Did the Catholic Church Oppose All Science?
The brief answer is no. The Jesuits ran the leading Catholic astronomy programme, Catholic priests made the first electrical instruments, and the Vatican employed Copernicus. The real conflict was over three specific claims — heliocentrism, the age of the earth, and the natural-philosophical implications of materialism.
Did the Catholic Church Oppose All Science?
The standard caricature, in which the Catholic Church was uniformly hostile to the new science of the seventeenth century, is contradicted by the historical record. The Church ran the leading Catholic programme in observational astronomy, employed Copernicus as a canon, sponsored the work of the Jesuits in physics and mathematics, and was a major patron of natural philosophy of every kind. The actual record of Catholic engagement with the new science is complex, and the more useful question is not whether the Church opposed science in general, but what specific claims it opposed, in what specific circumstances, and through what specific institutional mechanisms. This page summarises the modern historical scholarship — most importantly the work of Rivka Feldhay, Mario Biagioli, Thomas F. Mayer, and Peter Harrison — and distinguishes the cases in which the Church did oppose specific scientific claims from the cases in which it supported or sponsored the work of natural philosophers.
The Cases in Which the Church Opposed Specific Claims
The cases in which the Catholic Church acted against specific scientific claims are well known, and the better-known cases are also the more important. The list is shorter than the popular caricature would suggest.
The most consequential case was heliocentrism: the claim that the earth moves around the sun. The Church placed Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1616, and condemned Galileo in 1633 for defending the Copernican position. The prohibition was not lifted until 1757, and the Dialogue was not removed from the Index until 1835. The full account is given in How Did the Church Respond to Heliocentrism? and Why Did the Church Oppose Heliocentrism?. The Church’s opposition was not, on the historical record, a simple opposition to the science: it was an opposition to the cosmology in so far as the cosmology was held to contradict the literal sense of scripture, and the opposition was maintained as long as the literal sense was the dominant reading and as long as no alternative reading had been given institutional approval.
The second consequential case was the age of the earth: the question of how long the world had been in existence. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century calculations of the age of the earth, beginning with John Lightfoot’s 1649 calculation of a creation date of 3929 BC, and continuing with the work of William Ussher and the Seder Olam Rabbah, were not, on the historical record, the basis of a Catholic condemnation. The later and more consequential Catholic resistance to deep geological time came in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was directed not against these early-modern chronological calculations but against the empirical evidence of rock strata and the antiquity of the earth advanced by James Hutton, John Playfair, Charles Lyell, and — eventually — the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. The Catholic resistance to the new geology, like the earlier resistance to heliocentrism, was driven less by the empirical claims of the geologists than by the perceived threat to the literal sense of Genesis; but the resistance, in the late nineteenth century, was directed at specific empirical claims about the antiquity of the earth and the antiquity of the human race.
The third consequential case was the implications of the new mechanism for the soul and for human freedom: the question of whether the new mechanistic philosophy of the seventeenth century was compatible with the Christian doctrine of the soul. Descartes, the most influential proponent of the mechanical philosophy in the Catholic world, was careful to exempt the human soul from the mechanical account: the soul, for Descartes, was a thinking substance (res cogitans) distinct from the extended substance (res extensa) of the body, and the soul could, in particular, act on the body at the pineal gland. The Catholic Church was generally sympathetic to Descartes’s solution, and Cartesian mechanism was taught in the Jesuit colleges for the next century. But the materialist implications of the new mechanism — the suggestion, made by La Mettrie in L’homme machine of 1747, that the human being is a machine — was a different matter, and La Mettrie’s book was burned by the public hangman at the Hague in 1748.
The Cases in Which the Church Supported or Sponsored the New Science
The cases in which the Catholic Church supported the new science are, in aggregate, far more numerous than the cases in which it opposed specific claims. The most important examples are the following.
Copernicus himself was a Catholic canon. Nicolaus Copernicus was a canon of the cathedral of Frombork, in the Polish diocese of Warmia, and the De Revolutionibus was dedicated to Pope Paul III. The book was, on the whole, well received by the Catholic Church in the decades after its publication, and the preface by Andreas Osiander (which presented the heliocentric system as a calculating device) helped to keep the book out of theological trouble for half a century.
The Jesuits ran the leading Catholic programme in observational astronomy. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, ran a network of colleges and universities across Catholic Europe, and the Ratio studiorum of 1599 made the teaching of natural philosophy a major part of the curriculum. The Collegio Romano, in particular, was the leading Catholic centre of astronomy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Jesuit astronomers — Christopher Clavius, Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Athanasius Kircher, and many others — made significant contributions to the new astronomy. The Jesuits were not, on the whole, Copernicans, but they were careful and competent observers, and they made the new telescope and the new observational techniques part of the Catholic astronomical tradition. The full account of the Jesuits and the new science is in Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge University Press, 1995), in Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and in the older but still useful A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (Longmans, 1954).
Catholic priests made the first serious instruments of electrical research. The first electrical machine that could be used for sustained experimentation was built in 1700 by the Jesuit priest Franz Hauksbee the Elder at the Royal Society in London, and the first experiments on the storage of electrical charge in the Leyden jar were conducted by the Catholic priest Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745, independently of the better-known work of Pieter van Musschenbroek at Leiden. Catholic priests also played an important role in the growth of the early modern science of meteorology: the Benedictine abbey of Kremsmünster, in Austria, maintained a continuous series of meteorological observations from 1776 to 1788, and the Jesuit priest Angelo Secchi, in the nineteenth century, was one of the founders of modern astrophysics.
The Vatican employed the leading natural philosophers. The Vatican Observatory, founded in 1891, was the culmination of a long tradition of astronomical patronage by the papacy, and the leading Catholic natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — including Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who became director of the new Paris Observatory in 1671, and the Jesuit physicist Roger Boscovich, who contributed to Newtonian physics in the eighteenth century — worked with the active support of the Church hierarchy.
Catholic natural philosophy was at the centre of the early Enlightenment. The mechanical philosophy, the corpuscular chemistry, and the experimental method of the new science were taught at the Catholic universities, defended in the Catholic philosophical textbooks, and extended in the Catholic scientific journals. The Catholic contribution to this new approach was, in short, a major part of the reformed natural philosophy.
The Bigger Picture
The historical record, then, is far more varied than the simple caricature of Church-versus-science would suggest. The Church opposed specific scientific claims, in specific historical circumstances, for specific reasons; and the Church supported and sponsored the experimental science in many other cases, and was itself a major patron of the new natural philosophy. The standard twentieth-century account, following the work of historians of science from the 1960s onward, has been to replace the simple caricature with a more nuanced account of the long, complicated, and productive relationship between the Church and the new philosophy of nature. The relationship was not, on the whole, a relationship of conflict: it was a relationship in which the Church, the new learning, and the new political and intellectual culture of early modern Europe were all implicated in one another, and in which the conflicts that did arise were the result of specific claims, specific circumstances, and specific institutional decisions, rather than of any general opposition to the seventeenth-century science.
For the full account of the cases in which the Church did oppose specific claims, see How Did the Church Respond to Heliocentrism? and Why Did the Church Oppose Heliocentrism?. For the broader institutional and cultural history, see The Scientific Revolution and the Church and Education, Universities, and the New Science.