THE PERSON OF THE MILLENNIUM

Only one other man showed a similar courage in mounting a similar heroic challenge to the establishment—Martin Luther. It is therefore true that Galileo’s greatest rival for the title of Person of the Millennium is not a scientist or a philosopher but a theologian. One might even suggest that Luther was the one man who, a century before Galileo, shattered the medieval consensus and ushered in the modern world. Does that proposition hold up under scrutiny? No one can deny that Luther and Galileo caused dramatic changes which are normatively called the “Protestant Reformation” and the “Scientific Revolution”--as though they are two discrete developments. And one might say that these changes in religion and in science have nothing to do with each other--or so it seems until one realizes that they are joined in an important way. For together they are responsible for a singular “Luther-Galileo Paradigm Shift,” as STAR was undone by a one-two punch or, to change the figure, by the sequential dropping of a pair of shoes. In their wake, arose the New Empire and the consequent war between Tradition and Modernity. First Luther, as we saw, challenged Tradition and Authority. The longevity and ubiquity of the Church, the splendor of its Magisterium, the primacy of the Pope, the decrees of its Councils, the important roles of cardinals and bishops, of theologians early and late—all this impressed him not. In Erasmus’s just words, “Luther recognizes no authority of any author, however approved, except that of the canonical books [=the Bible].” Luther remained a Christian, i.e. still cleaved to the Revelation and Scripture parts of STAR; again Erasmus on the Catholic-Protestant schism: “We are not involved in a controversy regarding Scripture. The same Scripture is being loved and revered by both parties.” He meant, of course, that the issue is not the centrality of Scripture, but the interpretation of it. A century later, Galileo not only extended Luther’s attack on Tradition and Authority but knocked out the rest of STAR, not by rejecting Revelation and Scripture the way he and Luther had rejected Tradition and Authority, but by limiting the scope of that surviving pair of foundation stones. When it came to his doing science in a new experimental and mathematical fashion, Scripture had nothing to contribute. If there was a conflict between Bible and scientific findings, the latter could not be denied without throwing into question human senses and reason. Like Luther, therefore, Galileo is challenging venerable interpretations of the Bible, but, unlike Luther, he goes further by implying that the Bible itself had best be shelved--kept out of scientific endeavors altogether. The all-encompassing, unified vision offered by medieval Christianity is fragmenting. If Luther would not allow Tradition and Authority to come between God and man, Galileo would not allow Revelation and Scripture to come between nature and man. Not only did Galileo make a more compelling case against STAR than did Luther, but the latter is hobbled by another problem. While certainly an earth-shaking figure of the highest order, he is less significant because he led his followers into a philosophical dead end. Luther’s dissent had three disastrous consequences: It created a metaphysical stalemate between himself and the Catholic Church; it splintered Christianity (and then Protestantism itself); and, as a result, it ushered in skepticism. Luther had unwittingly replaced the single, objective Truth of the Church with pluralism, subjectivism, and, eventually and unavoidably, relativism, secularism, and tolerance; he in effect undid Western Christian unity and hegemony. Here indeed is where the brilliant Nietzsche perpetrated a rare major error in judgment. He lambasted Luther for having resuscitated a Christianity that was on its deathbed. Actually, the reverse is true: By splitting the faith and causing thereby the revival of ancient skepticism, Luther hastened the end of Christianity as an overarching, ineluctable, dominant unitary system of thought. He made a Nietzsche possible—though what a screaming match those two must be having in the hereafter! The skepticism catalyzed by Luther gave birth to, as well as became a hallmark of, modern science. The latter, in turn, by being able to solve riddles in the physical realm, heightened the skepticism in non-scientific disciplines like theology and morality. For if tradition and authority were wrong about the scientific matters on which they had pontificated (literally), why could they not likewise be wrong in their pontification on non-scientific matters like theology and ethics, as Luther had already insisted? While Luther undermined the old way of ascertaining the truth, it was left to Galileo to invent or disseminate a new way. Luther, that is, was still medieval enough to cleave to Revelation and Scripture (even while overthrowing Tradition and Authority), but Galileo was modern enough to establish experiment as the superior alternative (in the sciences only, of course) to Revelation and Scripture. Experimentation means exercising an all-dissolving doubt until seeing the truth for oneself. It means human arrangements in the natural realm in place of deference to privileged messages from a supernatural realm; it means a piecemeal construction of the truth, with many detours and revisions, instead of the simple monolithic, seamless, unalterable presence of the Truth at Sinai, Calvary, Mecca. Hence, despite his vast role in bringing about the modern world, Luther, in being more destructive than constructive, cannot be considered as important as Galileo. Luther played a major role only in clearing the ground for new the edifice of knowledge which Galileo brought into being. Certainly the two men were in a sense fighting the same battle, but Luther lacks Galileo’s greatness because the best he could do against the Church was to achieve a stalemate. For what emerged from the historic clash was uncertainty as to which side was right. In debating Free Will with Luther, Erasmus stated the predicament of the Christianity of his day: “How can we judge the Spirit? According to erudition? On both sides we find scribes. According to conduct? On both sides there are sinners.” A century later, Galileo entered the fray armed with a sword to cut the Gordian Knot. By changing the manner of proving something to be true, he massively advanced Luther’s breakthrough against authority to a new level and made the most important discovery or invention since the beginning of writing. Instead of one textual interpretation against another (Luther’s way), it now became the textual (however interpreted) against a new criterion of truth—sensory, replicable, quantifiable experimental verification. Once the superiority of the latter was accepted (and that is the major assumption of the modern world) both text and Church (in Europe) lost their universal, unchallenged power to define reality. To summarize, Luther undermined Tradition and Authority but not Revelation and Scripture, and offered only a subjective way of finding the truth in lieu of the old way; Galileo also undermined Tradition and Authority (albeit in science rather than theology) and, in addition, marginalized Revelation and Scripture, but he at least offered an objective alternative for finding the Truth, albeit a shrunken version of the truth. While, to be sure, Luther was a theologian and Galileo a scientist and while Galileo consequently did not solve the religious stalemate between Church and Luther, he did, unlike Luther, find that long-needed objective tribunal for the settling of ontological disputes (outside theology), and that tribunal turned out to be, of all people, l’homme moyen sensuel (Joe Sixpack). When Luther would have each individual be his own Bible interpreter, the result was pandemonium; when Galileo gave each individual access to verifiable objective material reality, the result was t