Key Takeaways
The Printing Press Broke the Intellectual Monopoly of the Church
The Discovery of Perspective Overturned Bedrock Conceptions of Reality
The Scientific Revolution Restored Authoritative Control Over Public Narrative
The Printing Press Broke the Intellectual Monopoly of the Church
In the middle of the 1300s, the Black Death claimed the lives of half the population of Europe. In those days, the Roman Catholic Church was supposed to be Europeans’ sole conduit for receiving God’s grace. But its conspicuous inability to stop the plague seeded grave doubts about that self-proclaimed role of the Church.
80 years later, all hell broke loose when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Doubters in every corner of Europe began exchanging heretical pamphlets churned out by mechanical presses. The printing press effectively destroyed Church control over the public narrative.
During the Fall of Rome, the advent of the bound book had similarly undermined the pagan state religion. Christians were early adopters of that new communications technology, and their holy book gave them a decided advantage in the war of ideas that raged during Rome’s twilight.
The Roman authorities eventually lost that war, and themselves converted to Christianity. Thanks in no small part to the bound book, Roman society exchanged the old pantheon of pagan gods for a new monotheistic conception of reality.
History repeated itself as the Middle Ages drew to a close. Like the bound book a thousand years earlier, the printing press altered the very fabric of reality. The notion that sentences in Purgatory could be shortened through monetary payments to the Church, for example, would come to be rejected by half of Europe.
The printing press created space for public doubts about the corrupt Sales of Indulgences where no such space had existed before. Its invention shattered the intellectual monopoly enjoyed by the medieval Church and splintered that institution into competing factions. Fueled by a flood tide of mechanically-printed literature, the Protestant Reformation dramatically transformed the political and intellectual landscape of Europe.
The Discovery of Perspective Overturned Bedrock Conceptions of Reality
In addition to the Protestant Reformation, the void left by the collapse of Church prestige at the end of the Middle Ages left room for other revolutions in popular conceptions of reality. A fascinating example is the discovery of perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi of Florence.
Brunelleschi designed the legendary dome of Florence’s cathedral, which still crowns the city to this day. Just 20 years before the advent of the printing press, he made an earth-shattering discovery. Brunelleschi realized that parallel lines appear to converge toward a single point on the horizon.
The early works of his contemporary, Donatello, were distinctly Medieval in that they were 2-dimensional and flat. But after the discovery of perspective by his friend Brunelleschi, Donatello began making parallel lines converge toward vanishing points in his backgrounds. This trick made his later work seem to pop up into 3 full dimensions.
This discovery of perspective was a watershed moment that separates flat Medieval artwork from the flowering of the Italian Renaissance—with Donatello and Brunelleschi’s home city of Florence at its epicenter.
The people of Medieval Europe cannot have been ignorant of the fact that objects in the distance appear smaller than objects in the foreground. But they never incorporated perspective into their artwork, suggesting that they were, at most, only subconsciously aware of it. Brunelleschi’s mind-bending discovery of perspective was nothing less than a wholesale revolution in the popular conception of reality itself.
The Scientific Revolution Restored Authoritative Control Over Public Narrative
The printing press demolished the intellectual monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church, which had gone largely unquestioned throughout the Middle Ages. The discovery that the Earth is in motion around the sun—and not vice-versa—is traditionally held to epitomize a transition from Medieval to modern called the Scientific Revolution.
The story we’ve received is that astronomers like Nicolas Copernicus published evidence of a heliocentric model of the solar system in fear of the Church. But in reality, Church luminaries like Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg and Bishop Tiedemann Giese were key allies who facilitated Copernicus’ publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.
Both church and science endorse an Aristotelian conception of reality where each of us is a small mind wandering around inside a grand universe, observing it with our senses. The opposing view is that of Aristotle’s mentor, Plato, who argued that the observable universe is actually a projection of the mind—similar to the vast dreamscapes we both conjure and experience while asleep.
Renaissance magic was a revival of Platonism. According to that school of thought, the universe admits of manipulation by the will because it is a projection of the mind—much like the lucid dreamer is able to control dreams. The elaborate experiments of the Renaissance alchemists were designed to reveal as much about the observer as they were about the observable universe.
The Scientific Revolution replaced astrology with astronomy, and alchemy with alchemy. Wizards’ robes became white lab coats. Slowly but surely, science shifted away from Platonism toward a materialist conception of reality.
Today, the idea that the human mind could be involved in the act of Creation remains every bit the abject heresy it was during the late Middle Ages. Just as the Church insisted that Creation is the sole domain of God, anyone professing a belief in magic is summarily dismissed in our modern, scientific paradigm. That’s how Aristotelian materialism survived the collapse of Church authority during the late Middle Ages.
Conclusion
The question of whether human consciousness exists within the universe, or whether the universe exists inside the human mind is one that consumed both the late Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages.
Early Christians borrowed much from Platonic philosophy—and suffered brutal political repression at the hands of imperial authorities. But after the Roman Catholic Church arose as the new political authority in Medieval Europe, it pivoted away from its Platonic roots.
As the printing press destroyed the Church’s intellectual monopoly, Platonism reemerged as Renaissance magic. Practitioners were tortured as heretics in the dungeons of the Inquisition—just as Christians were once thrown to lions in the Colosseum.
The Scholasticism of the Italian friar Thomas Aquinas overlaid a materialist conception of reality onto Church doctrine during the 1200s. Similarly, the Scientific Revolution transformed the astrology and alchemy of the Renaissance into modern astronomy and chemistry. The difference was the assumption of an objective universe, which exists independently of the observer.
These transformations are due to the fact that the authorities who govern human economic systems tend to endorse versions of reality that are economically expedient for the ruling class. The authorities don’t want us transcending some illusory reality; they want us reporting to work every morning where we make them money.
Consequently—when economic systems lapse into dysfunction—bedrock conceptions of reality supported by authorities are questioned and overturned. A transition from polytheism to monotheism attended the decline of the slave-based economy of Rome. The transition away from feudalism during the Renaissance was similarly marked by the discovery of perspective, the Protestant Reformation, and a magical revival of Platonism. These paradigmatic shifts were nothing less than a rending of the very fabric of reality itself!
Since you made it this far, thoughtful reader, kindly consider hitting the ❤️ button above or below; it really helps!
Further Materials
The geocentric theory had fitted reasonably well a theology which supposed that all things had been created for the use of man. But now men felt tossed about on a minor planet whose history was reduced to a “mere local item in the news of the universe.” What could “heaven” mean when “up” and “down” had lost all sense, when each would become the other in half a day? “No attack on Christianity,” wrote Jerome Wolf to Tycho Brahe in 1575, “is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the heavens”-though Copernicus had not taught the infinity of the universe. When men stopped to ponder the implications of the new system they must have wondered at the assumption that the Creator of this immense and orderly cosmos had sent His Son to die on this middling planet. All the lovely poetry of Christianity seemed to “go up in smoke” (as Goethe was to put it) at the touch of the Polish clergyman. The heliocentric astronomy compelled men to reconceive God in less provincial, less anthropomorphic terms; it gave theology the strongest challenge in the history of religion. Hence the Copernican revolution was far profounder than the Reformation; it made the differences between Catholic and Protestant dogmas seem trivial; it pointed beyond the Reformation to the Enlightenment, from Erasmus and Luther to Voltaire, and even beyond Voltaire to the pessimistic agnosticism of a nineteenth century that would add the Darwinian to the Copernican catastrophe. There was but one protection against such men, and that was that only a small minority in any generation would recognize the implications of their thought. The sun will “rise” and “set” when Copernicus has been forgotten.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 863