Thursday, September 07, 2006

Kristendom og vitenskap. Del 3

Her er del 3 av min serie innlegg om kristendom og vitenskap. Du vil få størst utbytte av innlegget hvis du leser de to foregående. Du finner del 1 her.

Men hvor kommer så denne oppfatningen fra, at kristendom og vitenskap er i opposisjon til hverandre? Mye av det ligger i vår forståelse av middelalderen og av koblingen mellom middelalderen og kristendommen. Ideen om middelalderen som en tid med barbarisme og mørke kan spores helt tilbake til Petrarca. Han delte historien i to deler “antiqua” (den gamle) som inkluderte romersk historie helt frem til de kristne keiserne, og “nouva” (den moderne) som gjaldt fra de kristne romerske keisere til hans egen tid.

Edward Grant gir oss en brilliant forklaring på hvordan myten om “den mørke middelalderen“ oppsto; ”Petrarch loved ancient Roman history and regarded it as the only period worthy of study. The second, or modern period, covering the history of Christian Europe, he viewed with complete disdain and contempt, characterizing it as barbarous, a period of darkness…Some generations later, humanists came to believe that they were not living in a period of darkness, but in a period of renewal following the darkness. In 1469, the humanist Giovanni Andrea (1417-1475) invented a term “media tempestas”, or “middle time” to identify the period of European history after the period of ancient Rome.
But it was the reaction by humanists against the period that intervened between the conversion of Roman emperors to Christianity and their own time, in combination with the Protestant Reformation, that foreordained a dark future for the period we now call the Middle Ages. For although they where often worlds apart in their values, humanists scholars and Protestant reformers both agreed, but for radically different reasons, that antiquity had ended by the fifth century and was followed by a thousand years of ignorance and worse, degeneracy” The third period, which followed the second degenerate period, was of course that in which the humanists lived”
(God and reason in the Middle Ages ) .

Denne myten om “den mørke middelalderen” har så blitt brukt for alt den er verdt av senere intellektuelle , når det passet deres agenda. Norman Cantor sa ; ”It is well known that the image of the Middle Ages which obtained at any given period in early modern Europe tells us more about the difficulties and dilemmas, the intellectual commitments of the men of the period than it does about the medieval world itself…the sarcastic opprobrium of the Enlightenment toward the medieval world was in large measure dictated by the guerilla warfare which the “philosophes” waged against the power and pretensions of the church in their own day” (som sitert i “God and reason in the Middle Ages”, Grant).

Rodney Stark sier: ”The identification of the era beginning in 1600 as the ”Enlightenment” is as inappropriate as the identification of the millennium before it as the ”Dark Ages.” And both imputations were made by the same people-intellectuals who whished to discredit religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and who therefore associated faith with darkness and secular humanism with light. To these ends they sought credit for the “Scientific Revolution” (another of their consepts), even if none of them had played any significant part in the scientific enterprice.
One of the first steps in this effort was to designate their own era as the “Enlightenment” and to claim it was a sudden and complete disjuncture with the past. To this end the “Dark Ages” were invented. Among the first to do so, Voltaire (1694-1778) described medieval Europe as hopelessly mired in “decay and degeneration.” This became the universal theme. Jean-Jacques Roussea (1712-1778) wrote of previous centuries: “Europe had relapsed into barbarism of the earliest ages. The peoples of this part of the world, so enlightened today, lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.” A century later, when Jacob Burckardt (1818-1897) popularized the idea of the “Renaissance” the “Dark Ages” were a historical certitude, not to be shaken until late in the twentieth century.
Moreover it was not enough to blame the “Dark Ages” on Christianity; religion must also be denied any credit for the rise of science. Hence it was necessary to discredit the achievements of the Scholastic era. In keeping with the aim, John Locke (1632-1704) denounced the Scholastics as hopelessly lost in a maze of trivial consernes, as the “great mintmasters” of useless terms as an “expedient to cover their ignorance.” In similar fashion, one after another of the philosophes condemned Catholic scholarship until the word “scholastic” became an epithet-defined as “pedantic and dogmatic” according to any edition of Webster.
With the past out of the way, the central aspect of the campaign by the likes of David Hume, Voltaire and their associates consisted of wrapping themselves in the achievements of science to authenticate their condemnation of religion in general, and Catholicism very specifically.”( For the glory of God)


Som Rodney Stark viser prøvde mange av opplysningstidens filosofer å fremstille kirken og kristendommen som motstander av vitenskap, fornuft og rasjonell tankegang, og å likestilte kristendommen med barbarisme og uvitenhet. Dette lyktes de også med, og la grunnen for den oppfatning mange i dag har av kristendommen. De lykkes også med å fremstille middelalderen som en tid hvor mørke, overtro, uvitenhet og barbarisme rådet, men dette er mer enn en karikatur som vi skal se.

I boken ”Science and religion, 400 B.C to A.D. 1550” sier Edward Grant; A distinguished medieval historian encapsulated a common view of the Middle Ages when he reported that “The Middle Ages were condemned as a “thousand years withouth a bath” by one well-scrubbed nineteenth-century writer. To others they were simply “the Dark Ages” – recently described (facetiously) as the one enormous hiccup on human progress.” At length, sometime in the fifteenth century the darkness is supposed to have lifted. Europe awakened, bathed, and began thinking and creating again”(Hollister 1994)…It is difficult to imagine a more inaccurate and misleading assessment. Yet the attitudes described above were commonplace between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, for example, Voltaire, the famous French author an philosopher, spoke for many when he referred to “ the “history of the Middle Ages” as “a barbarous history of barbarous peoples, who became Christians but did not become better because of it” and that it is necessary to know the history of that age only in order to scorn it. Such attitudes were commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”

Problemet er at lignende ideer og tanker forsatt er rådene hos veldig mange mennesker når det gjelder både middelalderen og kristendom. Dette til tross for at mange fagfolk i stor grad har ”avskaffet” den ”mørke” middelalderen. Etter å ha tatt for seg mange av mytene, og de negative holdningene rundt middelalderen kommer Grant med følgende, for noen, overraskende påstand; ”Despite all the anti-medieval passages cited to this point, the Middle Ages was one of the most innovative periods in human history.” (Science and Religion).

I sin bok "God and reason in the middle ages"sier han: "What made it possible for western civilization to develop science and the sosial science in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages"

Del 4

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