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| Science and the Jewish Covenants of Learning - Part 1
0. In talking about the rise of enlightenment science, the religious contexts in which it arose, and the tensions that developed between science and religion thereafter, matters of interpretation, I believe, matter a great deal more than most of us realize , and in more ways than one. Philosophically speaking, the crucial turning point was the publication of Isaac Newton's magnificent Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis of 1687. It was a massive achievement that in one important respect changed the very nature of philosophizing about of science. Before Newton, philosophy of science was concerned with the project of establishing science properly. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and Rene Descartes Discourse on Method stand out in this respect; each presenting a radical, and meticulously argued appeal to begin the study of nature from scratch, and to establish it anew upon philosophically sound foundations. But with the publication of Newton's physics, all this changed. From then and to this very day, philosophy of science was rendered, with very few exceptions, an interpretative, rather than a constitutive project.
If for Bacon and Descartes the question was how to ensure and produce a reliable interpretation of nature, after Newton the question for philosophy largely became how to interpret Newton's undeniably successful interpretation of nature. This major shift of philosophical interest from the problem of explaining how to read the book of nature to that of explaining the success of one particular reading, I shall argue, marked a significant turning point in the history of the strained relations between science and early-modern Christianity. I shall devote the first few moments of my talk to briefly sketching, in admitedly slapdash brevity, the development of the crisis as I see it. This will serve as a contrastive backdrop for introducing to you, in the second, and main part of my talk, a strikingly different Jewish approach to interpretation from which matters look very different. But first to early modern science and Christianity. .
1. The Protestant Reformation rendered the Holy Scriptures an open book. 'The Meaning is in the Text' rang out the rallying cry of the early reformers, who urged their followers to discover it for themselves. To all those willing to approach the Bible with an open mind and an open heart, they granted direct access to scripture, and with it, unmediated access to the very word of God. Protestantism transformed Divine revelation into a personal matter of prudent reading, the very prudence of which, they assured, guaranteed success. Scripture, they preached, does not conceal its message, and, therefore, reading it does not require the mediating services of Church doctrine, clerical go-betweens or priestly exegetes. Here, in the personal invitation, extended, as Luther put it, to "the priesthood of all believers", to discover the Word of God for themselves, lie the religious roots of modern individualism and modern selfhood. Here also lie the roots of a particular modern notion of inquisitive prudence; one that combines diligence and an open mind - which really means a largely empty and passively receptive mind; a mind dedicated to freeing itself of prejudice and giving itself piously to reading out the true message of scripture, while resisting the temptation to read one in.
Much has been written about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the rise of modern science. Max Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism along with R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, paved the way, during the 1930's for such writers as Dorothy Stimson, R.F. Jones and Robert K. Merton to argue that puritan values provided the key element for creating an audience receptive to programs for the improvement of man's estate by means of the practical sciences. The thesis is an appealing one. As John Brooke notes, it is not difficult to see how capitalist, and with it, scientific entrepreneurship might prosper under the ethical norms commonly derived from a Calvinist work-ethic. But a closer look reveals that the "Puritanism and science thesis" will not suffice. Many have noticed that several key figures in the rise of science can hardly be described as 'puritan' - especially among astronomers and methematical physicists - and in any case, as Peter Harrison has recently noted, "modern science had its rise well before the puritan revolution of 1640." To this I would add that even if all those involved had been devout puritans, it would still remain highly improbable that their devotion to science could have been due solely to their Puritanism.
For science to achieve the enthusiastic, regal status it was granted in, say, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, it is simply not enough for it to have merely been deemed "a special case of good works". A community had to be created who could enthusiastically view science as an undertaking both richly deserving and richly achievable; as something for which its practitioners would be most positively motivated and most confident of success. To this end, I would like to adopt and further develop the main claim of Peter Harrison's splendid recent book: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, namely, that the rise of modern science owed significantly more to the Protestant reform of Bible-study than to Puritanism as such.
It did so, Harrison argues, by virtue of the new meaning it lent to the old and religiously appealing "two-books" metaphor, that portrayed God as the author of both a "book of words", scripture, and a "book of works", nature. For the early Protestants, the two-books metaphor came to suggest more than a common divine authorship. It was extended to the ways the two books should be read and comprehended, bestowing upon the study of nature much of the urgency and enthusiasm, and all of the promise associated with that of Scripture. In its Protestant version, the two-books metaphor was transformed into a powerful and suggestive analogy, in the light of which the literal study of scripture became a model for studying nature. Harrison makes much of the analogy, but focuses exclusively on its hermeneutic dimensions. He speaks emphatically of "the hermeneutic revolution which took place in the early modern Period"(266) stressing, for example, how "the assertion of the primacy of literal reading" of scripture "entailed a new, non-symbolic conception of the nature of things."(114)
He is right, of course, and yet he fails to notice the crucial epistemological aspect of the Protestant two-books analogy. Carried over into science, the "literalist mentality" towards the Bible, insisted upon by the early Protestant reformers translated, I believe, into an equally insistent empiricism. As with religious truth, so were scientific truths believed to reside in the immediate, 'literal' sense of what meets the human eye, ripe and ready for human discovery. Similar to scripture, it was believed that nature too could be made to reveal her secrets by prudently reading them out, unmediated by prior hypothesis or theory. And, therefore, just like the study of scripture, science too should not require the mediating services of clerical go-betweens or priestly exegetes. Analogously to the study of scripture, early-modern Protestant images of scientific inquiry preached a similar sort of prudence that valued clever, diligent and unimaginative minds seeking passively to receive nature's plain 'literal' message, while carefully abstaining from speculating as to what it might be.
Here, I submit, going a rather large step beyond Peter Harrison, lie the Protestant roots of early modern empiricism and the experimental method it inspired - the philosophical approach to science that found its exemplary expression in the work of the great philosophical empiricist and inductivist Francis Bacon. Thomas Sprat says it all. Celebrating the new, and very Baconian experimental method in his History of the Royal Society of 1667, he waxes poetical in the most "Protestant" of terms, not merely about their being two books, but about there being two Reformations, each prizing the original copies of God's two books while bypassing the corrupting influence of scholars and priests!
But by extending Harrison's thesis in this manner, I have inevitably narrowed its scope and application from early-modern science in general to early-modern empiricism. Oblivious to epistemology, Harrison writes as if the literalist mentality of the Protestant reformers could be held equally responsible for the equally impressive surge of such rationalist approaches to science as those of Kepler, Galileo and especially Descartes. This, I believe, is the one weak aspect of his otherwise superb book. The equally confident, equally enthusiastic and equally urgent rise of systematic early-modern scientific rationalism, with its special emphasis on mathematical physics, owes its origin and inspiration, I strongly suggest, not to Protestant attitudes to the interpretation of scripture, as Harrison implies, but to the Catholic Counter-Reformation that it provoked, and to the very different meaning that the two-books analogy acquired when viewed from a Catholic perspective - a thesis suggested from a somewhat different perspective in Stephen Toulmin's recent Cosmopolis.
It is easy to see how a thoroughgoing anti-Baconian, Cartesian philosophy of science, according to which the validity of scientific knowledge is made to rest exclusively on the authority of systematic human contemplation, sits well with the interpretative attitude of the Glossa Ordinaria. If Reformation science, if I may call it so, insisted on grounding scientific truth in the immediacy of factual experience, Counter-Reformation science insisted, equally vigorously, that it be grounded in the apriori certitude of the mathematicized systems of ideas by which the facts are read. The former envisaged science as a 'literalist' process of reading out, one might say, the latter, by contrast, as an elaborate process of 'doctrinal' reading in. For both, then, interpretation mattered centrally. But their approaches to biblical interpretation differed to the extent that they ended up preaching radically different, contradictory philosophies of science. (This distinction, between Reformation and Counter-Reformation interpretative attitudes maps nicely onto the distinction proposed by Antje Jackelen between Antioch and Alexandria).
If there is any truth at all in any of this, then the dramatic rise of science during the seventeenth-century was inspired and informed by two powerful, foundational philosophies rather than by one; philosophies that owed their origin to radically different versions of the two-books analogy, which were grounded respectively in radically different, Reformation and Counter-Reformation attitudes to Biblical interpretation; philosophies within which science and religion meshed and reinforced each other fruitfully and harmoniously. They both promised lofty and ambitious visions of grand scientific accomplishment, and backed them with elaborate philosophical argument.
A word of orientation with reference to Phillip Clayton's paper is in order perhaps. Clayton suggests that we view the history of the relationship between our accounts of modern science and religion as a three-act drama culminating in a latter-day post-structuralist identity theory (he urges us to resist). From what I have said already there is good reason, I believe, to view it a drama that also commenced in two powerful identity theories, which in the second half of the 20th-century comes full circle in much the way Clayton describes. I also believe that somewhere between his acts 2 and 3 lies a promising (or at least the promise of an) act 21/2 that he chooses to overlook. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The single-minded enthusiasm of both early-modern philosophies of science was extremely short-lived, however. For one thing, Newton's Principia of 1687 along with his Optics of 1704 swiftly proved major stumbling-blocks for both schools of thought, for he had puzzlingly written up his physics as if both could have been right, which of course they could not. During the eighteenth-century, both of the two early-modern versions of the two-books analogy had to be thoroughly rethought, and, as a result, both were abandoned in their original forms. Cartesian rationalism was the first to go in both the philosophy of science and mathematics, giving way to such very different approaches to the contribution of the mind to knowledge such as Joseph Louis Lagrange and later Pierre Duhem's instrumentalism, and Kantian constructivism. Bacon's 'literalist' inductivism proved more resilient, and was still commanding the assent of such prominent 19th century figures as John Herschel and John Stuart Mill. But their contribution to the understanding of science as it was practiced at the time would be marginal, to say the least. The new empiricists from William Whewell to Karl Popper advocated philosophies of science that retained nothing of Bacon's 'Protestant' literalism of old. In short, by 1730 or so the sweet harmony that had characterized both reformation, and counter-reformation approaches to science and religion was seriously beginning to crumble, and the great parting of ways of science and religion, that would typify so much of the enlightenment, had seriously begun. I shall return to science toward the end of my talk. But first to Judaism.
2. The Jewish tradition, to which I would now like to turn, appears to have had no use at all for the two-books metaphor. There is, of course, a brief, if potent moment of a deliberate blurring of boundaries between religion and science in the writings of Moses Maimonides and some of his immediate followers, but even there one finds nothing even remotely akin to a two-books analogy. In fact, most people would be hard-pressed to point to a single traditional rabbinic text in which the study of Torah and the study of nature are at all compared. I have come across only one rabbinical source that favorably compares the two. But it does so by thoroughly reversing both of Christian formulae we have been discussing. It is worth taking a closer look. The text was written during the early 1860's by R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, better known as the NaTZYB (pronounced Natziv) of Volozhin.
Just as it is not possible for the wise student of nature ever to boast knowledge of all of nature's secrets (...), and just as there is no guarantee that what his investigations do accomplish will not be invalidated in this generation or the next by colleagues who elect to study the same things differently, so it is not possible for the student of the Torah ever to claim that he has attended to each and every point that claims attention, and even that which he does explain - there is never proof that he has ascertained the truth of the Torah!
As you recall, both Christian versions of the argument ran from our proven ability to fathom the true meaning of Scripture to a promise of similar success in discovering scientific truth. Rabbi Berlin's argument, commencing from exactly the same analogy, runs in exactly the opposite direction, and with the exact opposite conclusion! Students of Torah, he urges, resemble scientists (rather than the other way round), and do so not in the confidence they should feel in their findings, but, on the contrary, in being persistently distrustful of the fruits of their efforts. Both science and the study of Torah, he clearly implies, lack the means for determining either conclusiveness or truth!
Rabbi Berlin does not endorse science as a vocation of any religious significance, but neither does he deride science, as much religious rhetoric often does. On the contrary, his attitude toward science is clearly favorable. And since he obviously draws the analogy between science and religious study with a view to promoting the latter, it strongly suggests that in his view the perpetual doubtfulness with which he associates science and Torah study, is not an impediment, but is actually the reason for their great vitality and growth! Humbly aware of their own limitations, scientists and students of the Torah become equally aware of those of their predecessors. Because they can never vouch for the truth and completeness of their researchers, all they can do is to criticize former efforts as best they can, with a view to presenting their own better alternatives, which in turn they genuinely hope their students will treat in similar fashion. Science and Torah-study, according to Rabbi Berlin, are both on-going, open-ended exercises in epistemic humility; consisting of creative, yet, at the same time, humbly self-doubting, cycles of relentless trial and imaginative error.
Now, to many of you all of this must sound deliciously anarchic coming, as it does, from so very orthodox an Eastern European rabbi. But in fact it is far less surprising than it looks. What certainly is intriguing is the surprisingly Popperian view of science the 19th century rabbi seems to have internalized so long before Popper. But as far as rabbinical attitudes to interpreting the Bible go, Rabbi Berlin's description rings not only true, but commonplace.
The idea of there being a single, true and humanly discernible reading of the biblical text is as foreign to the Jewish exegetical tradition as it was central to early-modern Christianity. The rabbinical canon presents a clamorous, jarring and unresolved polyphony of conflicting voices to which each new generation of learners is invited to add its own - and most often does. Students of the Torah strive to perfect their readings by keenly and critically engaging others, but it is the din of the study-hall rather than any one victorious voice that the canon ends up preserving. Here and there the talmudic literature hints that this interpretative plurality is not the result of human shortsightedness but is of the very nature of the enterprise. R. Evyatar and R. Yonatan, we are told in Bavli, Gittin 6b, in discussing Judges 19, disagreed as to the reasons for the gruesome fate suffered by the concubine of Bethlehem. They agreed that her Levite master had needlessly overreacted to some minor negligence on her part, but differed as to its precise nature. Elijah then appeared to one of them in a dream. "What is The Holy One, blessed be He, doing at this time?", inquired of the sage. "He is busy [studying] (the episode of) the concubine in Gibeah" answered the late prophet. "And what does He say (about it)?" urged the sage. He says, replied Elijah, that "Evyatar my son says so and Yonatan my son says differently." "God forbid!," exclaimed the sage, "that there should be doubt even before the Heavenly One!" - to this Elijah replied: eilu va-eilu divrei Elohim Hayim - "both are the words of the living God"!
Nowhere does the talmudic literature complain about the interpretative under-determination of Scripture. On the contrary, it seems, as a rule, to rejoice in the spirited, creative, on-going, free-for-all that it perpetuates. Scripture seems to function for Jews less as a source of religious truth and values than as a divine invitation - perhaps divine 'challenge' is a better term - to try and work them out for themselves. The study of the Torah is as personal and as unpoliced an enterprise as its Lutheran counterpart, but differs from it in not advocating or practicing literalism. Students of the Torah are encouraged to bring their theologies, value systems and religious sensibilities to the text, yet unlike Catholicism, the rabbinical tradition does not insist that these be doctrinal. Most importantly, with regard to biblical exegesis, the Jewish tradition differs from both early-modern Christian approaches in not presupposing a single point of interpretative convergence. It solemnly recognizes the Torah she-bikhtav - the Written Torah - the Holy Text itself, as sacred and binding, without recognizing any particular reading as sacred or binding! In fact one gets the impression that the Bible's very sanctity is attested to by the lavish abundance of conflicting readings it is given.
And yet, it is not as if anything goes in the study of the Torah. The rabbis take their scripture with the utmost seriousness, paying close attention to every single word, and every unusual, or seemingly redundant turn of phrase. The divine Text is not allowed to mince its words, and certainly not to waste them. Neither is it allowed to state the obvious. None the less, much leeway still remains, and among the very many possibilities, none are deemed obligatory. Rabbi Berlin's fascinating description of Torah-study as a constructively skeptical and self-doubting, critical engagement with tradition, is far less a radical battle-cry than an apt and commonplace description.
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Published 2002.07.30
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