Beringer's stones, and preamble discussing competing views of
fossils (approx. 6 pages), excerpted from:
A HISTORY OF THE WARFARE
OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY
IN CHRISTENDOM
by ANDREW DICKSON WHITE.
First published in 1896.
Digitized by Cardinalis Etext Press, C.E.K.
Posted to Wiretap in July 1993, as wartheo.txt.
CHAPTER V.
FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY.
I. GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS.
AMONG the philosophers of Greece we find, even at an early
period, germs of geological truth, and, what is of vast
importance, an atmosphere in which such germs could grow. These
germs were transmitted to Roman thought; an atmosphere of
tolerance continued; there was nothing which forbade unfettered
reasoning regarding either the earth's strata or the remains of
former life found in them, and under the Roman Empire a period
of fruitful observation seemed sure to begin.
But, as Christianity took control of the world, there came a
great change. The earliest attitude of the Church toward geology
and its kindred sciences was indifferent, and even contemptuous.
According to the prevailing belief, the earth was a "fallen
world," and was soon to be destroyed. Why, then, should it be
studied? Why, indeed, give a thought to it? The scorn which
Lactantius and St. Augustine had cast upon the study of
astronomy was extended largely to other sciences.[209]
But the germs of scientific knowledge and thought developed in
the ancient world could be entirely smothered neither by
eloquence nor by logic; some little scientific observation must
be allowed, though all close reasoning upon it was fettered by
theology. Thus it was that St. Jerome insisted that the broken
and twisted crust of the earth exhibits the wrath of God against
sin, and Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the
flood of Noah.
To keep all such observation and reasoning within orthodox
limits, St. Augustine, about the beginning of the fifth century,
began an effort to develop from these germs a growth in science
which should be sacred and safe. With this intent he prepared
his great commentary on the work of creation, as depicted in
Genesis, besides dwelling upon the subject in other writings.
Once engaged in this work, he gave himself to it more earnestly
than any other of the earlier fathers ever did; but his vast
powers of research and thought were not directed to actual
observation or reasoning upon observation. The keynote of his
whole method is seen in his famous phrase, "Nothing is to be
accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is
that authority than all the powers of the human mind." All his
thought was given to studying the letter of the sacred text, and
to making it explain natural phenomena by methods purely
theological.[210]
Among the many questions he then raised and discussed may be
mentioned such as these: "What caused the creation of the stars
on the fourth day?" "Were beasts of prey and venomous animals
created before, or after, the fall of Adam? If before, how can
their creation be reconciled with God's goodness; if afterward,
how can their creation be reconciled to the letter of God's
Word?" "Why were only beasts and birds brought before Adam to
be named, and not fishes and marine animals?" "Why did the
Creator not say, `Be fruitful and multiply,' to plants as well as
to animals?"[210b]
Sundry answers to these and similar questions formed the main
contributions of the greatest of the Latin fathers to the
scientific knowledge of the world, after a most thorough study
of the biblical text and a most profound application of
theological reasoning. The results of these contributions were
most important. In this, as in so many other fields, Augustine
gave direction to the main current of thought in western Europe,
Catholic and Protestant, for nearly thirteen centuries.
In the ages that succeeded, the vast majority of prominent
scholars followed him implicitly. Even so strong a man as Pope
Gregory the Great yielded to his influence, and such leaders of
thought as St. Isidore, in the seventh century, and the
Venerable Bede, in the eighth, planting themselves upon
Augustine's premises, only ventured timidly to extend their
conclusions upon lines he had laid down.
In his great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's
attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with
the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like
Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah.
In the following century Bede developed the same orthodox
traditions.[211]
The best guess, in a geological sense, among the followers of
St. Augustine was made by an Irish monkish scholar, who, in
order to diminish the difficulty arising from the distribution
of animals, especially in view of the fact that the same animals
are found in Ireland as in England, held that various lands now
separated were once connected. But, alas! the exigencies of
theology forced him to place their separation later than the
Flood. Happily for him, such facts were not yet known as that
the kangaroo is found only on an island in the South Pacific,
and must therefore, according to his theory, have migrated
thither with all his progeny, and along a causeway so curiously
constructed that none of the beasts of prey, who were his
fellow-voyagers in the ark, could follow him.
These general lines of thought upon geology and its kindred
science of zoology were followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and by
the whole body of medieval theologians, so far as they gave any
attention to such subjects.
The next development of geology, mainly under Church guidance,
was by means of the scholastic theology. Phrase-making was
substituted for investigation. Without the Church and within it
wonderful contributions were thus made. In the eleventh century
Avicenna accounted for the fossils by suggesting a
"stone-making force";[212] in the thirteenth, Albert the Great
attributed them to a "formative quality;"[212b] in the following
centuries some philosophers ventured the idea that they grew
from seed; and the Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous
generation was constantly used to prove that these stony fossils
possessed powers of reproduction like plants and animals.[212c]
Still, at various times and places, germs implanted by Greek and
Roman thought were warmed into life. The Arabian schools seem to
have been less fettered by the letter of the Koran than the
contemporary Christian scholars by the letter of the Bible; and to
Avicenna belongs the credit of first announcing substantially the
modern geological theory of changes in the earth's surface.[212d]
The direct influence of the Reformation was at first
unfavourable to scientific progress, for nothing could be more
at variance with any scientific theory of the development of the
universe than the ideas of the Protestant leaders. That strict
adherence to the text of Scripture which made Luther and
Melanchthon denounce the idea that the planets revolve about
the sun, was naturally extended to every other scientific
statement at variance with the sacred text. There is much reason
to believe that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer
under the strict interpretation of Scripture by the early
Protestants than they had been under the older Church. The
dominant spirit among the Reformers is shown by the declaration
of Peter Martyr to the effect that, if a wrong opinion should
obtain regarding the creation as described in Genesis, "all the
promises of Christ fall into nothing, and all the life of our
religion would be lost."[213]
In the times immediately succeeding the Reformation matters went
from bad to worse. Under Luther and Melanchthon there was some
little freedom of speculation, but under their successors there
was none; to question any interpretation of Luther came to be
thought almost as wicked as to question the literal
interpretation of the Scriptures themselves. Examples of this
are seen in the struggles between those who held that birds were
created entirely from water and those who held that they were
created out of water and mud. In the city of Lubeck, the ancient
centre of the Hanseatic League, close at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, Pfeiffer, "General Superintendent" or
bishop in those parts, published his Pansophia Mosaica,
calculated, as he believed, to beat back science forever. In a
long series of declamations he insisted that in the strict text
of Genesis alone is safety, that it contains all wisdom and
knowledge, human and divine. This being the case, who could
care to waste time on the study of material things and give
thought to the structure of the world? Above all, who, after
such a proclamation by such a ruler in the Lutheran Israel,
would dare to talk of the "days" mentioned in Genesis as
"periods of time"; or of the "firmament" as not meaning a
solid vault over the universe; or of the "waters above the
heavens" as not contained in a vast cistern supported by the
heavenly vault; or of the "windows of heaven" as a figure of
speech?[213b]
In England the same spirit was shown even as late as the time of
Sir Matthew Hale. We find in his book on the Origination of
Mankind, published in 1685, the strictest devotion to a theory
of creation based upon the mere letter of Scripture, and a
complete inability to draw knowledge regarding the earth's
origin and structure from any other source.
While the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican Reformers clung to
literal interpretations of the sacred books, and turned their
faces away from scientific investigation, it was among their
contemporaries at the revival of learning that there began to
arise fruitful thought in this field. Then it was, about the
beginning of the sixteenth century, that Leonardo da Vinci, as
great a genius in science as in art, broached the true idea as
to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot, Fracastoro,
developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in other
parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it many
crudities, drew from it more and more truth. Toward the end of
the sixteenth century Bernard Palissy, in France, took hold of
it with the same genius which he showed in artistic creation;
but, remarkable as were his assertions of scientific realities,
they could gain little hearing. Theologians, philosophers, and
even some scientific men of value, under the sway of scholastic
phrases, continued to insist upon such explanations as that
fossils were the product of "fatty matter set into a
fermentation by heat"; or of a "lapidific juice";[214] or of a
"seminal air";[214b] or of a "tumultuous movement of
terrestrial exhalations"; and there was a prevailing belief
that fossil remains, in general, might be brought under the head
of "sports of Nature," a pious turn being given to this phrase
by the suggestion that these "sports" indicated some
inscrutable purpose of the Almighty.
This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the
Church, Catholic and Protestant, for centuries.
II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.
But the scientific method could not be entirely hidden; and,
near the beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud,
and De Villon revived it in France. Straightway the theological
faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as
unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished their
authors from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter
places of public resort.[214c]
The champions of science, though depressed for a time, quietly
laboured on, especially in Italy. Half a century later, Steno,
a Dane, and Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right
direction; and, though they and their disciples took great pains
to throw a tub to the whale, in the shape of sundry vague
concessions to the Genesis legends, they developed geological
truth more and more.
In France, the old theological spirit remained exceedingly
powerful. About the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made
another attempt to state simple geological truths; but the
theological faculty of the Sorbonne dragged him at once from his
high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print
his recantation. It runs as follows: "I declare that I had no
intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe
most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to
order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my
book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all
which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." This
humiliating document reminds us painfully of that forced upon
Galileo a hundred years before.
It has been well observed by one of the greatest of modern
authorities that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned" is
as firmly established as that of the earth's rotation upon its
axis.[215] Yet one hundred and fifty years were required to secure
for it even a fair hearing; the prevailing doctrine of the
Church continued to be that "all things were made at the
beginning of the world," and that to say that stones and fossils
were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary to
Scripture. Again we find theological substitutes for scientific
explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow--making
fossils "sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or
"creations of plastic force," or "models" made by the Creator
before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating
various beings.
Of this period, when theological substitutes for science were
carrying all before them, there still exists a monument
commemorating at the same time a farce and a tragedy. This is
the work of Johann Beringer, professor in the University of
Wurzburg and private physician to the Prince-Bishopthe
treatise bearing the title Lithographiae Wirceburgensis Specimen
Primum, "illustrated with the marvellous likenesses of two
hundred figured or rather insectiform stones." Beringer, for the
greater glory of God, had previously committed himself so
completely to the theory that fossils are simply "stones of a
peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of Nature for his own
pleasure,"[216] that some of his students determined to give his
faith in that pious doctrine a thorough trial. They therefore
prepared a collection of sham fossils in baked clay, imitating
not only plants, reptiles, and fishes of every sort that their
knowledge or imagination could suggest, but even Hebrew and
Syriac inscriptions, one of them the name of the Almighty; and
these they buried in a place where the professor was wont to
search for specimens. The joy of Beringer on unearthing these
proofs of the immediate agency of the finger of God in creating
fossils knew no bounds. At great cost he prepared this book,
whose twenty-two elaborate plates of facsimiles were forever to
settle the question in favour of theology and against science,
and prefixed to the work an allegorical title page, wherein not
only the glory of his own sovereign, but that of heaven itself,
was pictured as based upon a pyramid of these miraculous
fossils. So robust was his faith that not even a premature
exposure of the fraud could dissuade him from the publication of
his book. Dismissing in one contemptuous chapter this exposure
as a slander by his rivals, he appealed to the learned world.
But the shout of laughter that welcomed the work soon convinced
even its author. In vain did he try to suppress it; and,
according to tradition, having wasted his fortune in vain
attempts to buy up all the copies of it, and being taunted by
the rivals whom he had thought to overwhelm, he died of chagrin.
Even death did not end his misfortunes. The copies of the first
edition having been sold by a graceless descendant to a Leipsic
bookseller, a second edition was brought out under a new title,
and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of
human credulity.[217]
But even this discomfiture did not end the idea which had caused
it, for, although some latitude was allowed among the various
theologico-scientific explanations, it was still held
meritorious to believe that all fossils were placed in the
strata on one of the creative days by the hand of the Almighty,
and that this was done for some mysterious purpose, probably for
the trial of human faith.
[End of excerpt.]
The entire e-text is available on the net. Search for the string:
"Andrew Dickson White".
Footnotes, not in the e-text are added here:
[215] See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology,
chap. iii, p. 57; also Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions,
p. 62.
[216] See Beringer's Lithographiae, etc, p. 91.
[217] See Carus, Geschicte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467,
note, and Reusch, Bibel und Natur, p. 197. A list of the
authorities upon this episode, with the text of one of the epigrams
circulated at poor Beringer's expense, is given by Dr. Reuss in the
Serapeum for 1852, p. 203. The book itself (the original
imnpression) is in the White Library at Cornell University. For
Beringer himself, see especially the encyclopaedia of Ersch and
Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
[End of Beringer document.]