Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'   S  o  C
Vol. VI  The REFORMATION
PGS 238 - 243




                                                    THE SCIENTISTS

The scientific mood was hardly more popular with the pundits than with the people. The spirit of the age inclined to the “humanities; even the revival of Greek studies ignored Greek science. In mathematics the Roman numerals obstructed progress; they seemed inseperable from Latin culture; the Hindu-Arabic numerals seemed heretically Mohammedan, and were coldly received, especially north of the Alps ; The Cour des Comptes -- the French bureau of Audit used the clumsy Roman figures till the eighteenth century. Nevertheless Thomas Bradwardine, who died of the plague (1349) a month after being consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, introduced into England several Arabic theorems in trigonometry.

Nicole Oresme led an active ecclesiastical career, and yet invaded a dozen sciences successfully He paved the way for analytical geometry by developing the systematic use of co-ordinates. He played with the idea of the fourth dimension, but rejected it. In a commentary on Aristotle's  “De caelo et mundo, “ he wrote;  “We cannot prove by any experiment that the heavens undergo a daily movement and the earth does not;” he said. “there are good reasons indicating that the earth, and not the  sky, undergoes a daily motion.” When we consider that no telescope or camera existed as yet to watch or record the sky, it is encouraging to note the energy and intelligence of medieval astronomers, Moslem, Jewish, and Christian. Jean de Liniers, after years of personal observations, calculated the obliquity of the ecliptic to within seven seconds of the most modern estimate.  Another  proposed to reform the Julian calendar, which was outstripping the sun, but the reform had to wait till 1582, and still awaits international and interfaith understanding. William Merle of Oxford rescued meteorology from astrology by keeping a record of weather through 2,556 days. Unknown observers or navigators discovered in the fifteenth century the declination of the magnetic needle: the needle does not point due north, but inclines toward the astronomic meridian at a small but important angle, which, as Columbus noted, varies from place to place.

The peak figure in the mathematics and astronomy of this epoch, was Johann Muller, known to history as Regiomontanus from his birth ( 1436) near Konigsberg in Lower Franconia. At fourteen he entered the University of Vienna, where Georg von Purbach was introducing humanism and the latest Italian advances in Mathematics and Astronomy. Both men matured and died too soon: Purbach at thirty-eight, Muller at forty.  In 1475 Sixtus IV summoned Muller to Rome to reform the callendar. There a year later, Regiomontanus died. The short span of his life limited his achievements. Under the title of Ephemerides he issued ( 1474) an almanac showing the daily positions of the planets for the next thirty-two years; from this book Columbus would predict the lunar eclipse that would fill the stomachs of his starving men on Feb. 29, 1504. One of his students Martin Behaim, drew in colour on vullum the oldest known terrestrial globe ( 1492), still preserved in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg.

Modern geography was created not by geographers but by sailors, merchants, missionaries, envoys, soldiers, and pilgrims. Catalonian skippers made or used excellent maps; their  portolani-- pilot guides to Mediterranean ports --  were in the fourteenth century almost as accurate as the navigation charts of our time. Old trade routes to the east having fallen into Turkish hands, European importers developed new overland routes through Mongol Territory. Johann Schnittberger of Bavaria, captured by the Turks at Nicopolis (1396) wandered for thirty years in Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, and Siberia, and wrote in his Reisebuch the first West-European description of Siberia.

In one particular the most influential medieval treatise on Geography was the Imago mundi (1410) of Cardinal Pierre d’Aily, which encouraged Columbus by describing the Atlantic as traversable “ in very few days if the wind be fair.”  It was but one of half a dozen works that this alert ecclesiastic wrote on astronomy, geography, meteorology, mathematics, logic, metaphysics, psychology, and the reform of the calendar and the Church. Reproached for giving so much time to secular studies, he replied that a theologian should keep abreast of science.

The best scientific thought of the fourteenth century was in physics. Dietrich of Freiburg (d,1311) gave essentially our modern explanation of the rainbow as due to two refractions, and one reflection of the sun’s rays in drops of water. Jean Buridan did excellent work in theoretical physics, it is a pity that he is famous  only for his ass, which may not have been his. Born near Arras before 1300, Buridan studied and taught at the university of Paris. He not only argued for the daily rotation of the earth, but he eliminated from astronomy the angelic intelligences to which Aristotle and Aquinas had ascribed the guidance and motion of the heavenly bodies. Nothing more is needed to explain their movements, said Buridan, than a start originally given them by God, and the law of impetus-- that a body in motion continues in motion except as hindered by some existing force; here Buridan anticipated Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The motions of planets and stars, he added, are governed by the same mechanical laws that operate on earth. These propositions, now so trite, were deeply damaging to the medieval world view.  They almost date the beginning of astronomical physics. 

Complicated windmills were used to pump water, and grind grain. In a drawing by the Hussite engineer Conrad Keyser, occurs the earliest representation of reciprocating motion converted into rotary motion: two arms, moving in alternation, revolve a shaft precisely as the pistons turn the crankshaft of an automobile. Better mechanisms for measuring time were demanded  as commerce and industry grew.  City life required some uniform divisions of time, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clocks and watches were made that divided the day into equal parts throughout the year. In some places the hours were numbered from one to twenty-four: and as late as 1370 some clocks, like that of San Gotardo in Milan, struck the full number. This proved to be a noisy extravagance. By 1375 the day was regularly divided into two halves of twelve hours each.

While physics thus foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution, alchemy slowly grew into chemistry. By the close of this age the alchemists had discovered and described zinc, bismuth, liver of sulfur, regulus of antimony, volatized mercury, and made sulphuric acid  They bequeathed to chemistry the experimental method  that would prove the greatest gift of medieval science to the modern mind.

Botany was still mostly confined to manuals of husbandry or to herbals describing medicinal plants. Henry of Hesse ( 1325-97 ) suggested that new species, especially among plants, might evolve naturally from old ones; this some 500 years before Darwin. Anatomy and physiology had for the most part depended upon the dissection of animals, the wounds of soldiers, and occasional cases where the law required post-mortem autopsy. Honest Christians felt reasonable objections to the dissection of human bodies which, however dead, were supposed to rise intact from grave at the Last Judgement.  All through the fourteenth century it was difficult to get cadavers for anatomical study; north of the Alps very few physicians before 1450, had ever seen a dissected human corpse.  Dissections were performed before medical students at Venice in 1368, Vienna in 1404; and in 1445 the university of Padua built the first anatomical theatre. The results for medicine were endless.
     

[3kings(Trevor)]

Ephemerides ; An Almanac. "From this book Columbus would predict the lunar eclise that would fill the stomachs of his starving men on February 29, 1504."

Does anyone know the story and details of this event? ---  Trevor

[JoanK]

"Jean Buridan did excellent work in theoretical physics, it is a pity that he is famous  only for his ass, which may not have been his."

Have to look this one up!

Of course! It's the donkey who can't decide between two haystacks: goes first toward one, then te other, and starves to death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass

[JoanK]

And here is Columbus' lunar eclipse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1504_lunar_eclipse

This device (awing strangers into doing what you want by predicting an eclipse) is used in fiction (mark twain in Connecticut Yankee), but I didn't know it ever actually happened.

And now we know how Columbus did it! This is why this book is so much fun. You never know what will come up.

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'   S  o  C
Vol.  VI   THE REFORMATION
Pgs. 243  -  246


                                THE HEALERS

In the science and practice of medicine, as in literature and art, northern Europe was half a century or more behind Italy; and even Italy had by 1300 barely regained the medical knowledge reached by Galen and Soranus a thousand years before. But the medical schools at Montpelier, Paris, and Oxford were  making good progress, and the greatest surgeons of this age were French. The profession was now well organised and defended its privileges lustily; but as the demand for health always exceeded the supply, herbalists, apothecaries, midwives, wandering leeches and barber surgeons -- not to mention quacks --  everywhere competed with trained practitioners. The public, inviting disease by wrong living, and then seeking infallible diagnoses and cheap overnight cures, made the usual complaints about mercenary or murderous doctors. Froissart considered it “the object of all medical men to gain large salaries.” -- as if this were not a disease endemic to all civilisation.

The most interesting medical men of the age were the surgeons. They had not yet persuaded the physicians to recognise them as equals; indeed the University of Paris would admit no student to its school of medicine in the fourteenth century except on his oath never to perform a surgical operation. Even blood letting which had already
become a panacea, was forbidden to physicians and had to be left to their underlings. Barbers were still used by the people for many operations; but the barber surgeons were now abandoning tonsorial practice, and were specialising in surgery; in 1365 there were forty such barber surgeons in Paris; in England they continued till 1540. The great names in surgery, in the first half of the fourteenth century, were Henri de Mondeville, and Guy de Chauliac.  Froissart might have noted that Mondeville, though always in great demand, remained poor to the end of his days, and carried on his work despite his own asthma and tuberculosis. His ‘Chirurgia’ ( 1306-20) the first work on surgery by a Frenchman, covered the whole field with a thoroughness and competence that earned a new standing for surgeons. His distinctive contribution was the application and development of a method which he had learned from Theodoric Borgognoni at Bologna for treating wounds by complete cleansing, prevention of suppuration, exclusion of air, and dressings with wine.  He defended his innovations by warning against a supine acceptance of Galen or other classic authorities. “ Modern authors,” he wrote , using a favourite medieval adjective, “are to the ancient like a dwarf placed upon the shoulders of a giant; he sees all that the giant sees, and farther still.”

The generation after him produced the most famous of medieval surgeons. Born of peasant stock in the French village that gave him his name, Guy de Chauliac so impressed the lords of the manor that they paid for his tuition at university. In 1342 he became papal physician at Avignon, and held that difficult position for twenty-eight years. When the Black Death struck Avignon he stayed at his post, ministered to the victims, contracted the pestilence, and barely survived. Like any man he committed many errors: he blamed the plague now on an unfortunate conjunction of planets, now on Jews aiming to poison all Christendom, and he retarded the surgery of wounds by rejecting Mondeville’s simple cleansing method and returning to the use of plasters and salves. But for the most part he lived up to the finest traditions of his great profession.

Social and individual hygiene hardly kept pace with the advances of medicine. Personal cleanliness was not a fetish; even the King of England bathed only once a week, and sometimes skipped. The Germans had public baths-- large vats in which the bather stood or sat naked, some times both sexes together. In all Europe -- not always excepting the aristocracy -- the same articles of clothing were worn for months, or years, or generations. Many cities  had a water supply, but it reached only a few homes; most families had to fetch water from the nearest fountain, well, or spring. The air of London was befouled by the odour  of slaughtered cattle, till such carnage was forbidden in 1371.

In 1388, prodded by several returns of the plague, Parliament passed the first Sanitary  Act for all England. Similar ordinances  were promulgated in France about this time. Epidemics continued to occur -- The sweating sickness in England, diphtheria and smallpox in Germany -- but with diminished virulence and mortality. The treatment of the insane gradually passed from superstitious reverence or barbaric cruelty to semi scientific care. Matters improved in the fifteenth century. A monk named Jean Joffre, filled with compassion for lunatics who were being hooted through the streets of Valladolid by a mob, established there an asylum for the insane ( 1409 ), and his example was followed in other cities. The hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, founded in London in 1247, was transformed into an insane asylum in 1402 and the word Bethlehem, corrupted into Bedlam, became a synonym for a place of insanity.

Confirmed lepers were still outcast from society, but leprosy almost disappeared form Western Europe in the fifteenth century. Syphilis took its place. Possibly a development of the ‘gros verole’ previously known in France, possibly  an importation from America, it appeared definitely in Spain in 1493, in Italy 1495; it spread so widely in France that it came to be called morbus gallicus; and some cities in Germany were so ravaged by it that they begged exemption from taxation. As early as the end of the fifteenth century we hear of mercury being used in treating it. The progress of medicine ran a brave race then as now with the inventiveness of disease.

[Emily]

The treatment of the insane gradually passed from superstitious reverence or barbaric cruelty to semi scientific care.

There was nothing scientific about what they did. They simply gave asylum to people who were unable due to their disability to live and care for themselves in greater society. It was a wonderful and caring act and gave those least capable a safe and secure place. An asylum from the harsh reality of life.

This country has reversed that trend. A prison cell or living back on the street has become the norm here. When the ------(fill in the blank) decided that a place of asylum was not what these people needed, but they should be put back into society and live among all the people, they closed the places of asylum down and many were left wandering the streets.

They sold the one here to Dell computer, a large farm of beautiful rolling countryside with trees, meadows, a dairy, park like land with gazebos and benches. They even tore down the crafted wrought iron gates and sold them. We used to pass it on the way to Nashville before they built the interstate. There were many well kept buildings in a pristine setting with flowers and vegetable gardens. At least that is the description given when the local paper showed a picture of them tearing down the gates. Their families could visit them, today many don't know where their mentally ill relative is or what has happened to them.

Here we are in the 21st century and our government has chosen to revert back to 12th century science. Even with all the scientific knowledge we have today little is known about the brain, that other organ which can be diseased the same as the heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, stomach etc. That disease is treated much differently than the other vital organs.

Had I been so unfortunate as to be born with a malfunctioning brain, I would certainly have hoped for a place of asylum, instead of the streets or jails. I would think that all people deserve a place of safety.

Emily

[JoanK]

I agree with you! I remember the propaganda campaign at the time: we were doing these people a favor to return them to loving families. Yes, for the small minority who have loving families who can afford and are able and willing to care for them. But what about the rest? A cost cutting measure disguised as benevolence.

[3kings(Trevor)]

Durants'  S  o  C
Vol VI  THE REFORMATION
Pgs 246 - 248

                                                     THE  PHILOSOPHERS
Though the age of the system-makers had passed, philosophy was still vigorous; indeed in the fourteenth century it shook the whole dogmatic structure of Christendom. A change of emphasis ended the sway of the theologians in philosophy: the leading thinkers now took a major interest in science , like Buridan, or in economics, like Oresme, or in Church organization, like Nicholas of Cusa, or in politics, like Pierre Dubois and Marsilius of Padua. Intellectually these men were quite the equal of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Siger de Brabant, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus.

Scholasticism -- both as a method of argument and exposition and as an attempt to show the consistency of reason with faith -- continued to dominate the northern universities. Aquinas was canonized in 1323; thereafter his fellow Dominicans, especially at Louvain and Cologne, felt it a point of honour to maintain his doctrine against all challenges. The Franciscans as a loyal opposition, preferred to follow Augustine and Duns Scotus. One unmoored Dominican, William Durand of Saint- Pourcain, shocked  his order by going over to the Scotists. At thirty-eight  ( c.1308 ) he began a vast commentary, which he finished in old age. As he progressed he abandoned Aristotle and Aquinas, and proposed to  put reason above the authority  of any doctor, “however famous or solemn “ == here was a  philosopher with some sense of humour. While remaining overtly orthodox in theology, he prepared for the uncompromising nominalism of Ockham by restoring the conceptualism of Abelard; only individual things exist; all abstract or general ideas are merely the useful shorthand concepts of the mind. William’s friends called him Doctor Resolutissimus his opponents called him Durus Durandus == Durand the Hard == and warmed themselves with the hope that the fires of hell would soften him at last.

William of Ockham was much harder, but did not wait till death to burn; his whole life was one of hot controversy, cooled only by occasional imprisonment, and the compulsion of the times to phrase his heat in Scholastic form. He admitted in philosophy no authority but experience and reason. He took his theorems passionately, and set half of Europe by the ears in defending his views. His life, adventures, and aims prefigure Voltaire’s, and perhaps his effect was as great.

We cannot say precisely where or when he was born; probably at Ockham in Surrey, toward the end of the thirteenth century. While yet young he entered the Franciscan order, and about the age of twelve he was sent to Oxford as a bright lad who would surely be a shining light in the Church. At Oxford, and perhaps at Paris, he felt the influence of another subtle Franciscan, Duns Scotus; for though he opposed the realism of Scotus he carried his predecessor’s rationalist critique of philosophy and theology many steps further, to a scepticism that would dissolve alike religious dogmas and scientific laws. Apparently before 1324 -- while still a tyro in his twenties -- he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Peter Lombard, and his most influential book, “Summa totius logicae” -- a summary of all logic.

It seems at first sampling to be a dreary desert of logic chopping and technical terminology, a lifeless procession of definitions, divisions, subdivisions, distinctions, classifications, and subtleties. Ockham knew all about “semantics”; he deplored the inaccuracy of the terms used in philosophy, and spent half his time trying to make them more precise. He resented the Gothic edifice of abstractions -- one mounted upon the other like arches in superimposed tiers -- that medieval thought had raised. We cannot find in his extant works precisely the famous formula that tradition called “Ockham’s razor : ‘entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate -- entities are not to be multiplied beyond need“. But he expressed the principle in other terms again and again: “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” --a plurality ( of entities or causes or factors ) is not to be posited ( or assumed ) without necessity; and “frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora” -- it is vain to seek to accomplish or explain by assuming several entities or causes what can be explained by fewer. The principal was not new; Aquinas had accepted it, Scotus had used it. But in Ockham’s hands it became a deadly weapon, cutting away a hundred occult fancies and grandiose abstractions.

Applying the principle to epistemology, Ockham judged it needless to assume, as the source and material of knowledge, anything more than sensations. From these arise memory ( sensation revived), perception ( sensation interpreted through memory ), imagination ( memories combined ), anticipation ( memory projected ), thought ( memories compared )  and experience ( memories interpreted through thought). “Nothing can be an object of the interior sense” ( thought ) “without having been an object of the exterior sense, ( sensation ): here is Locke’s empiricism 300 years before Locke. All that we ever perceive outside ourselves is individual entities -- specific persons, places, things, actions, shapes, colours, tastes, odours, pressures, temperatures, sounds; and the words by which we denote these are “ words of first intention” or primary intent, directly referring to what we interpret as external realities.

By noting and abstracting the common features of similar entities so perceived, we may arrive at general or abstract ideas -- man, virtue, height, sweetness, heat, music, eloquence; and the words by which we denote such abstractions are “words of second intention” referring to conceptions derived from perceptions. These “universals “ are never experienced in sensation, they are “ termini, signa, nomina,” -- terms, signs, names-- for generalisations extremely useful ( and dangerous ) in thought or reason, in science, philosophy, and theology; they are not  objects existing outside the mind. “ Everything outside the mind is singular, numerically one. Reason is magnificent, but its conclusions are vain and perhaps deceptive abstractions. How much nonsense is talked or written by mistaking ideas for things, abstractions for realities ! Abstract thought fulfils its functions only when it leads to specific statements about specific things.

[Brian]

I have always been fascinated by Ockham's Razor as used in philosophic arguments,
and coming across it again here,  was activated into looking it up again on the net.


There are two major difficulties with Ockham’s Razor. The first is that other things are rarely (if ever) equal, so the ceteris paribus clause is not satisfied. The second, perhaps still more important objection is that the unknown (or additional) entities parsed away may have explanatory power outside the domain of consideration, or they may offer further methodological suggestions which subsequently show that the utility (or even truth) granted to the former explanation was too narrow.

The 14th century was a great time for the thinkers in all types of endeavour.   
Medicine,  politics,  nature,  the universe  and just the very fact of being alive.

Brian

[JoanK]

These flowerings of thought occur periodically, and disappear again. Why?  I'm sure the inquisition will cut all this off.

Brian: I like your critique of Occam's razor. I've never seen it as an imperitive, but as a suggestion.

Does anyone understand this sentance: "While remaining overtly orthodox in theology, he [William Durand] prepared for the uncompromising nominalism of Ockham by restoring the conceptualism of Abelard"

[Brian]

JoanK - - -   I have to fall  back on the web for a reply to your question.

Nominalism was first formulated as a philosophical theory in the Middle Ages. The French philosopher and theologian Roscellinus (c. 1050-c. 1125) was an early, prominent proponent of this view. It can be found in the work of Peter Abelard and reached its flowering in William of Ockham, who was the most influential and thorough nominalist. Abelard's and Ockham's version of nominalism is sometimes called conceptualism, which presents itself as a middle way between nominalism and realism, asserting that there is something in common among like individuals, but that it is a concept in the mind, rather than a real entity existing independently of the mind.

Brian

[JoanK]

Gotcha.

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANT'S   S  o  C
Vol. VI  THE REFORMATION
Pgs 246 - 251




                                           THE PHILOSOPHERS  (cont.)

From this “nominalism” Ockham moved with devastating recklessness into every field of philosophy and theology. Both metaphysics and science, he announced, are precarious generalizations, since our experience is only of individual entities in a narrowly restricted area and time; it is mere arrogance on our part to assume the universal and eternal validity of the general propositions and “ natural laws “ that we derive from this tiny sector of reality. Our knowledge is moulded and limited by our means and ways of perceiving things ( this is Kant before Kant ); it is locked up in the prison of our minds, and it must not pretend to be the objective or ultimate truth about anything.

As for the soul, it too is an abstraction. It never appears in our perceptions, external or internal; all that we perceive is will, the ego asserting itself in every action  and thought. Reason itself and all the glory of intellect are tools of the will; the intellect is merely the will (This is Schopenhauer ).

God himself seems to fall before this razor philosophy. Ockham ( like Kant ) found no conclusive force in any of the arguments used to prove the existence of deity. He rejected Aristotle's notion that the chain of motions or causes compels us to assume a Prime mover or First Cause; an “infinite regress” of motions or causes is no more inconceivable than the unmoved Mover or uncaused Cause of Aristotle's theology. Since nothing can be known save through direct perception, we can never have any clear knowledge that God exists -- “nonpotest sciri evidenter quod Deus est”-- That God is omnipotent or infinite, omniscient or benevolent or personal, cannot be shown by reason, much less can reason prove that there are three persons in one God, or that God became man to atone for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, or that the son of God is present in the consecrated Host. Nor is monotheism more rational than polytheism; there may be more worlds than one, and more gods to govern them.

What then remained of the majestic edifice of Christian faith, its lovely myths and songs and art, its God given morality, its fortifying hope? Ockham recoiled before the ruin of theology by reason, and in a desperate effort to save a social order based on a moral code based  on religious belief, he proposed at last to sacrifice reason on the altar of faith. Though it cannot be proved, it is probable that God exists, and He has endowed each of us with an immortal soul. We must distinguish ( as Averroes and Duns Scotus had advised ) between theological truth and  philosophical truth, and humbly accept in faith what proud reason doubts.

It was too much to expect that this caudal appendage in honour of “practical reason” would be accepted by the Church as atoning for Ockham’s critique of pure reason. Pope John XXII ordered an ecclesiastical inquiry into the “abominable heresies” of the young friar, and summoned him to appear at the papal court in Avignon. Ockham came, for we find him, in 1328, in a papal prison there, with two other Franciscans. The three escaped and fled to Aiguesmortes; they embarked in a small boat, and were picked up by a galley which took them to Louis of Bavaria at Pisa. The pope excommunicated them, the Emperor protected them. William accompanied Louis to Munich, joined Marsilius of Padua there, lived in an anti-papal Franciscan monastery, and issued from it a torrent of books and pamphlets against the power and heresies of the popes in general, and of John XXII in particular.

As he had in his metaphysics outdone the scepticism of Scotus, so now in his practical theory Ockham carried to daring conclusions the anticlericalism of Marsilius of Padua. He applied the “razor” to the dogmas and rites that the Church had added to early Christianity, and demanded a return to the simpler creed and worship of the New Testament. In a pugnacious ‘Centiloquium theologicum” he brought before the tribunal of his reason a hundred dogmas  of the Church, and argued that many of them led logically to intolerable absurdities. If, for example Mary is the Mother of God, and God is the father of us all, Mary is the mother of her father. Ockham questioned the Apostolic succession of the popes, and their infallibility; on the contrary, he argued, many of them had been heretics, and some had been criminals. What Christianity needed, he thought, was a return from the Church to Christ, from wealth and power to simplicity of life and humility of rule. The Church should be defined not as the clergy alone but as the whole Christian community. This entire fellowship including the women, should choose representatives, including women, to a general council, and this council should choose and govern the pope. Church and state should be under one head.

The state itself should be subject to the will of the people, for in them is vested all final sovereignty on the earth. They delegate their right of legislation and administration to a king or emperor on the understanding that he will enact laws for the welfare of all. If the common good requires it, private property may be abolished. We know little of Ockham's fate.   He compared himself to John the Evangelist on Patmos, but he dared not leave the protective orbit of the Emperor. Ockham played a part, if only a voice in the uprising of the nationalist state against the universalist Church. His propaganda for ecclesiastical poverty influenced Wyclif, and his assaults upon the papacy prepared for Luther, who ranked Ockham as  “ the chiefest and most ingenious of Scholastic doctors.” His skepticism passed down to Ramus and Montaigne, perhaps to Erasmus; his subjectivist limitation of knowledge to ideas foreshadowed Berkeley; his attempt to rescue faith through “practical reason“ anticipated Kant. His emphasis on sensation as the sole source of knowledge gave him a place in the procession of empirical English philosophy from Roger and Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Spencer to Bertrand Russell.

His occasional sallies into physical science stimulated thinkers from Jean Buridan to Isaac Newton. The general effect of his work, like that of Duns Scotus, was to undermine the basic assumption of Scholasticism -- that medieval Christian dogma could be proved by reason. Scholasticism maintained till the seventeenth century a pallid post-mortem existence, but it never recovered from these blows.

Ockham died of the Black Death in 1349 or 1350, still in the prime of life.

[JoanK]

Now that is a clear and concise description of Ockham. (Since I haven't read O, I have no way of knowing how accurate it is.) I'm impressed (as often) by the thought the Durants have put into this. And glad to know more of him: his "razor" is still seen a lot in the scientific thought I was educated in, and it's easy to forget how radical his ideas were at the time (and how much he was risking in expressing them).

[3kings(Trevor)]

JoanK Im pleased you found my selection of Durant's treatment of Ockham clear and understandable. In the book I copy from there were two paragraphs that had become rather confused. ( parts of sentences repeated and placed out of sequence). I'm glad my selection is coherent.  Trevor

[Brian]

Hi Trevor - - -  Thanks for your yeoman work,  not having a copy of the book,
your efforts are a boon to me.   Are we ever going to finish our task?

Ockham,  one of our greatest philosophers,  can be summed up by one of his quotes

Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
(It is pointless to do with more,  what can be done with less.)

Brian

[Emily]

God himself seems to fall before this razor philosophy. Ockham found no conclusive force in any of the arguments used to prove the existence of deity.

What then remained of the majestic edifice of Christian faith, its lovely myths and songs and art, its God given morality, its fortifying hope? Ockham recoiled before the ruin of theology by reason, and in a desperate effort to save a social order based on a moral code based  on religious belief, he proposed at last to sacrifice reason on the altar of faith.

Myth: an unfounded or false notion. a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence.

As for the Arab god given 'morality', the opposite occurs to me. The Arab's god in their myth did not make the people 'moral', it did just the opposite, made them immoral and then punished them for their 'immorality'. That seems to be the theme of their fairytale.

So Ockham sacrafices 'reason' for something called faith. At least that is what he wrote. He was after all living in a monastery under protection from the Pope. He could hardly have been honest and kept his head or his feet out of the fire. Reason flys out the window when the threat of death comes calling.

All religion was created by megalomaniacs to gain power over others.   

Emily

[Brian]

Emily - - -    

All religion was created by megalomaniacs to gain power over others.

 

I am not quite sure what point you are trying to make in your post,  but I agree with you 100%
 that over the years,  religion has been used to control the populace,  in the face of reason.

I have always been favour of separation of "Church" and "State",  and cannot understand why Ockham
is quoted as a disciple of government by both these entities together.

Brian

[JoanK]

Perhaps because the idea was so unheard of at the time, that he couldn't possibly have "meant it".

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'   S  o  C
Vol VI  The REFORMATION
Pgs   251 - 253




                                                   THE REFORMERS 

While ibn-Khaldun was founding sociology in Islam, Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, Marsilius of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa, were developing kindred studies, less systematically, in Christendom. Dubois served Philip IV of France as Ockham and Marsilius served Louis of Bavaria, by aiming intellectual broadsides against the papacy, and singing doxologies to the state. In a ‘Supplication du peuple de France au roi contre le pape Boniface ( 1308), and in a treatise ‘De recuperatione terre sancte ( On the recapture of the Holy Land, 1305), the ardent lawyer recommended that the papacy should shed all its temporal possessions and powers, that the rulers of Europe should repudiate the papal authority in their realms, and that the French Church should divorce itself from Rome and submit to secular authority and law. Moreover, proceeded Dubois, all Europe should be united under the French King as Emperor, with his capital at Constantinople as a bastion against Islam. An international court should be established to  adjudicate the quarrels of nations, and an economic boycott should be declared against any Christian nation that should open war against another. Women should have the same educational opportunities and political rights as men.

No one seemed to pay much attention to these proposals, but they entered into the intellectual currents that undermined the papacy. Two centuries after Dubois, Henry VIII, who doubtless had never heard of him, followed his program, and Wyclif’s in religion, and in the early nineteenth century Napoleon set up for a moment a united Europe under French leadership, with the pope a captive of the state. Dubois belonged to that rising legal profession which aspired to replace the clergy in administering the government. He won his battle, we live in the heyday of his victory.

Oresme, who stirred so many pools, wrote toward 1355 one of the clearer and most straight forward essays in all economic literature -- “On the Origin, Nature, Law, and alterations of Money“. The money of a country, he argued, belongs to the community, not to the king; it is a social utility, not a royal perquisite; the ruler or government my regulate its issue, but should make no profit from minting it, and should maintain its metallic utility undebased. A king who dilutes the coinage is a thief. Moreover, bad money ( as “Gresham’s Law” would say two centuries later ) drives good money out of  circulation.; people will secrete or export gold coin, and the dishonest government will receive in its revenues  only its depreciated currency. These  ideas  of Oresme were not merely ideals, he taught them, as a tutor, to the son of John II. When his pupil became Charles V, the young king, after one desperate  devaluation, profited from his teacher’s instruction, by restoring the shattered finances of war ridden France to a sound and honest basis.

Marsilius  of Padua was of more volatile temperament than Oresme: an uncompromising individualist proud of his intellect and courage, and making his political philosophy an inextricable part of his hectic life. Son of a notary in Padua, he studied medicine at the university; probably he owed some of his anticlerical radicalism to the atmosphere of Averroistic skepticism that Petrarch found and denounced there in the same generation.. Passing to Paris he became for a year rector of the university. In 1324 with the minor collaboration of John of Jandun, he composed the most remarkable and influential, political treatise of the middle ages -- ‘Defensor pacis ‘-- ( the Defender of peace.) Knowing that the book must be condemned by the Church, the authors fled to Nuremburg and placed themselves under the wing of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, then at war with the pope.

They could not have expected so lusty a fighter as John XXII to take calmly their bellicose defence of peace . The book argued that the peace of Europe was being destroyed by strife between state and Church, and that peace could be restored and best maintained by bringing the Church, with all her property and personnel, under the same Imperial or royal authority as other groups and goods. It was ( ran the argument ) a mistake for the Church ever to have acquired property; nothing in Scripture justified such acquisition.

Like Ockham, the authors defined the Church as the whole body of Christians. As the Roman people, in Roman law, was the real Sovereign, and merely delegated its authority to consuls, senate, or emperors, so the Christian community should delegate, but should never surrender its powers to its representatives, the clergy; and these should be held responsible to the people whom they represent. The derivation of the papal supremacy from the Apostle Peter is, in Marsilius’ view, an historical error; Peter had no more authority than the other Apostles, and the bishops of Rome, in their first three centuries, had no more authority than the bishops of several other ancient capitals. Not the pope but the emperor or his delegates presided over the first general councils. A general  council, freely elected by the people of Christendom, should interpret the scriptures, define the Catholic faith, and choose the cardinals, who should choose the pope. In all temporal matters the clergy, including the pope, should be subject to civil jurisdiction and law. The state should appoint and remunerate the clergy, fix the number of churches and priests, remove such priests as it finds unworthy, take control of ecclesiastical endowments, schools, and income, and relieve the poor out of the surplus revenues of the Church.

Here again was the strident voice of the upsurging national state. Having through the support of the rising middle classes, subdued the barons and the communes, the kings now felt strong enough to repudiate the claims of the Church to sovereignty over the civil power. Seizing the opportunity presented by the deterioration of the Church’s international and intellectual authority, the secular rulers now dreamed of mastering every phase of the life in their realms, including religion and the Church. This was the basic issue that would be fought out in the Reformation; and the triumph of the state over the Church would mark one terminus of the Middle Ages. ( in 1535 Henry the VIII, at the height  of his revolt against the Church, had the “Defensor pacis” translated and published at governmental expense.)

Marsiliuis, like Ockham and Luther, after proposing to replace the authority of the Church with that of the people, was compelled, both for social order and for his own security, to replace it with the authority of the state. But he did not raise the kings into ogres of omnipotence. He looked beyond the triumph of the state to the day when the people might actually exercise the sovereignty that legal theorists had long affected to vest in them. In ecclesiastical reform he advocated democracy: each Christian community should choose its representative to church councils, each parish should choose its own priests, control them, dismiss them if need be, and no member of the parish should be excommunicated without its consent.
 

[Brian]

- - -  papacy should shed all its temporal possessions and powers  - - -

Now,  here's a thought for the new Pope,  when he is elected.   I suppose the creation of female
Cardinals and Priests is still outside the realm of possibility.

I am all for the absolute separation of 'Church and State'.

Brian

[JoanK]

"While ibn-Khaldun was founding sociology in Islam, Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, Marsilius of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa, were developing kindred studies, less systematically, in Christendom."

Durant makes me feel so ignorant. I have a graduate degree in sociology, but never heard of any of these people.

[mabel1015j]

As i used to say to my students Joan, "that's not ignorance ( they defined the word as "stupid") that's just an experience, or knowledge, you hadn't come in contact with as yet. " 

Young people often assumed that everybody had had the same opportinities they as individuals had had and were "ignorant" if they didn't know the same "facts."

The recent chapters have been interesting, thanks Trevor.

[JoanK]

Well, I had to look up ibn-Khaldoun. He is trying to make generalizations about society, and about peoples. here is an interesting one:

"When civilization [population] increases, the available labor again increases. In turn, luxury again increases in correspondence with the increasing profit, and the customs and needs of luxury increase. Crafts are created to obtain luxury products. The value realized from them increases, and, as a result, profits are again multiplied in the town. Production there is thriving even more than before. And so it goes with the second and third increase. All the additional labor serves luxury and wealth, in contrast to the original labor that served the necessity of life. On economic growth [1]"

Source: quoted in Wikipedia.

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'  S  o  C
Vol. VI  THE REFORMATION
Pgs 254 - 257



                                        THE REFORMERS  (cont.)
Marsilius, like Ockham and Luther, after proposing to replace the authority of the Church with that of the people, was compelled, both for social order and for his own security, to replace it with the authority of the state. But he did not raise the kings into ogres of omnipotence. He looked beyond the triumph of the state to the day when the people might actually exercise the sovereignty that legal theorists had long affected to vest in them. In ecclesiastical reform he advocated democracy: each Christian community should choose its representative to church councils, each parish should choose its own priests, control them, dismiss them if need should be; and no member of the parish should be excommunicated without its consent. Marsilius applied similar principles to civil government, but with hesitant modifications.

     “We declare, according to truth and opinion of Aristotle, that the legislator --- the prime and proper effective cause of law -- should be the people, the whole body of citizens, or its weightier part (valentiorem partem ), commanding or deciding  by its own choice of will, expressed verbally in a general assembly of citizens. Only out of the  deliberation and will of the whole multitude is the best law produced. A majority, more readily than any of its parts, can discern the defects in a law proposed for enactment, for an entire body is greater in power and worth than any of its separate parts.”

This is a remarkable statement for its time (1324 ), and the conditions of the age justify its hesitations. Even Marsilius would not advocate equal suffrage for all adults in Europe where hardly one person in ten could read, communication was difficult, and class divisions were mortised in the cement of time. Indeed he rejected complete democracy, wherein policy and legislation would  be determined by a count of noses (egenorum multitudo -- a multitude of needy people ). And to correct this “ corruption of a republic,“ he was willing that individuals should have political power commensurate with their value to the community -- but he did not say how or by whom this was to be judged. He left room for monarchy, but added that “ a ruler who is elected is greatly to be preferred to rulers who are hereditary.”

These ideas had a medieval, even an ancient, origin: the Roman lawyers and the Scholastic philosophers had regularly  endowed the people with a theoretical sovereignty, the papacy itself was an elective monarchy; the pope called himself “servus servorum Dei --  servant of the servants of God.” Here in one man, Marsilius, in the fourteenth century, were the ideas of both the protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Marsilius was too far a head of his time to be comfortable. He rose rapidly with Louis of Bavaria, and fell rapidly with Louis’ fall. When Louis made peace with the popes he was required to dismiss Marsilius as a heretic. We do not know the sequel. Apparently Marsilius died in 1343, an outcast alike from the Church that he had fought and from the state that he had laboured to exalt.

His temporary success would have been impossible had not the rising legal profession given to the state an authority rivalling that of the Church. Over and above the ruins of feudal and communal law, beside and often against the canon law of the Church, the lawyers raised the “positive law “ of the state; and year by year this royal or secular law extended its reach over the affairs of men. The law schools Montpelier, Orleans, and Paris, turned out bold and subtle legists who used Roman law to build up, as against papal claims, a theory of divine right and absolute power for their royal masters. These ideas were strongest in France  where they evolved into “L’etat c ‘est moi “ and  “Le roi soleil;” They prevailed also in Spain, preparing the absolutism of Ferdinand, Charles V, and Phillip II; and even in parliamentary England Wyclif expounded the unlimited authority of the divine king. Lords and Commons opposed the theory, and Sir John Fortescue insisted that the English king could not issue laws without the consent of Parliament, and that English judges were bound, by their oath, to judge by the law of the land, whatever the king might desire; but under Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, England too would kneel to absolute rulers. Some idealistic spirits clung to the notion of a “natural law, “ a divine justice implanted in the human conscience, phrased in the Gospels, and superior to the law of man. Neither the state nor the Church paid more than lip service to this conception; it remained in the background; professed and ignored but ever faintly alive. In the eighteenth century it would father the American Declaration of Independence and the French declaration of the Rights of Man, and would play a minor but eloquent role in a revolution that for a time upset both the absolutisms that had ruled mankind.

Nicholas of Cusa fought, and then resigned himself to the absolutism of the papacy. His varied career showed the best face of organised Christianity to a Germany always suspicious of the Church. Philosopher and administrator, theologian and legist, mystic and scientist, he combined in one powerful personality the best constituents of those Middle Ages that were closing with his life. In a year at Heidelberg he felt the influence of Ockham’s nominalism; at Padua he was touched for a time with the scepticism of Averroes, at Cologne he absorbed the orthodox tradition of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; all the elements were so mixed in him that it would make him the most complete Christian of his time.

He rejected the Scholastic rationalism that sought to prove theology by reason; all human knowledge, he felt, is relative and uncertain; truth is hidden in God. Generally he rejected astrology; but, succumbing to the delusions of his epoch, he reckoned that the end of the world would come in 1734. He kept abreast of scientific thought. He urged more experiment and more accurate measurements; he suggested timing the fall of different bodies from different heights; he taught that the earth “ cannot be fixed, but moves like other stars; every star, however fixed it may seem, moves; no orbit is precisely circular; earth is not at the centre of the universe, except in so far as any point may be taken as the centre of an infinite universe. These were sometimes judicious borrowings, sometimes brilliant apercus. Nicholas pictured the Church as an organic unity, incapable of successful functioning except through the harmonious co-operation of its parts. Instead of concluding, as the popes might have done, that the parts should be guided by the head, Nicholas argued that only a general council could represent, express, and unify the interdependent elements of the Church.

He repeated Aquinus and Marsilius, and almost plagiarized Rousseau and Jefferson, in an idealistic passage:

“Every law depends upon the law of nature; and if it contradicts this it cannot be a valid law... Since by nature all men are free, and every government... exists solely by the agreement and consent of the subjects... the binding power of any law consists in this tacit or explicit agreement and consent.

The sovereign people delegates its powers to small groups equipped by education or experience to make or administer laws; but these groups derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. When the Christian community delegates its powers to a general council of the Church, that council, and not the pope, represents the sovereign authority in religion. Nor can the pope rest his claim to legislative absolutism on the supposed Donation of Constantine, for that donation is a forgery and a myth. A pope has a right to summon a general council, but such a council, if it judges him unfit, may rightly depose him. And the same principles hold for secular princes.  An elective monarchy is probably the best government available to mankind in its present depraved condition; but the secular ruler, like the pope, should periodically convene a representative assembly, and should submit to its decrees.

Nicholas’ later life was a model for prelates. Made a cardinal ( 1448) he became in person a Catholic Reformation. In a strenuous tour through the Netherlands and Germany, he held provincial synods, revived ecclesiastical discipline, reformed the nunneries and monasteries, attacked priestly concubinage, furthered the education of the clergy, and raised, at least for a time, the level of clerical and popular morality. “Nicholas of Cusa,” wrote the learned abbot Trithemius, “ appeared in Germany as an angel of light and peace amid darkness and confusion. He restored the unity of the Church, strengthened the authority of her Supreme Head, and sowed a precious seed of new life.”

To his other titles Nicholas could have added that of Humanist. He loved the ancient classics, encouraged their study, and planned to print for wide circulation the Greek manuscripts that he himself had brought from Constantinople. In a  “Dialogue of Peace.” composed in the very year when Constantinople fell to the Turks, he pleaded for mutual understanding among the religions as diverse ways of one eternal truth. And in the Dawn of modern thought, when the rising freedom of the intellect was an intoxication, he wrote sound and noble words:

“To know and to think, to see the truth in the eye of the mind, is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure that this affords him.... As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavour after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. Amid the moments of time, the daily labour, perplexities, and contradictions of life, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven, and seek ever to obtain a firmer grip of.... the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacity of our own hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the centuries, and the wonderful works of  Nature around us, but remembering always that in humility alone lies true greatness, and that knowledge and wisdom are profitable only in so far as our lives are governed by them.”

Had there been more Nicholas's there might have been no Luther.

[JoanK]

"To know and to think, to see the truth in the eye of the mind, is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure that this affords him.... As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavour after knowledge and truth the life of the mind."

Not a bad motto for life.

[JoanK]

In the Griffith Observatory gift shop, bought Einstein and Newton finger puppets. They had plenty of Einstein, but had run out of Galileo. Not sure what that means.

Einstein and Newton are now sitting on my refrigerator arguing about gravity. But they agree in getting rid of that pesky uncertainty principle!

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'   S  o  C
Vol. VI  The Reformation
Pgs 258 - 261



                                               The Conquest of the Sea.


It was “manifest destiny” that someone would dare the perils of the Atlantic to find India or “Cathay”. The failure of the crusades compelled the discovery of America; the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks, the closing or obstruction of land routes by the Ottomans at Constantinople and by anti-Christian dynasties in Persia and Turkestan, made the old avenues of East-West trade costly and dangerous. The problem for Portugal and Spain was to find a better route. Portugal found one round Africa; nothing was left for Spain but to try a passage west.

The growth of knowledge had long since established the sphericity of the earth. The very errors of science encouraged audacity by underestimating the width of the Atlantic, and picturing Asia as lying ready for conquest and exploitation on the far side. Scandinavian mariners had reached Labrador in 986 and 1000, and had brought back news of an immense continent. In 1477, if we may believe his own account, Christopher Columbus visited Iceland and presumably heard proud traditions of  Leif Ericsson’s voyage to “Vinland.” All that was needed now for the great adventure was money. Bravery abounded.

Columbus himself, in the will that he made before setting out on his third voyage across the Atlantic, named Genoa as his birthplace. Possibly his forebears had been Spanish Christianized Jews, who had migrated to Italy; the evidence of Hebraic blood and sentiment in Columbus is almost convincing. He tells us that he became a sailor at fourteen. In Genoa every road leads down to the sea. In 1482, probably as an officer, he joined a Portuguese fleet that sailed the African coast to Elmina. He read with interest, Pope Pius II’s “Historia  rerum gestarum,” which suggested the circumnavigability of Africa.

But his studies more and more inclined him to the west. He accepted the prevailing estimate of the Earth’s circumference as 18,000 to 20,000 miles; and combining this with Polo’s  idea that Japan  was some 1,500 miles east of the Asian mainland, he reckoned that the nearest Asiatic islands would be some 5,000 miles west of Lisbon.

About 1484 he proposed to John II of Portugal that the King should equip three vessels for a year of exploration across the Atlantic and back; that Columbus should be appointed “ Great Admiral of the Ocean,” and perpetual governor of whatever lands he might discover; and that he should receive a tenth of all revenues and precious metals thereafter derived from those lands by Portugal. ( obviously the idea of spreading Christianity was secondary to material considerations.) The King submitted the proposal to a committee of savants; they rejected it on the ground that Columbus’s estimate of the distance across the Atlantic as  merely 2,400 miles was  far to small. ( it was approximately correct from the Canary Islands to the West Indies). In 1485 two Portuguese navigators proposed a similar project to King John, but agreed to finance it themselves: John gave them at least his blessing; they sailed (1487), followed too northern a route, encountered rough westerly winds, and turned back in despair.

Columbus renewed his appeal (1488). The King invited him to an audience; Columbus came just in time to witness the triumphant return of Bartholomeu Dias from a successful rounding of Africa. Absorbed in prospects of an African route to India, the Portuguese government abandoned consideration of a passage across the Atlantic. Columbus commissioned his brother to sound out Henry VII of England, who invited Columbus to a conference. When the invitation reached him he had already committed himself to Spain. He was now (1488) some forty-two years old; tall and thin, with long face, ruddy complexion, eagle nose, blue eyes, freckles, bright red hair turning gray, and soon to be white. His son and friends described him as modest, grave, affable, discreet,  temperate in eating and drinking, fervently pious.  Others alleged that he was vain, that he paraded and inflated the titles he received, that he ennobled his ancestry in his imagination and his writings, and that he bargained avidly for his share in the New World’s gold; However he was worth more than he asked. After his wife’s death  Beatriz Enriquez bore him an illegitimate son (1488). Columbus did not marry her, but he provided well for her in his life and will.

Meanwhile he laid his petition before Isabella of Castile ( May  1486). She referred it to a group of advisers  presided over by the saintly Archbishop Talavera. After a long delay they reported the plan to be impracticable, arguing that Asia must be much further west than Columbus  supposed. After the Talavera committee, for a second time rejected the plan, Columbus resolved to submit it to Charles VIII of France. Fray Juan Perez, head of the monastery of La Rabida, dissuaded him by arranging another audience with Isabella. She sent him 20,000 maravedis to finance his trip to her headquarters at the siege city of Santa Fe. He went, she heard him kindly enough, but her advisers once more discounted the idea. He resumed his preparations for going to France. At this critical juncture a baptised Jew prodded the march of history.

Luis de Santander, finance minister to Ferdinand, reproached Isabella for lack of imagination and enterprise, tempting her with the prospect of converting Asia to Christianity, and proposed to finance the trip himself with the aid of his friends. Several other Jews -- Don Isaac Azbrabanel, Juan Cabrero, Abraham Senior-- supported his plea. Isabella was moved, and offered to pledge her jewels to raise the needed sum. Santander judged this unnecessary; he borrowed 1,400,000  from the fraternity of which he was treasurer, he added  350,000 out of his own pocket and Columbus somehow got together 250,000 more. On April 17th 1492, the King signed the requisite papers. Then or later he gave Columbus a letter to the Khan of Cathay; it was China, not India that Columbus hoped to reach, and which to the end of his life he thought he had found. On August 3  the Santa Maria ( his flagship). the Pinta, and the Nina sailed from Palos with eighty-eight men, and provisions for a year.

[JoanK]

I wonder what else Columbus was doing while he was trying to get financing.

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS’   S  o  C
Vol. VI   The REFORMATION
Pgs. 261 - 263
 




They headed south to the Canary Islands, seeking winds from the east before they faced into the west. After a long stay at the islands they ventured forth ( September 6) along the 28th parallel of latitude-- not quite far enough south to get the full boon of the trade winds; we know that a still more southerly crossing would have shortened the distance and tribulation to America. Thirty-three days passed anxiously. Columbus understated to his men the nautical mileage of each day; but as he overestimated his speed, his statements were unwillingly correct. On October 9 the captains of the Pinta and the Nina boarded the flagship and pleaded for an immediate turnabout back to Spain. Columbus promised that unless land was sighted in three days he would do as they wished. On October his own crew mutinied but he appeased them with the same pledge. On October 11 they drew from the ocean a green branch bearing flowers; their trust in the Admiral returned. At two o'clock the next morning, under a nearly full moon, Rodrigo de Triene , the lookout on the Nina, shouted “Tierra! tierra!,” it was land at last.

When dawn came they saw naked natives on the beach, “ all of good stature.” The three captains were rowed to the shore by armed men, they knelt, kissed the ground, and thanked God. Columbus christened the island San Salvador -- Holy Saviour -- and took possession of it in the name of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Christ. The savages received their future enslavers with civilized courtesies. The Admiral wrote:
        “In order that we might win good friendship--because I knew that they were people who could better be freed and converted to our Holy Father by love than by force, I gave them some red caps and some glass beads.... and many other things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure. They remained so much our friends that it was a marvel; and later  they came swimming to the ships’ boats, and brought us parrots and cotton thread. Finally they exchanged with us everything they had, with good will.”

The report of the “friendly and flowing savage” which was to bewitch Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Whitman may have begun then and there. But among the first things that Columbus learned on the island was that these natives were subject to slave raids by other native groups, and that they themselves, or their ancestors, had conquered earlier indigenes. Two days after landing the Admiral struck an ominous note in  his journal: “these people are very unskilled in arms... With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.” 

But alas, there was no gold in San Salvador. On October 14 the little fleet sailed again, seeking Cipango -- Japan --- and gold. On  October 28 a landing was made on Cuba. There too the natives  were well disposed. When Columbus showed them gold they seemed to indicate that he would find some at a point in the interior, which Columbus misheard as “El gran can “--- The Great Khan. He sent two Spaniards to find the elusive potentate. They returned without locating the Khan, but with a pleasant account of the natives’ courtesies. They brought  also the first report, by Europeans, of American tobacco. They had seen males and females smoking tobacco herbs rolled into a cigar, which was inserted into the nose. Columbus left  Cuba taking with him, by force five native youths to serve as interpreters, and seven women to comfort them. All died enroute to Spain.

Meanwhile Columbus’s senior captain, Martin Alonso Pinzon, had deserted with his ship to hunt gold on his own. On  December 5  Columbus reached Haiti. There he remained four weeks. He found some gold and felt himself a bit closer to the Khan; but his ship grounded on a reef, and was smashed. Luckily the Nina was near by to rescue the crew, and the natives salvaged most of the cargo. The Admiral thanked God for the gold, forgave Him for the shipwreck, and wrote in his journal that Ferdinand and Isabella would now have sufficient funds to conquer the Holy Land. On January 6 1493 Pizon rejoined him with the Pinta; his apologies were accepted. On January 16 they began the journey home.
It was a long and miserable voyage. All through January the winds were against them, and on February 12  a violent storm buffeted the tiny ships which were not much more than seventy feet long. As they approached the Azores, Pinzon deserted again, hoping to be the first to reach Spain. The Nina anchored off Santa Maria in the Azores, February 17; half the crew went ashore partly to make a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Virgin; they were arrested by the Portuguese and were kept in jail for four days, while Columbus fretted ashore.  They were released and Columbus sailed again; but another storm drove it from its course, split its sails, and so depressed the sailors that they vowed to spend the first day on land fasting on bread and water, and observing the Ten Commandments. On march 3 they sighted Portugal, and though Columbus knew that he was risking a diplomatic mess, he decided to disembark at Lisbon rather than attempt the remaining 225 miles to Palos with one sail. John II received him with courtesy; the Nina was repaired; and on March 15 it reached Palos after “infinite toil and terror “( said Columbus), 193 days after leaving  the port. Martin Pinzon had landed in north-western Spain several days before , and had sent a message to Ferdinand and Isabella, but they refused to see him or his messenger. The Pinta sailed into Palos a day after the Nina. Pinzon fled in fear and disgrace to his home, took to his bed, and died.                                                                                                         
       

[mabel1015j]

Some member of the Catholic hierarchy said today how appropriate it was to have a pope from South America, that people there had been in the Church in great numbers since the SIXTEENTH CENTURY!?! I think the Europeans may have been killing and torturing the people of the Carribean and the peoples of the western hemisphere who were refusing to convert to Catholicism in the SIXTEENTH century. Sadly the majority of the people who heard that statement don't know how wrong he was.

Jean

[JoanK]

How near we came to not being "discovered" by Columbus. But someone else would have done it: there was exploration in the air.

[3kings(Trevor)]

Durants'  S  o  C
Vol. VI  The REFORMATION
Pgs. 263 - 266




                                                    THE WATERS OF BITTERNESS

Columbus was welcomed ( after the initial exploration ) by King and Queen at Barcelona, lived six months at the court, and received the title ‘Almirante del Mar Oceano ‘ -- “Admiral of the Ocean sea”-- by which was meant the Atlantic west of the Azores. He was made Vice King and General Governor of the Islands and Terra Firma of Asia and India.  As John II was rumoured to be fitting out a fleet to cross the Atlantic, Ferdinand appealed to Alexander VI to define the rights of Spain in the “Ocean Sea”. The Spanish Pope in a series of bulls (1493), allotted to Spain all non Christian lands west, and to Portugal all those east, of an imaginary line drawn north and south 270 miles west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese refused to accept this line of demarcation, and war was imminent when the rival governments , by the treaty of Toresillas ( June 7th, 1494 ) agreed that the line should run along a meridian of longitude 250 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands for discoveries before that date, but 250 leagues west for later discoveries. (The eastern corner of Brazil lies east of this second line.) The papal bulls termed the new terrain “Indies”; scholars  like Pietro Martire d’ Anghiera, accepted Columbus’s notion that he had reached Asia, and this delusion persisted till Magellan circumnavigated the globe.

Hoping for gold, Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with a new fleet of seventeen vessels, equipped with 1,200 seamen, animals to start flocks and herds in the Indies, and five ecclesiastics to shrive the Spaniards, and convert the “Indians”.  The second voyage sailed from Seville on September 25, 1493” Thirty-nine days later ( as against seventy days for the first voyage ) the watch sighted an island which Columbus, because the day was Sunday, named Dominica. No landing was made there, the Admiral scented bigger prey. He disc overed Puerto Rico; he dallied there briefly, then hurried on to see what had happened to the Spanish settlement he had left in Haiti ten months before. Hardly a man remained of it. The Europeans had roamed the island robbing the natives of gold and women; they had established a tropical paradise with five women to each  man; they had quarrelled and murdered one another, and nearly all the rest had been killed by the outraged Indians.

The fleet sailed eastward along the Haitian coast. The Admiral landed men and cargo to found a new settlement, which he called Isabella. After supervising the construction of a town, and the repair of the ships, he left to explore Cuba. Unable to circumnavigate it, he concluded that it was the mainland of Asia, perhaps the Malay Peninsular. He turned back toward Haiti ( oct. 29, 1494 ) wondering how his new settlement had fared. He was shocked to find it had behaved like its predecessor; that the Spaniards had raped native women, stolen  native stores of food, and had kidnapped  native boys to serve as slaves; and that the natives had killed many Spaniards in revenge. Columbus himself now became a slave dealer. He sent out expeditions to capture 1500 natives; four hundred of these he gave to the settlers, 500 he dispatched to Spain. Two hundred of these died on the voyage; the survivors were sold at Seville; but died in a few years, unable to adjust themselves to a colder climate, or perhaps to the savagery of civilisation.

Columbus sailed for Spain( March 1496) and reached Cadiz after an unhappy voyage of ninety-three days. He presented his sovereigns with Indians and gold nuggets; it was not much, but modified the doubts that had formed at court about the wisdom of pouring more money into the Atlantic. The Admiral asked for at least eight ships for another trial of fortune. The sovereigns consented, and in May 1498, Columbus sailed again. He reached Santo Domingo August 31. This third settlement had survived, but one of every four of the five hundred that he had left there in 1496 was suffering from syphilis, and the settlers had divided into two hostile groups that were now on the verge of war. To appease the discontent, Columbus allowed each man to appropriate a large tract of land, and to enslave the natives dwelling on it; this became the rule in the Spanish settlements. Worn now with hardships, disappointments, arthritis, and a disease of the eyes, Columbus almost broke down under these problems, his mind clouded occasionally, he became irritable, querulous, dictatorial, avaricious, and ruthless in his punishments; so at least many of the Spaniards claimed, and they fretted under an Italian’s rule. He recognised that the problems of managing the settlement were alien to his training and temperament. He sent two caravels to Spain with a request that Ferdinand and Isabella should appoint a royal commissioner to help him govern the island.

 The sovereigns took him at his word, and appointed Francisco de Bobadilla, but going beyond the Admirals request, they gave their commissioner full authority, even over Columbus. Bobadilla heard many complaints of the manner in which Cristoforo and his brothers Bartolome and Diego had ruled what was now called Hispaniola. Bobadilla had Columbus cast into jail, with manacles on his arms and fetters on his feet. After a further inquest the commissioner sent the three bothers, in chains, to Spain. (October 1, 1500). Ferdinand was busy dividing the Kingdom of Naples with Louis XII; six weeks went by before he ordered Columbus and his brothers released, and summoned them to court. King and Queen received them, consoled them, and restored them to affluence, but not to their former authority in the New World. They allowed the Admiral to collect all his property rights at Santo Domingo, and all that was hitherto due to him of the gold diggings and trade. Columbus  lived the rest of his life a rich man.                                                       

[mabel1015j]

I love this period of history. It is amazing to me how these brilliant people put together ideas to form new theories and ideas. Remember the BBC series "Connections" in the 70s or 80s? (did i mention it here before?) how ideas come together from unlikely backgrounds to move thinking forward? I so enjoy reading about those things and am often astonished at the visions of folks. I have always been in awe of those folks who figured out astronomical physics with the limited instruments and previous knowledge they had. I loved Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel. ( did i get those in the right order?)

As i sit here watching the cowardice of U.S. senators who won't vote for a background check on gun buyers or to limit gun magazines to  potentially safe 3,000 lives a year,  for fear of losing their jobs, the thought of someone taking a stand like the reformationists did is incredible. Too bad we can't put this into operation on the gun issue......

   “We declare, according to truth and opinion of Aristotle, that the legislator --- the prime and proper effective cause of law -- should be the people, the whole body of citizens, or its weightier part (valentiorem partem ), commanding or deciding  by its own choice of will, expressed verbally in a general assembly of citizens. Only out of the  deliberation and will of the whole multitude is the best law produced. A majority, more readily than any of its parts, can discern the defects in a law proposed for enactment, for an entire body is greater in power and worth than any of its separate parts.”

On the other hand, the arrogance of individuals who believe they have the authority to make decisions to own lands and people and control lives has amazed me thruout my studying of history. It is individual decisions that make history, even though historians/writers say "the Spanish", " the Portugese", "europeans". Countries do not make decisions.

Jean

[JoanK]

The Durant's way with words again:

"the survivors were sold at Seville; but died in a few years, unable to adjust themselves to a colder climate, or perhaps to the savagery of civilisation".

[3kings(Trevor)]

DURANTS'  S  o  C
Vol.VI  The REFORMATION
Pgs.  266-269


Though he was now a rich man, Columbus was not content. He importuned the King and Queen for one more fleet, and they felt that they owed him one more trial. On  May 9 1502 Columbus began his fourth voyage, with four ships and 140 men. On June 29, feeling a storm in the air, and in his joints, he anchored off a sheltered spot near Santo Domingo. A fleet of about 30 ships was in the main harbour, about to sail for Spain. Columbus advised the governor that a hurricane  was brewing, and suggested that he detain the vessels for a while. The warning was rejected and the fleet dispatched. The hurricane arrived; the Admiral’s ships survived it with minor damage; of the governor’s fleet all vessels but one were wrecked; 500 lives were lost, and a rich cargo of gold was surrendered to the sea.

Columbus now began the most arduous and tragic months of his troubled career. Continuing westward, he reached Honduras, and explored the coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the hope of finding a strait that would let him circumnavigate the earth. On December 5, 1502 a tempest of wind and rain arose, whose mad force is vividly described in Columbus’s journal. To add to the terror of wind, water, lightning, and rocky reefs near by, a waterspout appeared, perilously close to the ships, and shooting “water up to the clouds.” After twelve awful days the fury passed, and the fleet rested in a harbour near the present eastern end of the Panama Canal. There Columbus and his men celebrated sadly the Christmas of 1502 and the New Year’s Day of 1503, not knowing that the Pacific was only forty miles away.

Further misfortunes came. Thirteen sailors rowing the flagship’s boat upriver to find water, were attacked by Indians; all but one of the Spaniards were killed, and the boat was lost. Two vessels had to be abandoned as too worm-eaten to be seaworthy; the other two leaked so badly that the pumps  had to be worked day and night. Finally the worms proved stronger than the men, and these surviving ships had to be beached on the shore of Jamaica, ( June 25, 1503). There the hapless crew remained for a year and five days, depending for food on the precarious friendship of the natives, who themselves had little to spare. Diego Mendez, whose calm courage in all this adversity kept Columbus from complete despair, volunteered to lead six Christians and ten Indians in a dugout canoe 455 miles -- eighty of them out of sight of land-- to Santo Domingo to solicit aid. Mendez reached his goal, but Ovando would not or could not spare a vessel till May 1504, to go to the Admiral’s relief. By January the Jamaica Indians had reduced their gifts of food to the stranded crew to the point where the Spaniards began to starve. Columbus had with him Regiomontanus’s Ephemerides, which calculated a lunar eclipse for Feb 29. He called in the native chiefs, and warned them that God, in his anger at their letting his men starve, was about to blot out the moon. They scoffed, but when the eclipse began they hurriedly brought food to the ships. Columbus reassured them, saying he had prayed to God to restore the moon, and had promised Him that the Indians would properly feed the Christians thereafter. The moon reappeared.

Four more months passed before help came; even then the ship that Ovando sent leaked so badly that it was barely able to return to Santo Domingo. Columbus, with his brother and son, sailed in a stouter  vessel to Spain, arriving November 7  after a long and stormy voyage. The King and Queen were disappointed that he had not found more gold, or a strait to the Indian Ocean; and neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, who was dying, had time to receive the white haired sailor finally home from the sea. His “tenths” from Haiti were still paid to him; he suffered from arthritis, but not from poverty. When at last Ferdinand consented to see him, Columbus, older than his fifty-eight years could hardly bear the long journey to the court  at Sergovia. He demanded all the rights, titles, and revenues promised him in 1492. The King demurred, and offered him a rich estate in Castile. Columbus refused. He followed the court to Salamanca, and Valladolid; and there, broken in body and heart, he died, May 20 1506. No man had ever so remade the map of the earth.

                                                               The NEW PERSPECTIVE

Now that he had shown the way, a hundred other mariners rushed to the New World. The name was apparently first used by a Florentine merchant whose own name now described the Americas. Amerigo Vespucci was sent to Spain by the Medici to straighten out the affairs of a Florentine banker.  In 1495 he won a contract to fit out twelve vessels for Ferdinand. He caught the exploration fever, and in letters later ( 1503-1594 ) written to friends in Florence, he claimed he had made four voyages to what he termed ‘novo mondo‘, and  that on one of these, in June 16, 1497 he had touched the mainland of South America. Vespucci’s account would give him the credit of being the first European to reach the mainland of the Western Hemisphere since Leif Ericsson (c. 1000) Confusion and inaccuracies in Vespucci’s reports have cast doubt on his claims. In 1508, Vespucci was made ‘piloto mayor‘-- chief of all the pilots -- of Spain,-- and held that position until his death.

In 1500, shortly after Cabral’s accidental discovery of Brazil, Vicente Pinzon who had commanded the Nina on Columbus’s first voyage, explored the Brazilian coast, and discovered the Amazon. In 1513 Vassco Nunez de Balboa, sighted the Pacific, and Ponce de Leon, dreaming of a fountain of youth, discovered Florida.

The discoveries begun by Henry the Navigator, advanced by Vasco da Gama, culminating in Columbus, and rounded out by Magellan, affected the greatest commercial revolution in history before the coming of the airplane. The opening of the western and southern seas to navigation and trade ended the Mediterranean epoch in the history of civilization, and began the Atlantic era. As more and more of America’s gold came to Spain, economic decline progressed in the Mediterranean States. The Atlantic nations found in the New World an outlet for their surplus population, their reserve energy, and their criminals, and developed avid markets for European goods. Industry was stimulated in Western Europe, and demanded the mechanical inventions, and better forms of power, that made the industrial Revolution. New plants came from America to enrich European agriculture -- the potato, tomato, artichoke, squash, maize. The influx of gold and silver raised prices, encouraged manufacturers, harassed workers, creditors, and feudal lords, and generated and ruined Spain’s dream of dominating the world.

[JoanK]

"The influx of gold and silver raised prices, encouraged manufacturers, harassed workers, creditors, and feudal lords, and generated and ruined Spain’s dream of dominating the world."

I remember reading, decades ago, an author, whose name I don't remember, who claimed that Spain frittered away the wealth that the new world brought in lavish decoration and fruitless wars, and has been poor ever since. While England built up trade and manufacture and prospered. Even amoung nations, some manage money better than others.

[ginny]

Hi,

Just interrupting to say Robby was on my mind a couple of days ago and so I wrote him, and got a lovely reply.  He's doing splendidly and is still seeing patients 5 days a  week and active in civic affairs, the  old Robby.

He wrote last night:

Ginny, if there are any  who remember me, please feel free to give them my email address.  I would love to hear from them.  rbiallok@earthlink.net

So I am passing that on.    

[JoanK]

Hoorah, good for him.

[mabel1015j]

Wonderful to hear that. Thank you Ginny for thinking of Robby and us.