Hey, three science Fridays in a row. I'm not promising to the keep this up every week. But we'll see.
Today's topic is someone I read about recently in Ivan Illich's Shadow Work (1981), a European monk in the twelfh century named Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141). He was reportedly descended from the royal house of Blankenburg in Saxony. He joined an urban-based order called the Canons Regular that was devoted to the Augustinian tradition. He came to the cloister of St. Vincent near Paris at about the time the famous Peter Abelard was leaving due to the exposure of his famous affair with Heloise. Or, as Illich delicately puts it, Abelard "was chased from the [teaching] chair, gelded and dishonored."
Hugh became the head of the school at St. Vincent. Illich suggests that he was the first Christian theologian who recommended laughter to other believers:
Hugh even encouraged teachers to foster merriment among their students, since serious matters are absorbed more easily and with more pleasure when they are mixed with humor. Such a recommendation flew straight in the face of at least 700 years of Christian exhortation to sudents to shun not only the flesh but also the laughter which ripples it.
Now, the following quote doesn't directly relate to Hugh's thoughts on science. But it does give a clue to why Illich looked to the 12th century as a critical moment in Western development (and, one in which, incidentally, he thought a seriously wrong turn was made):
The middle of the twelfth century constituted one of those rare moments in history when scholars possess a confident sense that the mastery of the works of the past is about to reach a natural end. The thought of Greece, Rome and the Church Fathers seemed assimilated. Thinkers began to feel comfortable about their command of the past's achievements. St. Bernard, Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor represented an entirely new kind of genius that flourished during the short period between 1110 and 1150 - thinkers who, having thoroughly digested their tradition, now felt free to create a new synthesis. The scientific and metaphysical works of Aristotle had not yet reached and upset Paris. They had not yet been translated from the Arabic, and their Arab commentators were still unknown. During this creative lull, some of the West's greatest textbooks were written: Peter the Lombard's Sentences (1150), Gratian's Concordances of the Law (1140), and the first of them, Hugh's Didascalicon (c. 1127). These books remained in use and became obligatory reading for those who sought a liberal education right into the seventeenth century - a part of every cleric's, indeed, every scholar's formation. As school books, with the exception of grammars, they had an extraordinary lifetime. The end of their undisputed acceptance marks the conclusion of the Middle Ages much more decisively than either the Renaissance or the Reformation.
Hugh saw three phases of the life of contemplation: cogitatio (thinking) in which people encounter God in nature; meditatio (meditation) which involves reflection and reasoning to understand God; and, contemplatio (contemplation), which prepares one for encountering God directly. Starting from the story of the expulsion of Adam and Even from the Garden of Eden, Hugh saw humanity has having violated the rules of original nature.
As Illich describes Hugh's view, "Humans, through their own fault, are weakened and must survive in an environment they themselves have damaged." And science becomes a quest to treat this condition and to relieve the human weakness which it entails. In the Dialogue of Dindimus on Philosophy, Hugh puts his arguments about the ecological basis of science into the mouth of Dindimus, a Brahmin, who his readers could have considered a virtuous pagan, a kind of crypto-Christian. "The Brahmin would insist," say Illich, "that scientific inquiry was part of the human birthright, and could proceed unaided by Holy Writ."
Illich sees this line of argument as one of Hugh's major contributions to the understanding of science: "the definition of science as a remedy for the weakness of the persons who engage in it, and who must engage in it in order to survive in an enironment originally impaired by human action, is characteristic of Hugh alone," i.e., he was the first Western thinker to make this argument. Hugh's Dindimus describes science as "the caring pursuit of truth, motivated not by that love which cherishes the well-known, but driven by the desire to pursue further what has been tasted and has been found pleasing."
Illich sees another major contribution of Hugh's as his understanding of the mechanical arts as part of philosophy/science, including weaving, agriculture and performance arts. He thought that the way for people to deal with their disturbed relationship with nature was to build tools in accordance with natural principles, "artifacts which imitate nature," in Illich's words. He quotes Hugh's Dindimus as follows:
All living beings were born with the armor which befits them. Only man comes unarmed and naked into this world. What was given to others by birth, he must invent. Imitating nature and outfitting himself through reason, he shines forth more brightly than if he had been born with the equipment to cope with his environment.
Illich argues that, unfortunately, both of these notions - science as a remedy for humanity's wounded condition and the mechanical arts as an essential part of science - were abandoned in the later development of science. One factor he sees causing this was the rapid acceleration in the use of iron during Hugh's time, one of the main reasons being the need for armor for Christian warriors to use in fighting the Crusades. And the departure from the ecological understanding of science that Hugh of St. Vincent elaborated also seems to be one of the key reasons Illich believes history took a seriously wrong turn in the 1100s:
By the end of the twelfth century, the climate of Europe had nanged, both in the mechanical arts and in intellectual approaches. The differences between the great thinkers of the early twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries are often obscured when both are simply considered together as the 'scholastics'. Between the two groups, Spanish Jews and Benedictine monks translated the Greek philosophers from the Arabic manuscripts in which they had survived for 400 years. Then, an entirely new conception of science became general. Science came to be regarded as the search for what makes things tick rather than, as for Hugh, the caring pursuit of those remedies for the scientist's weakness which had been tasted by him and found pleasing. In the wake of this new approach to science a new attitude toward technical means came into being. The new mills became symbols of man's power over nature, the new clocks symbols of man's power over time. In fact, as C. S. Lewis remarks, the relationship turned out to be the power exercised by some men over others, with nature as the instrument. Critical technology, in Hugh's sense, ran counter to the passions and interests of the age, and was forgotten.
It's worth remembering that the main pathway by which those Greek translations reached Western Europe was through al-Andalus, the Muslim-controlled areas in what is now Spain.
Illich suggests that though those particular ideas of Hugh's were forgotten in the process of Western development, the ideas of this 12th century theologian have relevance for present-day attempts to develop more ecological and holistic approach to scientific research.
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