Crosby on Medieval and Modern European Views of the World

In his 1997 best-selling history The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 , Arthur Crosby argues that the modern West got “ahead” of other regions because it developed a new attitude toward the world (a new mentalite) during the period covered by his book. He’s talking about the attitudinal preconditions for the “scientific revolution.” He outlines a shift to emphasis upon the sense of vision, which allowed the world to be perceived in a new way: as homogeneous and divisible, and therefore countable: quantifiable.  I’ve  presented some of his description of the difference between the old (“venerable”) European model and its modern successor (which he calls simply “the new model”).  As you’ll see from other bits in this section of the course, the shift in perspective can be discussed in all sorts of ways and associated with many sorts of transition. In part,  that’s because the historical reality is far more complex than a simple move from one stance to another . (Pieces from pages 22-5, 32-3, 46-7, & 227-31.)


[The Venerable Model]
   I shall call the old view the Venerable Model, “venerable” because it is indeed old and deserving of  respect.
   The Venerable Model maintained a near monopoly in European common sense for so many generations because it had the cachet of classical civilization and, more important, because as a whole it squared with actual experience. Furthermore, it answered the need for a description of the universe that was clear, complete, and appropriately awesome without being stupefying. To illustrate: anyone could see that the heavens were vast, pure, and utterly different from the earth, but also that they revolved around the earth, which, though small, was the center of everything.
   The Venerable Model provided structures and processes that a person could live with emotionally as well as comprehend intellectually - for instance, a time and a space of human dimensions. Time was awesome, but not so as to exceed the capacity of the mind to encompass. Eusebius, circa A.D. 300, declared that God had created the universe and had wound time up and set it going 5,198 years before the Incarnation. The Venerable Bede, circa 700, was sure that Creation was even more recent: the figure according to his reckoning was 3,952 years before the Incarnation. No medieval or Renaissance Westerner of repute suggested that the number of years since the beginning, from Creation to Incarnation to the present, was as high as 7,000. Two hundred and fifty to 300 or so human generations would surely suffice to include all time from the beginning to the present to the inevitable end. (Westerners of course believed in infinity--it was an attribute of God--but infinity was the antithesis of time, rather than its extension).
   Space was also vast, but not benumbingly so. Gossoin of Metz, writing about 1245, calculated that if Adam had set off straight up imrnediately after his creation at a rate of 25 miles a day (a good day's tramp, but not too much for a healthy young man), he would still have 713 years to go before he reached the fixed stars. A few decades later Roger Bacon calculated that a person walking 20 miles a day would take 14 years, 7 months, 29 days and a fraction to reach the moon. For some of the West’s best-informed scholars the extent of the universe could still be described in terms of walking.
   Reality... had humanly comprehensible dimensions and functioned in ways that people could understand or to which they could reconcile themselves, but that did not mean it was essentially uniform. They perceived reality as an uneven, heterogeneous sort of thing, perhaps a rare attitude today but a common one in the past shared, for instance, with the distant and unquestionably sophisticated Chinese. Cats, so to speak, might always chase mice north of the equator and never vice versa, but who could say what might be the case in the antipodes? And what Christian could doubt that Methuselah lived 969 years in the first age after Creation, whatever might be the unlikeliness of such longevity in the present age.
   Europeans dealt with reality's essential heterogeneity by acknowledging it in even the most immediate manifestations: fire rose and rocks fell not because they had different amounts of the same abstract thing, weight, but because they were different, period. Reality, however, was not absolutely chaotic - that would be very distressing, indeed - but its predictability derived not from itself per se, but from the one and only God. “The Creator has so ordered the laws of matter,” wrote William of Canterbury, “that nothing can happen in his creation except in accordance with his just ordinance, whether good or bad.”
   Did that make it quantifiable by mere humans? It well might, assuming that God deigned to be
reasonable in human terms, though investigators' obsession with the immeasurable first cause, God, would for a long time divert attention away from immediately perceptible and possibly measurable secondary causes - velocity, temperature, and so on.
   Believers in the Venerable Model doted on symbolism, which is more usefully sampled than abstractly described. Let us turn to examples, one from geography (space) and one from historiography (time). Christians agreed that the crucifixion of Jesus was the pivot of all time - and therefore of the world. Jerusalem, the scene of His crucifixion, must be the center of the inhabited surface of the earth. Did not Ezekiel 5:5 say, in anticipation of His agony, “this is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her”?
   Europe did not straddle the equator, and so the durations of daytime and nighttime changed radically through the year. Even so, they had to have twelve hours each. Europeans had a system of unequal, accordian-pleated hours that puffed up and deflated so as to ensure a dozen hours each for daytime and nighttime, winter and summer. To compound the confusion (ours, not theirs), these unequal hours, familiar to us at least to the extent of being duodecimal, were not the vernacular kind of hours. Most people, when they did not judge the time simply by glancing at the position of the sun in the sky, relied on a system of time proclaimed by church bells, the most effective information medium of the age. This was the system, still followed in monasteries today, of the seven canonical “hours” - matins, prime, tierce, sext, none, vespers, and compline - which indicated when certain prayers were to be said (Psalms 119: 64: “Seven times a day I praise Thee for thy righteous ordinances”). It served both the pious and the impudent. In the fifteenth canto of Paradiso Dante speaks of the bells of his Florence ringing tierce and none; and when Boccaccio notes specific times in his Decameron he refers to a canonical hour....
   ...Seven was perfect, too. In the usage of [this] era 3 was the first odd number and 4 the first even number. Added together, they made the perfect 7. And had not God rested on the seventh day after completing the Creation? Ten, being the number of the Commandments, symbolized law, and so 11, which goes one beyond 10, signified transgression of the law - sin. Twelve, on the other hand, was the number of judgment because the two parts of the number 7, that is to say, 4 and 3, multiplied together, make 12. Forty, the number of the days of Lent and the number of days the Savior spent on earth after the Resurrection, represented to St. Augustine “life itself.”
   Most of a millennium later St. Thomas Aquinas made 144,000, the sum of those whom Revelation promises will be saved at the end of time, into a cathedral of holy references. The thousand of 144,000 designated perfection (presumably because 1,000 is 10, the number of  Commandments, multiplied by itself 3 times over (3 being the number of the Trinity and of the days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection). The one hundred and forty-four of 144,000 is 12 times 12. Twelve signifies faith in the Trinity, that is to say, 3 multiplied by the 4 parts of the earth. One of the 12's to be multiplied can be taken to signify the number of the apostles and the other the number of the tribes of Israel.
   Today we utilize numbers when we want narrow focus on a given subject and maximum precision in our deliberations. The old Europeans preferred broad focus and settled for imprecision in the hope of  including as much as possible of what might be important. Often they were reaching not for a handle on material reality, but for a clue as to what lay beyond the scrim of reality. They were as poetic about numbers as about words.
   Much of the Venerable Model seems as peculiar to us as a Tungusic shaman's version of reality. We sniff and cluck at its mistakes - that the earth is the center of the universe, for instance -but our real problem with the Venerable Model is that it is dramatic, even melodramatic, and teleological: God and Purpose loom over all. We want (or think we want) explanations of reality leeched of emotion, as bloodless as distilled water. Our astrophysicists, looking for a title for the birth of time and space, have rejected creation, a word with references and reverberations that go on forever. They have chosen the nose-thumbing title the big bang in order to minimize the drama of the subject and the distortions and accelerations of rhapsodic thinking. Medieval and Renaissance Europeans, like the shaman, like all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time, wanted immediately conclusive and emotionally satisfying explanations. They longed for a universe that, in Camus's phrase, “can love and suffer.”
   In such a universe the balance scale, the yardstick, and the hour glass were devices of little more than immediate practical convenience.

[The New Model]
   Beginning in the miraculous decades around the turn of the fourteenth century... and continuing on for generations, sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly, sometimes in one terrain of mentalite and sometimes another, Western Europeans evolved a new way, more purely visual and quantitative than the old, of perceiving time, space, and material environment....
   Vision empowered its aficionados to see and think of space geometrically. Awed by light that expanded, instantly, it seemed, in cones and globes of radiation, light that was the one discernible thing that behaved with the neatness of diagrams in a Euclidean text, they let vision guide them to Renaissance perspective and some of the greatest works of art of all the ages, and thence to a new astronomy.
   The greatest advantage the aficionados of sight gained was simply its compatibility with measurement in terms of uniform quanta. St. Bonaventure, Schoolman and minister general of the Franciscans, proclaimed that “God is light in the most literal sense”; ipso facto, it functioned uniformly throughout time and space. The luminous-numinous implication was that a league, if measured precisely, would be found to be the same everywhere and at all times, and so would an hour. Westerners, monotheists fascinated with light, gloried in pantometry [measurement of everything]. In practical terms, the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper, or at least in your mind, be it the fluctuation of wool prices... or the course of Mars through the heavens, and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.
   Then you possess a quantitative representation of your subject that is, however simplified, even in its errors and omissions, precise. You can think about it rigorously. You can manipulate it and experiment with it, as we do today with computer models. It possesses a sort of independence from you. It can do for you what verbal representation rarely does: contradict your fondest wishes and elbow you on to more efficacious speculation. It was quantification, not aesthetics, not logic per se, that parried Kepler's every effort to thrust the solar system into a cage of his beloved Platonic solids and goaded him on until he grudgingly devised his planetary laws.
   Visualization and quantification: together they snap the padlock - reality is fettered (at least tightly enough and for long enough to get some work out of it and possibly a law of nature or two).
   Nature seemed to be agreeable to this approach (the greatest of miracles), and the human mind to be good at visualization and numbers: “These [numbers] alone we apprehend correctly,” Kepler said four hundred years ago, “and if piety permits to say so, our comprehension is in this case of the same kind as God's, at least insofar as we are able to understand it in this mortal life.”
   ...Already Westerners were leading the world in the invention and utilization of machinery. At the end of the century they were abreast or drawing ahead of others in cartography, navigation, astronomy, commercial and banking procedures, and practical and theoretical mathematics. By the end of the next century they had lengthened their old leads and had attained new ones.
   The West's lead overall was not nearly as great as in the nineteenth century (when the gap became, so to speak, a matter of the steamboat versus the junk and dhow), and in some areas the West still lagged behind. For example, the Ottoman armies were better organized and trained and demonstrably superior to the West's: in 1529 the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. For another example, the Chinese version of the heavens, with no crystal spheres but celestial bodies floating in space, was closer to the truth than the West's. But Westerners' lead in the way they perceived reality and could, thereby, reason about and then manipulate it was enormous. They were cultivating what Eviatar Zerubavel calls the rationalistic character of modern culture: “precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine.” All, we might add, pertain to or at least smack of the visual and quantitative.
   Printing amplified the prestige of visualization and accelerated the spread of quantification. The demand for more books had engendered stationeries (publishing houses, one might call them) around the universities, where scribes using the new Gothic script copied more books faster than ever betore. Then, in the 1450s, a metalworker in Mainz, Germany, Johann Gutenberg, began printing books with movable type, specially formulated inks, and a printing press adapted from the ancient wine press. That event was far more significant than the contemporaneous fall of Constantinople to the Turks, though not a soul thought so at the time.
   Printing (a single arbitrary title for a combination of inventions) spread faster than anything new and mechanical since the clock. By 1478 they were printing in London, Cracow, Budapest, Palermo, Valencia, and a number of cities in between. By the next century millions of books had been printed. Unlike the societies of the East the West was hungry to learn by staring at standardized marks on paper.

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