An image held by many is that antiquity was a bright period in which science flourished, which was then replaced by the dark Middle Ages that suppressed science, and that the rebirth of antiquity freed man from his bad bonds and then enabled the progress of science through Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton free from the shackles of superstition. This development then continued in the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
This picture is wrong for several reasons.
On the one hand, the most important results of ancient natural science were discovered as early as 200 BC. In the following centuries, during the heyday of the Roman Empire, almost nothing happened in the field of science. And all the scientific results did not lead to widely used technical devices.
Die christliche Welt des Mittelalters
war keine ideale Welt und von vielen Nöten bedroht. Aber dort galt, daß alle Menschen von Gott geliebt und deshalb wichtig sind. Alle Autorität war sich sehr bewußt, daß sie eines Tages Gott gegenüber Rechenschaft geben mußte. Es war sehr erwünscht, sich um die Armen und Rechtlosen zu kümmern und im Testament vorzusehen, daß ein Teil des Erbes den Armen zukommen sollte. Die Entchristlichung der Gesellschaft wurde dann sehr schnell daran deutlich, daß die Vermächtnisse für die Armen aus den Testamenten verschwanden. Weil Gott selbst die Wahrheit ist und die Lüge haßt, war man der Wahrheit verpflichtet und bereit, vor Gott und Menschen Fehler zuzugeben. Und weil Gott selbst in Jesus Mensch geworden war und als Handwerker gearbeitet hatte, wurde die harte Arbeit geachtet. Dies führte, anders als in der Antike, zur Bereitschaft, Messungen durchzuführen und zu dokumentieren. Ziel der Wissenschaft war hier die Wahrheit zu entdecken, die Gott in der Bibel geoffenbart hatte und die Wahrheit von Gottes Schöpfung. Beides diente dann zur Verherrlichung Gottes. Dies war die Motivation bei Galileo Galilei, bei Johannes Kepler und bei Isaac Newton. Es war das christliche Westeuropa, in dem die moderne Wissenschaft entstand, und nicht die anderen Großreiche in dieser Zeit, nämlich das Osmanische Reich, das Moghul-Reich in Indien und das Chinesische Reich.
But was antiquity really a bright time?
I attended a “humanistic grammar school” where I learned a lot of good things. But during this time, in 9 years of Latin lessons and 6 years of Greek lessons, I never once read a Christian author. The only exception was 2 lessons in which our Greek teacher had us read the text of the Sermon on the Mount for 2 hours. During my school days, I was fascinated by the Romans. The closer I got to antiquity later on, the more foreign it became to me. Classical Latin literature was written by rich men who despised manual labor and made others work for them, who met at parties and tried to impress each other with particularly refined language, who didn’t mind that innocent people in other nations were enslaved, deprived of rights and broken in their personality, who didn’t mind that it was a popular popular amusement when people fought for their lives on an open stage and were slaughtered or mauled by wild animals. The “sexual liberation” only applied to the rich men. Anyone who develops a little sense of the world of the Roman Empire will perceive a dark, hopeless and heartless world.
Ancient Greece was a time whose literature was described as “cold and domineering”, in which the slave was seen as an andrapodon, a “thing with human feet”, a time that was fully sexualized – people felt so at the mercy of sexuality that the noblest of the Greeks considered sexuality as such to be something bad from which one should free oneself as far as possible. Here, too, a cold and brutal world ultimately without hope. And this is exactly what the Renaissace wanted to revive.
The Renaissance is a time when man was at the center
and considered himself to be the measure of all things. This person saw himself confirmed by the ancient authors and saw his main task as finding and publishing sources from antiquity. They despised all the results obtained in the Middle Ages, e.g. the proof that Aristotle’s theory of the motion of bodies was wrong and the better solutions that had been found. And it was precisely the followers of Aristotle who were Galileo Galilei’s bitterest enemies and who ultimately urged those responsible in the Catholic Church to put Galileo on trial. So the Renaissance was clearly at war with science here. In any case, the heyday of the Renaissance from 1450 to 1500 was one of the 50 most unfruitful years in the history of physics. The ideal of the Renaissance is ultimately the proud strongman who recognizes no authority above himself, and who is ultimately indifferent to the well-being of others. This also led to the Renaissance becoming one of the most immoral eras.
It is fatal for real science if the truth is no longer generally binding.
Marxism, which reigned in the Soviet Union, considered itself a scientific worldview, and statistics and graphs were seen everywhere. But it failed because, although the statistical methods were correct, the necessary input data was based on lies.
A society in which I no longer feel loved and respected by God and in which the weak are no longer protected and honored becomes inhuman. This then leads to personal egoism and nationalism, the egoism of nations.
I therefore see the Renaissance as a time that was much darker than the Middle Ages that preceded it.