An Age of Enlightenment

Copernicus and the Heliocentric Theory

If the Renaissance was the medieval worldview’s death-knell, the Enlightenment was what put it in the ground and ushered in the modern world. The ‘Age of Enlightenment’ stretches from the mid-1600s through the 1700s. It begins with the Scientific Revolution and the resultant ‘New Science’ that undermined precious, time-honored beliefs that had constrained and guided European philosophy. The Enlightenment reaches sounds its grand finale with the French Revolution, during which France’s traditional political hierarchy and social orders were literally hunted down and destroyed to be replaced with a wholly new way of doing things that was informed by Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all.

Architects, navigators, and engineers of the Renaissance needed precise measurements and observations that gave a boom to physics, and the science of experimentation blossomed first with the anatomists, who became renowned for dissecting cadavers. The Renaissance spurred a race for discovery, and new ways of studying the world were invented: the telescopes and microscopes, barometers and thermometers, even vacuum pumps. Natural philosophers (i.e. scientists) began studying nature by manipulating conditions, thus freeing them from the painstaking patience needed for natural observation alone. The invention of these staple instruments of modern science enabled the world to be seen in greater detail, and the resultant observations spurred revolutions in all the major scientific fields. The most dramatic revolutions came in astronomy. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) overturned medieval cosmology by showing that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. His ‘heliocentric theory’, though initially resisted, caught on, and forty years after his death, Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar to reflect the new cosmology. The Julian Calendar, which had been used since Roman times, was supplanted by the (current) Gregorian Calendar. Copernicus’ teachings became commonplace, but his theory was simplistic in that it didn’t account for all the data. It wasn’t until the late 1500s that instruments became available that could help astronomers probe deeper. One of these astronomers, Dane Brahe (1546-1601) spent decades plotting the paths of the moon and planets, but their movements didn’t line up with Copernicus’ calculations. The measurements implied a cosmology somewhere between Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, but Brahe didn’t know what to make of it. A mathematician named Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) would pick up where Brahe left off and discover a synthesis in the language of mathematics. His “Laws of Planetary Motion” made sense of what was seen, but his theories wouldn’t be adopted until they were used by Isaac Newton in the late 17th century. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) proved Copernican theory by factoring in the movements of the earth. The Church, caught in the throes of the Protestant Reformation and frantically trying to put the lid on anything outside orthodox beliefs, opposed Galilei at every turn. The Church’s hostility towards him discouraged other Italian scientists from voicing unorthodox views, and the impetus in scientific advancement shifted west to England and France. The English mathematician Isaac Newton (1642-1727) marks the climax of the Scientific Revolution: his discoveries forever altered the landscape of mathematics, physics, and astronomy; he united physics and astronomy into a single system to explain motion; and he took mathematics to the next level, discovering a number of the basic laws of modern physics. Oh, and he developed calculus; yeah, he was good. His advances were so momentous that new discoveries in the fields of astronomy and physics slowed to a crawl for nearly three generations. Newton had carried Copernicus’ observations to its final level, and people assumed he’d pretty much figured it out.

Isaac Newton

The Scientific Revolution resulted in an entirely new way of studying reality and knowledge. Experience, reason, and doubt were the bulwark of this epistemological revolution; by rejecting all questionable authorities, everything became testable; and a new way of studying the world, the Scientific Method, came into being. The philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) took this new scientific method and applied it to philosophy; and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) prophesied that science would be the savior of the human race, answering all of our questions and ushering in a Golden Age for humanity. Science’s discoveries made her a jewel in the public eye, and scientific societies sprouted across Europe. These gentleman scientists aspired to reach beyond national and political boundaries and unite with their colleagues across the continent. Science started to be treated as ‘above’ the clamor of Europe’s conflicts. The first scientific society started in Rome in 1603, and it was copied in France. English revolutionaries in the English Civil War captured Oxford in the 1640s and ousted the university’s traditionalist scientists and replaced them with enlightened ones. An official society developed in London in 1660, and two years later it was given the blessing of King Charles II. In 1666 King Louis XIV of France gave his blessing to the French Royal Academy of Sciences. Similar societies would emerge in Naples and Berlin by the end of the 17th century. The popularity of science during this time is evident in that country estates started building small observatories, parties liked to advertise stargazing, and in Holland surgeons butchered criminals and dissected them for the gathered crowds, pointing out what organ was what and giving little talks on each.

Science made gargantuan leaps of progress, and philosophers worked hard to catch up. These philosophers sought to apply the lessons learned from science to society; the scientific method became the backbone to a new and improved, and admittedly rational, view of the world. The philosopher Voltaire argued the preeminence and necessity of rationalism; Adam Smith coined the term ‘mercantilism’ and revolutionized economic theory; John Locke opposed the Stuart kings and argued that governments were responsible to their citizens. Locke went so far as to declare that if a government was failing, the citizens didn’t have just the right but the responsibility to replace it (his ideas would be taken up by many others and serve as a spring-board to the rebellions and revolutions at the tail-end of the Enlightenment Period). Jean Rousseau, philosopher and novelist, argued for the importance of emotion and sentiment in political thought. Enlightenment ideals wormed their way into the music of Bach, Handel, and Mozart. The Baroque period in music and the neo-classical period in art were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideals. The Enlightenment revolutionized the way Europeans looked at the world and at themselves, and the modern world continues to rely (and build) upon Enlightenment tenets. It is tragic, then, that the Enlightenment movement culminated in one of the worst bloodletting in Europeans history.