The Times History of the World. Richard Overy

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СКАЧАТЬ Monotheistic religions, in which respect for the deity and reverence for doctrine earned the right to salvation, were altogether more problematic. Arguments about Christian doctrine brought regular schism, provoking the rift between Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe and Western Catholic Christianity in 1054, and further schism between Catholic and Protestant Christianity in the 16th century. Fear of heterodoxy, or of the diabolical, provoked Catholicism into regular heresy hunts and the extraction of confessions through torture. Protestant and Catholic were burnt at the stake for their faith in the struggle over the Reformation. Radical Protestantism was also fearful of idolatry or witchcraft and the last witches were famously burnt in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Islam was also schismatic. In 680 AD the faith divided between Sunni and Shiite sects over disagreements on doctrine (including the Shia insistence that Allah could take human form), and the two branches are still engaged in violent confrontation throughout the Middle East. Convinced of the rightness of their cause, monotheistic religions enjoy a strong imperative to convert; those outside the pale, regarded as pagans or infidels, are damned. Conversion was seen as an obligation, part of God’s purpose to ensure that among the many competing claims to a divine order only one could be the right one.

      To claim no religious allegiance has been a recent and limited option, confined largely to the Western world. Atheism became publicly admissible in the 19th century without fear of punishment but the public denial of God still attracts outrage. Secularists over the past two centuries have been keen to separate Church and state, but have not necessarily been irreligious. The strident rejection of the supernatural was identified with 19th-century socialism whose world view was materialist. Atheism appealed to a progressive intelligentsia hostile to what they saw as stale Christian convention. When the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced in Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1888, that ‘God is dead!’, he challenged what he saw as the great lie, dating back 2,000 years, and found a limited intellectual audience more than willing to accept a godless reality. In the early 20th century atheism was formally adopted by the Soviet Union, and communist China after 1949, but in neither case was it possible to eradicate belief. Atheism is now widely regarded as a declining intellectual force in an age of religious revivalism. The wide popular hostility to Richard Dawkins’s recently published The God Delusion (2006) is testament to how necessary it is even for societies where church attendance is moribund that the material world is not just all there is.

      For much of recorded history what was known or believed to be knowable was bound up with religion. Religious institutions and the priesthood were the depositories of knowledge passed down, like the famous Jewish Talmud, from generation to generation. The earliest work of ‘wisdom literature’ in ancient Egypt, perhaps in the world, was attributed to Imhotep, high priest of Heliopolis under Djoser, king between 2,654 and 2,635 BC. Religious buildings housed valuable manuscripts, not only sacred books but treatises on many subjects. During the early Christian era in Europe, in what use to be known as the ‘Dark Ages’, monasteries and churches kept alive traditions of teaching, writing and recording. The Venerable Bede, based at the monastery in Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early 8th century, helped to collect together an estimated 300–500 volumes, one of the largest libraries of books in the then Western world. Western education was dominated by the Church until the 18th century. Knowledge of this kind was limited in several ways. First, it was confined to a very small elite who could read and write. A distinct literary or official language was developed which could be fully understood only by the favoured few. Although the earliest writing can be dated back to the Sumerian civilization in present-day Iraq around 5,000 years ago, and then appearing in Egypt and China, the overwhelming majority of all humans who lived between then and the last few centuries were illiterate. Knowledge for them was limited to what could be conveyed orally, or crudely illustrated. For most people information was passed on through rumour, superstition, ritual, songs, sagas and folk tales. Second, it was limited by the theological or philosophical priorities of those who held the key to knowledge, reinforcing existing views of the known world, or of man’s relation to the universe, or of social hierarchy. Knowledge was used instrumentally, rather than for its own sake, confirming the existing order rather than encouraging critical or subversive discourse.

      Knowledge in this sense did not inhibit technique. From the earliest settled communities onwards rapid strides were made in the practical skills associated with metallurgy, construction, irrigation, sculpture, and the production of artefacts of often stunning originality and beauty. The contrast between the last 6,000 years and the previous tens of thousands of years is remarkable. Early man made painfully slow progress in the development of sophisticated tools of stone or bone; humans in settled communities, with a division of labour and access to trade, could transfer technologies or fashions in a matter of years. By the time of the late Roman Empire, as any visit to a museum of classical archaeology will confirm, the range and sophistication of everything from daily products to major pieces of engineering was as advanced as anything that could be found for another thousand years. Practical skill was not, nevertheless, knowledge. Understanding of the natural world, like understanding of the supernatural, was conditional. It was possible to build the most technically remarkable and artistically splendid cathedral but still to believe that the earth was flat and hell really existed.

      The development of a critical, sceptical, speculative science that did not endorse existing beliefs but deliberately undermined them, was a historical development of exceptional importance. The foundations of a speculative intellectual life were to be found in ancient Greece, whose philosophers, poets and playwrights produced work of real originality whose central concerns, despite the passage of 2,000 years, engaged the enthusiasm of educated Europeans when the classics were rediscovered in the late medieval period. Nineteenth-century intellectuals could write as if little separated their age from that of Plato or Aristotle or Aeschylus. The critical breakthrough in understanding the nature of material reality by thinking critically about accepted world-views was begun, however, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and associated mainly with the rise of a body of experimental or deductive science based on close observation. The key names are well-known. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus dared to argue that the earth revolved around the sun in a book only published the year of his death, in 1543; the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei extended these observations and in many other ways paved the way for much modern physical science, utilising recent developments in the mechanical sciences; the Englishman Thomas Hobbes laid the foundations of modern political science and human psychology in his Leviathan, published in 1651; in 1687 the mathematician Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica announced the law of gravity and ushered in a new age of mechanical physics. The scientific and philosophical revolution precipitated by the late 17th century in Europe opened the way to developing a modern understanding of nature and natural laws and above all accepting that such things were intrinsically knowable, not part of a Divine Plan whose purpose was not to be questioned. The new principle, according to the late 18th-century Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was sapere aude—‘dare to know’.

      Those who pioneered a critical, scientific view of the world ran great risks. In 1616 the Catholic Church banned Copernican teaching, and placed Galileo under house arrest for challenging scripture. Galileo was fortunate: a few years before, in 1600, Giordano Bruno, another Copernican, was burnt at the stake in Rome. Hobbes was forced into exile, suspected of atheism; John Locke, who wrote the founding text of modern liberal representative government in the 1680s was also forced to write in exile, and his works circulated in parts of Europe in secret, too subversive for open sale. Writers of the 18th-century ‘Enlightenment’, during which critical thinking began to flourish for the first time, had to steer a careful line between what could or could not be said. Rousseau was also banned for life from his native city of Geneva for his radical democratic views. But it was a tide that could not be held back. By the early 19th century most of the modern Western sciences had been established on a firm scientific basis; political and social theory exploded traditional claims to authority (expressed most clearly in the founding of the American Republic in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789); organized religion in its Western guise was shown to be unable to defend its major contentions about the nature of the universe and of man’s place in it and an alternative, naturalistic, rational model of the world was substituted. СКАЧАТЬ