"The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages" is available December 7.
A thousand years ago, the pope studied the stars and found God in numbers. Mathematics ranked among the highest forms of worship, for God had created the world, as the Book of Wisdom said (chapter 11, verse 21), according to number, measure, and weight. Our modern tension between faith and science did not exist.
Pope Sylvester II (999-1003) was known as "the Scientist Pope." Born Gerbert of Aurillac, he rose from peasant beginnings to the pinnacle of the Christian church "on account of his incomparable scientific knowledge" -- not in spite of it. Such is the testimony of men who knew him and wrote during, or right after, his lifetime. They call him "acutely intelligent" and "deeply learned in the study of the liberal arts." He was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day.
Gerbert of Aurillac left us over 200 letters and a handful of scientific treatises. His biography has been known to historians for hundreds of years. Some overlooked it. Some twisted it. Others suppressed it. For the picture Gerbert paints of the Dark Ages -- the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance -- is lovely and surprising.
Born a peasant in the mountainous Cantal region of France in about 950, Gerbert entered a Benedictine monastery -- the only elementary school of his day. To teach reading and writing, the monks used the Psalms. To teach rhetoric, they used Cicero, Virgil, and other Latin classics.
When Gerbert showed an aptitude for mathematics, his abbot sent him south to Spain. He spent three years near Barcelona, whose Christian count had signed a treaty with the Muslim caliph of Cordoba in 940. For more than 35 years, the Muslim and Christian kingdoms of Spain were at peace. Trade and scientific exchanges flourished.
Islamic Spain was an extraordinarily tolerant culture in which learning was prized. The Royal Library in Cordoba, just west of the Great Mosque, contained 40,000 books. (By comparison, the greatest Christian library in Europe held only 690.) Many of the caliph's books came from Baghdad, known for its House of Wisdom, where for 200 years works of mathematics, astronomy, physics and medicine had been translated from Greek, Persian and Hindu and further developed by Islamic scholars.
During Gerbert's lifetime, the first of these science books were translated from Arabic into Latin through the combined efforts of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars. Many of the translators were churchmen, and some became Gerbert's lifelong friends.
Gerbert was a professor at the cathedral school in Reims, France, for most of his career. He is the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero -- although he called them Hindu numerals, as did his Arabic sources. Using these new numerals, Gerbert devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first computer. In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert's abacus is one of only four innovations mentioned between 3000 B.C. and the invention of the slide rule in 1622.
Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority and performed experiments. He noticed that the math books of his time gave two different methods for finding the area of an equilateral triangle -- and that their answers did not agree. As he wrote to a friend, "Thus, in a triangle of one size only, there are different areas, a thing which is impossible." He found the correct solution by drawing a triangle with equal sides, each seven units long. Then he cut out little squares of parchment, each one unit square, and laid them on top of the triangle.
To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models. He came up with an equation, using what physicists call "opportune constants" (or "fudge factors"), that allowed him to switch, mathematically, from strings to pipes and back. A modern physicist who evaluated his work called his solution ingenious, though labor intensive.
Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and constructed globes on which their positions were recorded relative to lines of celestial longitude and latitude. He made an armillary sphere -- a primitive planetarium -- to explore the movements of the planets. He believed Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, along with the sun, circled the earth (everyone did until Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the universe in 1543). But Gerbert knew Mercury and Venus orbited the sun.
He (or more likely his best student) wrote a book on the astrolabe, an astronomical instrument introduced by the Muslims to Spain during his lifetime. An astrolabe was handy for telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert and his peers knew very well was not flat like a disc. It was a globe, they wrote, round as an apple.
Gerbert's love of science was not unusual for a 10th-century monk -- though he was an exceptional science teacher. Churchmen from throughout France, Italy and Germany came to study with him, returning to their cathedrals to set up science schools of their own.
Even the rulers in the Dark Ages sought to be technologically literate. Gerbert was asked to tutor the future king of France and two future Holy Roman Emperors. He caught the attention of one of them by sending him a math book. Asked to explain it, he complimented the young emperor on realizing that "the power of numbers contained both the origins of all things in itself and explained all from itself."
The emperor and the Scientist Pope shared a dream. But their plans for a Christian empire based on peace, tolerance, law and the love of learning died with them. The emperor succumbed to malarial fever in 1002, age 22; the pope a year later, some say of a broken heart.
Just before the First Crusade in 1096 redefined the relationship between the Christian and Muslim worlds, Gerbert was posthumously branded a sorceror and devil-worshipper. Instead of the Scientist Pope, he became known as the Magician Pope. The interests of the Church had changed. Science had lost its central place. Much of what Pope Sylvester II had known and taught would be forgotten for hundreds of years.
The Vatican tried to rehabilitate the Magician Pope in 1602. "Gerbert was nothing but a learned man who was ahead of his time," wrote Cardinal Baronius, the Vatican librarian. "Those who want to efface his name from the catalogue of popes are ignorant fools."
But the story of a Magician Pope sold books. As late as 1988, a historian could write, "Did he not practice black arts such as astronomy? ... It was thought that he had sold his soul to the devil in order to obtain knowledge." Another, in 1998, titled a chapter "Gerbert the Wizard" and declared, falsely, that Gerbert's studies "got him in real trouble" with the church.
The Vatican fought back. In 1999 Pope John Paul II summed up the official church position. Gerbert, he wrote, was "a learned humanist and wise philosopher, a true promoter of culture ... He reminds us that intelligence is a marvellous gift from the Creator."
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the World Year of Astronomy, 2009, by noting that, "Among my predecessors of venerable memory there were some who studied this science, such as Sylvester II." He added, "The laws of nature which, over the course of centuries, many men and women of science have enabled us to understand better are a great incentive to contemplate the works of the Lord with gratitude."
Yet the Scientist Pope remains little known. In the popular mind today, the Dark Ages are wrongly considered a time of superstition and hysteria, when the Christian church suppressed all scientific investigation.
Just the opposite is true. A thousand years ago, Christian monks were busily collecting, translating and investigating the scientific wisdom compiled by their Islamic neighbors. Science transcended faith and faith encompassed science.
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Then I did some reading and realized that the classical world did a pretty good job of ruining itself.
I also found that that period between the fall of Rome and the High Middle Ages is one of the most unexpectedly rich periods. For instance, there's the rich cultural and intellectual climate of Spain, or the ways in which Roman law and customs reconciled with Frankish custom, or the way the Western church was enriched by refugees of the Iconoclasm controversy from the Greek East. I didn't know about Gerbert, but he seems like another interesting figure from a period that tends to surprise.
Yes, there was a lot of religious violence in the Dark Ages, but the questions that are being asked are pretty interesting -- are the Muslims so successful because they keep their god undepicted? should conversion by the sword take place for barbarians? how is the west's identity separate from the east? Many things that we take for granted were in flux at this time, and were being defined both by violence and by thought.
But I think that refusing to be curious about a historical period because you don't like Christianity is as silly as Christians who refuse to read about the Classical world because they think it will ruin Jesus for them. Frankly, it's a disservice to reasoned, secular inquiry into truth.
A pity, because not only is the Church's role in the formation of Europe vital to understanding how we got the way we are, it's such a wonderfully entertaining story full of saints, scoundrels, sinners, political skullduggery, appalling violence, palace intrigues, and intellectual bravery and cowardice. The study of Western history during the period between Constantine and the Renaissance is just one ripping good yarn after another.
While it appears Gerbert was a great scientist and good Catholic, the chasm between religion and science is real. However, I believe the problem is that religious people keep electing those who see science as a threat, not that science and religion a mutually exclusive. Overall though, I do enjoy a good history lesson.
Because what we recognize as modern science did not really exist. The methods had not been formalized yet.
I'm not necessarily taking a religious stand -- for one thing, exploits like the persecution of Galileo help drive a wedge between the perceived needs of blind faith and the honest exploration of the world -- but I think it's important to note that the secular world is a modern phenomenon, and that this goes back beyond the middle ages into the ancient world and beyond.
"God exists" is the mother of all unfalsifiable hypotheses.Which is the primary reason modern science and religion cannot be rationally reconciled.
The bible writer Luke uses the word xy'lon at Acts 5:30, 10:39 and 13:29. Paul uses the same word at Galatians 3:13 and Peter at 2:24. This word xy'lon means timber or "a stick, club or tree".
In Galatians 3:13, Paul was quoting Deuteronomy 21:22, 23, in regards to being a cursed person. So, now the question is: Should a Christian use a cross or decorate their person or home considering the above information.
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia admits: "The cross is found in both pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures."
Not to disrespect anyone here, just telling the facts about the cross.
Proverbs 1:1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel: 2 To know wisdom and instruction, To discern the sayings of understanding, 3 To receive instruction in wise behavior, Righteousness, justice and equity; 4 To give prudence to the naive, To the youth knowledge and discretion, 5 A wise man will hear and increase in learning ...
And here is what the Bible says of Solomon:
1 Kings 4:29 Now God gave Solomon wisdom and very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore. 30 And Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all men ... and his fame was known in all the surrounding nations. 32 He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. 33 And he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even to the hyssop that grows on the wall; he spoke also of animals and birds and creeping things and fish. 34 And men came from all peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.
No praise of intelligence in the Bible? Doh!
"NOWHERE in any religious texts can you find praise for intelligence."
really embarrass me.
http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/
They did 99% of the time. If not for Hindu and Arab scientists, the Dark Ages probably would have stayed that way.
"Just the opposite is true. A thousand years ago, Christian monks were busily collecting, translating and investigating the scientific wisdom compiled by their Islamic neighbors."
Once again, it's not 'just the opposite'. There was much ignorance and destruction and misery spread around by the Christians.
The intellectuals, back then that would have been the monks, are usually fairly pious and intelligent. But it's kind of like in America, where our kids are sent to fancy schools, and they are "good kids", but the money that puts them through school comes from oppressing and exploiting poor people.
He called them Hindu numerals because they were Hindu numerals...The Arabs got them from the Hindus...
on the other hand, one might consider the bible as a handbook of hate since it has inspired hosts of religious wars, destruction of non-christian cultures, curtailing of civil rights and general intolerance.
after all my post mentioned civilization not history, which would appear at times to be very very uncivilized.
Hey, look! The basic elements of the universe are universally interchangable working machine parts that all work together with intent and a common purpose according to billions of observable preexisting directives ...that have to have preexisting proteins ...which need the preexisting directives ...that need the preexisting proteins to contain them.
Hey, Look! There is no way to accurately date a fossil that is 100% contaminated by its surroundings that have an apparent age of being much older.
Hey, Look! Everything is relative except for the very sure fact that we do have observable evidence of a Creator who Himself also made the provision for us to exist as sinners before Him because no one else could do anything for us because it was written before it happened.
Hey, Look! The scientists don't have anything to say.
"Everything is relative". That is your belief about your fantasy about somebody else and other things.
Your definiton of Creator is belief based and irrelevant to your own belief.
If you examine the sequence of layers in the soil the fossil was found in, you can sure as heck tell that the fossil is more than 10,000 years old...
"The Flintstones" is not a documentary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_scientists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_philosophers
And let's not forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_scientists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_inventions_and_discoveries