. Actually the truth is the reverse. In the thinking of the time, to become spiritual was to become lighter. Sin made one heavier. It follows that, far from being a special place of glory, the earth was the bottom, the lowest point in the universe: the drain in a galactic sink. Things too heavy to remain in the heavens fell to the lowest point - and in a sphere, that is the center. So in the medieval view, everything bad in the universe fell to earth. In fact, the orbit of the moon was considered the cosmic quarantine line for everything bad - what falls to the earth stays on the earth, to adapt the Las Vegas slogan.

Not only was the shape of the earth well and widely known, but the operation of gravity was very clear. Sir Isaac Newton gave us a rigorous definition of gravity and even invented (along with liebniz) the math to describe the operation of gravity. But in "Inferno" when the Pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil reach the center of the earth, they have to turn over to begin the climb up to the surface on the opposite side. Virgil reminds Dante that the principle of gravity was stated by Aristotle nearly 1,600 years before the time Inferno was written.

To turn back to the cosmos, the cosmology of the middle ages was guided by the principle of "a place for everything and everything in its place." Man dwelt on the surface of the globe, the fish in the water, birds in the air, long-lived spirits lower than angels filled the atmosphere, evil spirits were on or under the ground. Beyond the orbit of the moon was the sphere of the visible cosmos, warm, filled with light and music and with a ruling spirit for every one of the stars and planets. If the medieval cosmos was small compared with the actual physical universe, it was all that one could take in with the unaided eye. The telescope, after all, wasn't invented until 1610. Aristotle, Virgil, Dante, and King Richard III saw a cosmos of thousands of stars stretching over millions of miles. We know the cosmos has billions of stars and is trillions of miles across, but both sizes were simply as vast as anyone could imagine or verify with the instruments of their time.

It is also worth noting the medieval cosmos and our own prior to 1930 were both assumed to be static. The Big Bang expanding universe model was not fully accepted until the 1960s and now stands as the prevailing view of modern cosmology. Around the same time the first astronauts were circling the earth, the static universe model joined the geocentric universe in the theoretical graveyard.

Why should we care about the medieval view of the cosmos? For several reasons. If science/religion controversies seem inevitable today, it is good to remember there was a time when a beautiful, if very incomplete, view of the universe was held by most educated people, and that view had many of the basics right. Also, the coherence of the medieval model shows great ingenuity. Those who built science had less data than we moderns, but they were in no way inferior people. Pop culture equates technical progress with intellect capacity in a way that should make us all uncomfortable. A clear view of history keeps us all from this form of chronological snobbery. Then as now, many people live on the border of the science/religion conflict, accepting science as the best way to know the physical world and believing there is a dimension of life beyond the reach of our senses.

"We're History" was prepared by Neil Gussman, communications manager for the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF; www.chemheritage.org). This article was based on information from the book, "The Discarded Image," by C.S. Lewis. Currently best known as a writer of children's books, Lewis was a leading literary historian in the middle of the 20th century and all of his scholarly works are still in print.