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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