Key Takeaways:
Like the bound book, the printing press broke an authoritative monopoly over the flow of information, leaving room for a whole new reality to take root.
Filippo Brunelleschi discovered perspective during the same century that the printing press was invented.
After the printing press, the heliocentric model of the solar system endorsed by science overturned the geocentric model of the solar system endorsed by the Church.
The Printing Press
As Christianity took the Roman Empire by storm, its spread was accelerated by the advent of the bound book. Because Christians were early adopters of that piece of communications technology, the priests of the old pagan state religion lost their monopoly in the Roman marketplace of ideas. Christians from the farthest reaches of the Empire used books to coordinate their message and present a unified challenge to imperial power. The bound book facilitated a fundamental change in the popular conception of reality itself. During its fall, Roman society was transformed from pagan polytheism to Christian monotheism.
A thousand years later, the printing press altered the fabric of reality once again for the people of Europe. That piece of communications technology fractured the intellectual monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church and unleashed the chaos of the Protestant Reformation.
The Church had been the rebellious upstart during the Fall of Rome. But over the course of a millennium, it calcified into a corrupt authority similar to that which it had once revolted against.
During the mid-1300s, the Church’s failure to stop the horror of the Black Death seeded grave suspicions about its claimed connection to God. 80 years later, the arrival of the printing press allowed doubters in every corner of Europe to compare notes. These devices churned out heretical pamphlets faster than the Church could confiscate them. As with the bound book in Rome, the established authorities once again lost control over the popular narrative.
Spurred on by a flood tide of mechanically printed literature, the Protestant Reformation splintered the Roman Catholic Church into competing factions. The Catholic version of reality—in which sentences in Purgatory could be shortened by paying the Church—was rejected by half of Europe. Another intellectual monopoly was shattered by an innovation in communications technology.
Perspective
In addition to the Protestant Reformation, the void left by the collapse of Church authority left room for other changes in the popular conception of reality. One fascinating example was 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 work of his contemporary, Donatello, were distinctly Medieval in the sense that they were 2-dimensional and flat. But after the discovery of perspective by his dear 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 the watershed that separates 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; they must have been aware of the illusion to some extent. But they never incorporated perspective into their artwork, suggesting that they were only subconsciously aware of it. Brunelleschi’s earth shattering discovery of perspective was a paradigm shift. It was another revolution in the popular conception of reality.
Heliocentrism
In addition to the discovery of perspective, and the chaos of the Protestant Reformation unleashed by the printing press, a third paradigm shift resulted from the crumbling of the Church’s intellectual monopoly.
The discovery that the Earth is in motion around the sun, and not vice-versa, symbolizes the transition from the Medieval to the Modern age. This discovery swept away the last vestiges of Church authority and ushered in a Scientific Revolution.
The triumph of the heliocentric model of the solar system started with Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who theorized that the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun. To avoid punishment from the Church, he published this theory on his deathbed. A half century later, German astronomer Johannes Kepler revised Copernicus’ theory using ellipses instead of circles. He used data carefully collected by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. And finally, back in Florence, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei confirmed Kepler’s findings using his new-fangled telescope. For this heresy, Church authorities confined Galileo to his house until he died in 1642.
But Galileo’s house arrest made no difference to the grand course of history. Before these men made their titanic contributions to the Scientific Revolution, anyone could see the sun “moving” across the sky. But after their findings were propagated far and wide by the printing presses of Europe, that illusion was broken forever. It was nothing less than an inversion of reality itself, and there was no going back. The Roman Catholic Church lost its intellectual monopoly, which was ultimately inherited by science. Today, that institution defines reality on behalf of the public as our modern priesthood.
Since you made it this far, patient reader, kindly consider hitting the ❤️ button above or below; it really helps!
Conclusion
Authorities who govern human economic systems endorse versions of reality that are economically expedient for the ruling class. Consequently, when economic systems lapse into dysfunction, bedrock conceptions of reality are also overturned as collateral damage. 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 the Scientific Revolution. These paradigmatic shifts were nothing less than a rending of the very fabric of reality itself.
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