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History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

A >> Andrew Dickson White >> History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom




Eminent Lutheran divines in the seventeenth century, like
Gerhard, Calovius, Coccerus, and multitudes of others, wrote
scores of quartos to further this system, and the other branch of
the Protestant Church emulated their example. The pregnant
dictum of St. Augustine--"Greater is the authority of Scripture
than all human capacity"--was steadily insisted upon, and, toward
the close of the seventeenth century, Voetius, the renowned
professor at Utrecht, declared, "Not a word is contained in the
Holy Scriptures which is not in the strictest sense inspired, the
very punctuation not excepted"; and this declaration was echoed
back from multitudes of pulpits, theological chairs, synods, and
councils. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find what the
"authority of Scripture" really was. To the greater number of
Protestant ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning in
the text which they had the wit to invent and the power to
enforce.

To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the
Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin
translation of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate.
It was insisted by leading Catholic authorities that this was as
completely a product of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew
original. Strong men arose to insist even that, where the
Hebrew and the Latin differed, the Hebrew should be altered to
fit Jerome's mistranslation, as the latter, having been made
under the new dispensation, must be better than that made under
the old. Even so great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted
himself in vain against this new tide of unreason.[469]

[469] For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an
especially interesting account, Symond's Renaissance in Italy,
the Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the
best contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom.
iii, p. 98. For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus,
by Butler, London, 1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the
general subject, Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy during
the Reformation. For the attack by Bude and the Sorbonne and the
burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life and character of Erasmus,
vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As to the text of the
Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, chap. xxxvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman's note
thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence
against the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790,
in which an elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See
also Jowett in Essays and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and
impartial history of the long controversy over this passage, see
Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae, reprinted in Jared Sparks's
Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For Luther's ideas of
interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch edition, vol.
i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some of his
more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p.
1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration,
Boston, 1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p.
102; also the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibelubersetzung, in
Walch's edition, as above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and
146-150. As to Melanchthon, see especially his Loci Communes,
1521; and as to the enormous growth of commentaries in the
generations immediately following, see Charles Beard, Hibbert
Lectures for 1883, on the Reformation, especially the admirable
chapter on Protestant Scholasticism; also Archdeacon Farrar,
history of Interpretation. For the Papstesel, etc., see Luther's
Sammtliche Schriften, edit. Walch, vol. xiv, pp. 2403 et seq.;
also Melanchthon's Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665
et seq. In the White Library of Cornell University will be found
an original edition of the book, with engravings of the monster.
For the Monchkalb, see Luther's works as above, vol. xix, pp.
2416 et seq. For the spirit of Calvin in interpretation, see
Farrar, ans especially H. P. Smith, D. D., Inspiration and
Inerrancy, chap. iv, and the very brilliant essay forming chap.
iii of the same work, by L. J. Evans, pp. 66 and 67, note. For
the attitude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see
Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, tome
i, pp 19,20; but especially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol.
i, pp. 226 et seq. As to a demand for the revision of the Hebrew
Bible to correct its differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel
Deutsch's Literary Remains, New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work
and spirit of Calovius and other commentators immediately
folloeing the Reformation, see Farrar, as above; also Beard,
Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments in der
christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 et seq. As to extreme views of
Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above. For the Formula
Concensus Helvetica, which in 1675 affirmed the inspiration of
the vowel points, see Schaff, Creeds.


Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred
text confined to western Europe. About the middle of the
seventeenth century, in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the
Great, Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Greek Church, attempted to
correct the Slavonic Scriptures and service-books. They were
full of interpolations due to ignorance, carelessness, or zeal,
and in order to remedy this state of the texts Nikon procured a
number of the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set the
leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them,
and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate
the books thus corrected.

But the same feelings which have wrought so strongly against our
nineteenth-century revision of the Bible acted even more forcibly
against that revision in the seventeenth century. Straightway
great masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose
in revolt. The fact that the revisers had written in the New
Testament the name of Jesus correctly, instead of following the
old wrong orthography, aroused the wildest fanaticism. The
monks of the great convent of Solovetsk, when the new books were
sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what have you done with
the Son of God?" They then shut their gates, defying patriarch,
council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven years,
their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army.
Hence arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to
this day, and fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the
old text.[470]

[470] The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894,
was presented by Count Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and
influential members of the sect of "Old Believers," which dates
from the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with
which this venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb
villa, expatiated on the horrors of making the sign of the cross
with three fingers instead of two. His argument was that the TWO
fingers, as used by the "Old Believers," typify the divine and
human nature of our Lord, and hence that the use of them is
strictly correct; whereas signing with THREE fingers,
representing the blessed Trinity, is "virtually to crucify all
three persons of the Godhead afresh." Not less cogent were his
arguments regarding the immense value of the old text of
Scripture as compared with the new. For the revolt against Nikon
and his reforms, see Rambaud, History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 414-
416; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii, pp. 307-309; also Leroy-
Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, vol. iii, livre iii.


Strange to say, on the development of Scripture interpretation,
largely in accordance with the old methods, wrought, about the
beginning of the eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton.

It is hard to believe that from the mind which produced the
Principia, and which broke through the many time-honoured
beliefs regarding the dates and formation of scriptural books,
could have come his discussions regarding the prophecies; still,
at various points even in this work, his power appears. From
internal evidence he not only discarded the text of the Three
Witnesses, but he decided that the Pentateuch must have been made
up from several books; that Genesis was not written until the
reign of Saul; that the books of Kings and Chronicles were
probably collected by Ezra; and, in a curious anticipation of
modern criticism, that the book of Psalms and the prophecies of
Isaiah and Daniel were each written by various authors at various
dates. But the old belief in prophecy as prediction was too
strong for him, and we find him applying his great powers to the
relation of the details given by the prophets and in the
Apocalypse to the history of mankind since unrolled, and tracing
from every statement in prophetic literature its exact fulfilment
even in the most minute particulars.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the structure of
scriptural interpretation had become enormous. It seemed
destined to hide forever the real character of our sacred
literature and to obscure the great light which Christianity had
brought into the world. The Church, Eastern and Western,
Catholic and Protestant, was content to sit in its shadow, and
the great divines of all branches of the Church reared every sort
of fantastic buttress to strengthen or adorn it. It seemed to be
founded for eternity; and yet, at this very time when it appeared
the strongest, a current of thought was rapidly dissolving away
its foundations, and preparing that wreck and ruin of the whole
fabric which is now, at the close of the nineteenth century,
going on so rapidly.

The account of the movement thus begun is next to be given.[471]

[471] For Newton's boldness in textual criticism, compared with
his credulity as to the literal fulfilment of prophecy, see his
Observations upon the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of
St. John, in his works, edited by Horsley, London, 1785, vol. v,
pp. 297-491.



II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.

At the base of the vast structure of the older scriptural
interpretation were certain ideas regarding the first five books
of the Old Testament. It was taken for granted that they had
been dictated by the Almighty to Moses about fifteen hundred
years before our era; that some parts of them, indeed, had been
written by the corporeal finger of Jehovah, and that all parts
gave not merely his thoughts but his exact phraseology. It was
also held, virtually by the universal Church, that while every
narrative or statement in these books is a precise statement of
historical or scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains
vast hidden meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by
a few interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the
indifference of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship
did not prevent its ripening into a dogma.

The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not
only divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the
creation and of the beginnings of life on the earth; an account
to which all discoveries in every branch of science must, under
pains and penalties, be made to conform. In English-speaking
lands this has lasted until our own time: the most eminent of
recent English biologists has told us how in every path of
natural science he has, at some stage in his career, come across
a barrier labelled "No thoroughfare Moses."

A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection
of the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a
record of the past, but as a revelation of the future.

The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the
Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general
superintendent, or bishop, in northern Germany, near the
beginning of the seventeenth century. He declared that the text
of Genesis "must be received strictly"; that "it contains all
knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight articles of the
Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; that "it is an
arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts of atheists,
pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists, Socinians, and
Baptists"; "the source of all sciences and arts, including law,
medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the source and essence of
all histories and of all professions, trades, and works"; "an
exhibition of all virtues and vices"; "the origin of all
consolation."

This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit,
growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was
echoed back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of
France. He cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to
prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch; and not only this, but
that from the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen theology--that
Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon rolled into
one, and really the being worshipped under such names as Bacchus,
Adonis, and Apollo.[472]

[472] For the passage from Huxley regarding Mosaic barriers to
modern thought, see his Essays, recently published. For
Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i,
pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome's indifference as to the Mosaic
authorship, see the first of the excellent Sketches of the
Pentateuch Criticism, by the Rev. S. J. Curtiss, in the
Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1884. For Huet, see also Curtiss,
ibid.


About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the world
now knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. Then it
was that Aben Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the Middle
Ages, ventured very discreetly to call attention to certain
points in the Pentateuch incompatible with the belief that the
whole of it had been written by Moses and handed down in its
original form. His opinion was based upon the well-known texts
which have turned all really eminent biblical scholars in the
nineteenth century from the old view by showing the Mosaic
authorship of the five books in their present form to be clearly
disproved by the books themselves; and, among these texts,
accounts of Moses' own death and burial, as well as statements
based on names, events, and conditions which only came into being
ages after the time of Moses.

But Aben Ezra had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom; he
fathered the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and,
having veiled his statement in an enigma, added the caution, "Let
him who understands hold his tongue."[473]

[473] For the texts referred to by Aben Ezra as incompatible with
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, see Meyer, Geschichte
der Exegese, vol. i, pp. 85-88; and for a pithy short account,
Moore's introduction to The Genesis of Genesis, by B. W. Bacon,
Hartford, 1893, p. 23; also Curtiss, as above. For a full
exhibition of the absolute incompatibility of these texts with
the Mosaic authorship, etc., see The Higher Criticism of the
Pentateuch, by C. A. Briggs, D. D., New York, 1893, especially
chap. iv; also Robertson Smith, art. Bible, in Encycl. Brit.


For about four centuries the learned world followed the prudent
rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a
Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first
of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the
Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes,
expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the
most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and
had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and
phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt
with promptly: Carlstadt was, for this and other troublesome
ideas, suppressed with the applause of the Protestant Church;
and the book of Maes was placed by the older Church on the Index.

But as we now look back over the Revival of Learning, the Age of
Discovery, and the Reformation, we can see clearly that powerful
as the older Church then was, and powerful as the Reformed Church
was to be, there was at work something far more mighty than
either or than both; and this was a great law of nature--the law
of evolution through differentiation. Obedient to this law
there now began to arise, both within the Church and without it,
a new body of scholars--not so much theologians as searchers for
truth by scientific methods. Some, like Cusa, were
ecclesiastics; some, like Valla, Erasmus, and the Scaligers, were
not such in any real sense; but whether in holy orders, really,
nominally, or not at all, they were, first of all, literary and
scientific investigators.

During the sixteenth century a strong impulse was given to more
thorough research by several very remarkable triumphs of the
critical method as developed by this new class of men, and two of
these ought here to receive attention on account of their
influence upon the whole after course of human thought.

For many centuries the Decretals bearing the great name of
Isidore had been cherished as among the most valued muniments of
the Church. They contained what claimed to be a mass of canons,
letters of popes, decrees of councils, and the like, from the
days of the apostles down to the eighth century--all supporting
at important points the doctrine, the discipline, the ceremonial,
and various high claims of the Church and its hierarchy.

But in the fifteenth century that sturdy German thinker, Cardinal
Nicholas of Cusa, insisted on examining these documents and on
applying to them the same thorough research and patient thought
which led him, even before Copernicus, to detect the error of the
Ptolemaic astronomy.

As a result, he avowed his scepticism regarding this pious
literature; other close thinkers followed him in investigating
it, and it was soon found a tissue of absurd anachronisms, with
endless clashing and confusion of events and persons.

For a time heroic attempts were made by Church authorities to
cover up these facts. Scholars revealing them were frowned
upon, even persecuted, and their works placed upon the Index;
scholars explaining them away--the "apologists" or "reconcilers"
of that day--were rewarded with Church preferment, one of them
securing for a very feeble treatise a cardinal's hat. But all in
vain; these writings were at length acknowledged by all scholars
of note, Catholic and Protestant, to be mainly a mass of devoutly
cunning forgeries.

While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to
the skill of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to
ecclesiasticism, another discovery revealed their equal skill in
forging documents useful to theology.

For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by
theologians upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the
Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul. Claiming to
come from one so near the great apostle, they were prized as a
most precious supplement to Holy Writ. A belief was developed
that when St. Paul had returned to earth, after having been
"caught up to the third heaven," he had revealed to Dionysius the
things he had seen. Hence it was that the varied pictures given
in these writings of the heavenly hierarchy and the angelic
ministers of the Almighty took strong hold upon the imagination
of the universal Church: their theological statements sank
deeply into the hearts and minds of the Mystics of the twelfth
century and the Platonists of the fifteenth; and the ten epistles
they contained, addressed to St. John, to Titus, to Polycarp,
and others of the earliest period, were considered treasures of
sacred history. An Emperor of the East had sent these writings
to an Emperor of the West as the most precious of imperial gifts.
Scotus Erigena had translated them; St. Thomas Aquinas had
expounded them; Dante had glorified them; Albert the Great had
claimed that they were virtually given by St. Paul and inspired
by the Holy Ghost. Their authenticity was taken for granted by
fathers, doctors, popes, councils, and the universal Church.

But now, in the glow of the Renascence, all this treasure was
found to be but dross. Investigators in the old Church and in
the new joined in proving that the great mass of it was spurious.

To say nothing of other evidences, it failed to stand the
simplest of all tests, for these writings constantly presupposed
institutions and referred to events of much later date than the
time of Dionysius; they were at length acknowledged by all
authorities worthy of the name, Catholic as well as Protestant,
to be simply--like the Isidorian Decretals--pious frauds.

Thus arose an atmosphere of criticism very different from the
atmosphere of literary docility and acquiescence of the "Ages of
Faith"; thus it came that great scholars in all parts of Europe
began to realize, as never before, the part which theological
skill and ecclesiastical zeal had taken in the development of
spurious sacred literature; thus was stimulated a new energy in
research into all ancient documents, no matter what their claims.
To strengthen this feeling and to intensify the stimulating
qualities of this new atmosphere came, as we have seen, the
researches and revelations of Valla regarding the forged Letter
of Christ to Abgarus, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine,
and the late date of the Apostles' Creed; and, to give this
feeling direction toward the Hebrew and Christian sacred books,
came the example of Erasmus.[474]

[474] For very fair statements regarding the great forged
documents of the Middle Ages, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic
Dictionary, articles Dionysius the Areopagite and False
Decretals, and in the latter the curious acknowledgment that the
mass of pseudo-Isidorian Decretals "is what we now call a
forgery."

For the derivation of Dionysius's ideas from St. Paul, and for
the idea of inspiration attributed to him, see Albertus Magnus,
Opera Omnia, vol. xiii, early chapters and chap. vi. For very
interesting details on this general subject, see Dollinger, Das
Papstthum, chap. ii; also his Fables respecting the Popes of the
Middle Ages, translated by Plummer and H. B. Smith, part i, chap.
v. Of the exposure of these works, see Farrar, as above, pp.
254, 255; also Beard, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 4, 354. For the
False Decretals, see Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol.
ii, pp. 373 et seq. For the great work of the pseudo-Dionysius,
see ibid., vol. iii, p. 352, and vol. vi, pp. 402 et seq., and
Canon Westcott's article on Dionysius the Areopagite in vol. v of
the Contemporary Review; also the chapters on Astronomy in this
work.


Naturally, then, in this new atmosphere the bolder scholars of
Europe soon began to push more vigorously the researches begun
centuries before by Aben Ezra, and the next efforts of these men
were seen about the middle of the seventeenth century, when
Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and La Pevrere, in his Preadamites,
took them up and developed them still further. The result came
speedily. Hobbes, for this and other sins, was put under the
ban, even by the political party which sorely needed him, and was
regarded generally as an outcast; while La Peyrere, for this and
other heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of
Mechlin, and kept there until he fully retracted: his book was
refuted by seven theologians within a year after its appearance,
and within a generation thirty-six elaborate answers to it had
appeared: the Parliament of Paris ordered it to be burned by the
hangman.

In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far
greater than any of these--the Tractatus Thrologico-Politicus of
Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into
the subject. Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he
summed up all with judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could
not have been the author of the Pentateuch in the form then
existing; that there had been glosses and revisions; that the
biblical books had grown up as a literature; that, though great
truths are to be found in them, and they are to be regarded as a
divine revelation, the old claims of inerrancy for them can not
be maintained; that in studying them men had been misled by
mistaking human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while
prophets have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been
the dowry of the Jewish people alone; that to look for exact
knowledge of natural and spiritual phenomena in the sacred books
is an utter mistake; and that the narratives of the Old and New
Testaments, while they surpass those of profane history, differ
among themselves not only in literary merit, but in the value of
the doctrines they inculcate. As to the authorship of the
Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion that it was written long
after Moses, but that Moses may have written some books from
which it was compiled--as, for example, those which are mentioned
in the Scriptures, the Book of the Wars of God, the Book of the
Covenant, and the like--and that the many repetitions and
contradictions in the various books show a lack of careful
editing as well as a variety of original sources. Spinoza then
went on to throw light into some other books of the Old and New
Testaments, and added two general statements which have proved
exceedingly serviceable, for they contain the germs of all modern
broad churchmanship; and the first of them gave the formula
which was destined in our own time to save to the Anglican Church
a large number of her noblest sons: this was, that "sacred
Scripture CONTAINS the Word of God, and in so far as it contains
it is incorruptible"; the second was, that "error in speculative
doctrine is not impious."

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