Renaissance the 15^{th and} 16^th  centuries

§         Renaissance means “rebirth”, the rebirth of culture; art (visual and performing) and thought; science, and philosophy. Many invention were invented, like printing, which gave other people other than the church to make books, therefore the Church wasn’t the main source of education.  The discoveries of the time, like that of the earth not being the center of the universe gave civilization a shake. It became more important to reach God by your self then to do it through church. The Bible was translated and printed into languages that other people besides priests could read.

§         Many Reformations of the Church were happening, and the founding of many other churches that broke off from the Catholic Church.

§         Humanism was a big theme during the Renaissance, man was good and beautiful, and the age revolved around humans, not God. The Church looked down on humanism, they burned and hung those who went against it

§         Pantheism.

§         Empirical method – science discoveries and knowledge must be based on experience. Science became presented in mathematical terms, experiments and mathematics made inventions possible. Medicines were developed.

Niccoló Machiavelli (1469-1527) – Florence, Italy

·        Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a basis for ruling and addressed ‘how one holds or acquires princely power’ and ‘how not to be good’.

o       Power: In an old kingdom it is easy to hold power over the people if you stick with the customs and traditions held by the people. A newly founded state is much harder to govern. When one takes a state he will prosper and keep power if he is culturally aware and eliminates the pervious ruler and his family. The people would hardly notice in the long run, and if one is not culturally aware of the people he should either reside in the new state or colonize it with peoples who have the same culture and language.

§         States with ministers are hard to conquer, but easy to hole

§         States with monarchs with barons and such as his advisers are easy to conquer, but hard to hold. The barons and nobles would revolt.

§         Free cities, or republican states are hard to conquer and hard to hold, for the people are used to being free. The thing to do with a free city to destroy it completely, because even if you are resident in the state rebellion is a definite thing.

Coming into Power:

§         If you come to power by yourself it will be hard at first, but the power will be easy to hold, especially if you have the support of the military.

§         If you come to power by the will and dexterity of others then you most likely will become dependent on your benefactors, and if they desert you, you will not have the skills to continue to hold your power.

§         If you come to power by villainy then you must be certain to commit all your great acts of villainy at one time, then you should soften up a bit.

§         If you come into power with the support of your fellow citizens (such as democracy) you must make sure the people need you, military support helps greatly.

Military: The militia is the best form of military; mercenaries are dangerous and untrustworthy, and allies are dangerous for if they win a war for you then you are in their debt.

o       Never have to raise taxes; it leads to hatred. It is better to have the reputation of being cheep than to be hated by your people.

o       Have cruelty instead of clemency; cruelty is necessary to keep order in the state, but not villainy. Villainy has no virtue, leaders want glory and glory cannot be achieved by villainy. Never take someone’s property, it is better to kill a close kin than to take away a man’s property, for when someone is dead, there is no coming back, but one can find a way to get his property back.

o       Make sure you have a reputation of integrity, honesty and religion, but you don’t have to practice them to the extreme; they might get in your way and handicap you. 

Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536)

·        Erasmus entered and studied in an Augustinian monastery and became novice, he left before taking his final vows. He went to study in a university in Paris and became first northern European to know enough Greek to edit the old testament

·        Wrote in many forms – formal letters, model conversations, improve Latin and satires:

o       In The Praise of Folly - Folly herself is the main character and she stands on a platform and preaches a sermon on folly. She speaks; laughing at marriage; if one knew about childrearing beforehand they would never go that far. Mocks excessive honesty, scholars, neglecting kings, mocks monks, theologians and says enthusiasm is a virtue to be dreaded. It is better to be in the cave than brought to the light.

o       The Exclusion of Pope Julius about Pope Julius II who went overboard on trying to “save” the church from secular control and it undid him and made him a bad example of abuse of tradition. It got Erasmus in trouble because in attacking Pope Julius he was symbolically attacking all popes.

o       A Treatise on the Education of a Christian Prince is exactly that, and Erasmus starts by telling the prince to read Plotar, Cisero, Seneca and Plato and do not go overboard, restraint is wisdom and avoid being foolish

·        Erasmus believed what Christians needed to practice was the Philosophia Christi or the philosophy of Christ; the life of the Gospels and the formal doctrines.

·        Erasmus supported Luther in reading the Bible directly, but thought that the rest of his beliefs such as judging one owns faith, and that the will is not free weren’t true. Erasmus and Luther exchanged literary arguments until Luther became verbally abusive and Erasmus broke with Luther’s thought, believing that God was not the tyrant who was somehow just that Luther said he was. Above all Erasmus began to believe that Luther had been led astray with enthusiasm.

·         Erasmus thought that Latin was the best language to know to read, write and pronounce correctly. He believed that it should become a sort of universal language, except that people from different parts of the world tend not to understand each other because their pronunciation was so different. So Erasmus tried to find the classical pronunciation of Latin.           

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) Scientist: Poland

·        Publish a book called On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, where he introduced the ‘Copernicus Hypothesis’ that claimed that the planets were easier to understand if one believed that all the planets orbit around the sun and sun did not revolve around the earth. He also claimed that the sun was the center of the universe, and that the planets had a circular orbit.

Sir Thomas More (1477-1535) – England

·        More wrote a book called Utopia, which was like Plato’s Republic in which a traveler tells a tale of an island that he had been to and the society there.

o       A council composed of the most able persons, whom are elected along with the prince, led the Utopian society. Wars are very rarely fought, for the goals of the country is to protect the lives of the Utopians, and if war does threaten the leaders of Utopia find other ways to avoid war, but when it is necessary the hire mercenaries. 

Martin Luther (1483-1546) Reformation Leader: Germany 

·        Luther said to believe in faith alone. He broke from the Roman Catholic Church because he didn’t believe that people needed priests to be forgiven by God.

·        Do we have God’s grace from the beginning or do our choices and action bring God’s grace to us?  Luther thought that trying to “earn” God’s grace (i.e. fasting) was useless and above all torments one’s being.

·         Pure love and obedience of God is the right way to go, but if you are trying to earn grace and are mindful of your sins you will start examining your conscience. You will wonder if your love and obedience is really and truly pure, or if you are just loving and being obedient because you know if you are you will get something out of it. As a young man Luther spent many hours deliberating on this problem.

·        Instead of trying to see God Luther began to read the Gospels to hear the word of God. He fond them very comforting and they eased his mind about the many questions that plagued him. He spoke not of Law and Grace, but of Law and Gospel.

·        At the time the Pope was signing papers that would help whoever had them get rid of their sins and get to heaven quicker and they were being sold. Luther was angered, because most people thought that they were tickets to get them straight into heaven and he believed that the Pope had no right in handing these papers out. So he wrote ninety-nine theses and posted them on the church’s door meaning for them to be topics of discussion between scholars, but they were translated into the common language and it started the beginning of the Protestant church.

·        For Luther the devil was a little voice in your subconscious that would whisper to you telling you that you are a sinner and tempting you into forgetting and leaving the teachings of the Gospels.

·        Luther thought that the Pope had the power of an Anti-Christ. He said that he was trying to take the Gospels away from the people and sending the message that man could only earn God’s grace through him.

John Calvin (1509-1563) Reformation Leader: France to Geneva

·        John Calvin was the 2^nd generation of Switzerland’s reformation and was the President of the Reformation in Geneva – church reformed to the word of God

·        His book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion was on the theology of Protestants and Puritism

·        Said that man were only sinners standing before God

·        Calvin’s Three Solas to be guided by:

o       Faith Alone – Justification by faith alone

o       Grace Alone – It is only grace that allows us to be saved

o       Scripture Alone – Only the bible is the authoritive source of Christian doctrine

·        Merits of Catholics vs. Calvin and Luther

o       Catholics: Grace changes us and we are better for God’s approval. Catholics believed Protestants were authoritarians because they believed to trust the Bible and to submit to the authority of God, where Catholics thought that always bowing to authority and blindly trusting the bible wasn’t necessary.

o        Calvinism and Lutherans: Thought very strongly that man never deserves God’s approval, and are blessed by it and even if man is better for having God’s grace they must not rely on that, instead man should rely on God’s mercy. They also believed that the Catholics were authoritarian, because men can’t trust the priests; God’s words are the only way to know God.

·        The Calvinists had a very different view of damnation then Luther and the Catholics.

o       Catholics and Lutherans: Be justified everyday (confession, go regularly to church, etc.), because you can still be damned. You also must believe you are justified.

o       Calvin: If you are justified once than you cannot be damned, even if you turn away from the faith afterwards. You must ask yourself ‘Do I have true faith?’ and believe you believe it. God also does pre-destine some to be damned. 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Scientist: England

·        Bacon studied at Cambridge university as a young man, and even then he was countering traditional scholasticism and later became Lord Chancellor of England

·        Argued that the Euoropian philosophical thought stood condemned on several grounds, but the two main ones are:

o       First philosophers mixed religion and natural philosophy (science) to the confusion of both

o       Second they substituted concern for words for concern of things; instead of mastering things they would manipulate words

·        He also said that all philosophy had become only five or six systems of thought that were developed in Greece. He said that the history was not the history of great minds debating what we knew/did not know rather “this” Greek system of thought against “that” Greek system of thought.

·        Bacon wanted to re-define human knowledge and developed two main ways he could convince the people to change their attitudes towards the goals of humans:

o       Convince them that new methods of knowledge would make possible expansion of the human empire over the circumstances upon our suffering or well being depends. Turn knowledge too nature and well being.

o       He believed that he could convince his audience that the Christian ethic demanded knowledge in the service of charity knowledge was not to be famed, to use knowledge as the power to aid and enhance one’s fellow creature’s well being.

·        Bacon wrote a book called The New Organon that was a counter to Aristotle’s Organon, which was at the heart of the education which he despised so. Bacon’s Organon taught to learn things that stood the test of time, and to ask  ‘where have the “great minds” gotten us?’ He said to look at other technology like navigation, and see how far those areas have come, because they have not been argued over for centuries, like philosophical questions. The main themes in The New Organon are:

o       Knowledge is human power

o       There must be a separation between natural philosophy and theology (natural philosophy must not go beyond the natural world)

o       The method for the acquisition of knowledge is induction

o       Science is a dynamic, cooperative, cumulative enterprise

·        Bacon asks why are we, as humans, are so hesitant to be patient and wait to learn from nature? And answers it by pointing out that we, as humans, are creatures of pride and arrogance, therefore we will not let ourselves wait to let nature teach us.

·        Bacon’s Idols of the mind (idolatry in Christian doctrine is a great sin, so Bacon made four forms of idolatry of the mind):

o       The Idols of the Tribe – tribe of humans which is pride and arrogance

o       The Idols of the Cave – that person’s need, education, psychology

o       The Idols of the Marketplace – where words take place of knowledge

o       The Idols of the Theater – our received philosophical thoughts

·        The New Atlantis was Bacon’s Utopian world in which he states the proper place of natural philosophy in society. People in this society govern with their knowledge of the natural world with their human interest (or charity).

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Scientist

·        Was a good friend of Johannes Kepler and read much of his works, but didn’t believe that his Law was true; they were much too speculative for Galileo’s taste.

·        Believed very strongly that we need to learn from nature and observation.

·        He watched the moon; through a telescope he studied it’s craters, saying that the moon had mountains and canyons like the earth. He also discovered Jupiter had four moons.

·        Galileo thought that the lunar forces did not have affect on anything because gravitation didn’t work over great distances

·        He said that there were Primary and Secondary qualities of all objects in the world:

o       Qualities like taste and smell were held to be the qualities of an item, but Galileo said those things were only the effect that the item had on our senses, human senses reacting to the things in the world.

o       The qualities apart from perception, like mathematics, were the true qualities of the objects themselves. Mathematics, mass, geometry, the laws of motions, bodies to time and distances are how to see the qualities of the world. One must not look for perfections or purposes in nature.

·        In debates Galileo would say that if Aristotle were alive he would agree with him, but his opponents would refuse to look through his telescope, saying he had made optical illusions to lead them astray.

·        Two sources of knowledge from God:

o       Book of Nature: our knowledge the creation that we can precise with the gifts of math and logic God gave to man.

o       Book of Scripture: our knowledge of beyond the creation.

Galileo was put under house arrest until his death and despite orders not to he wrote a test book that became the basis for modern physics

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) Scientist: Germany

·        Found evidence that the planets moved in an oval (elliptical) orbit and that the speed of the planets is faster the closer to the sun they get.

·        He claimed that physical laws are the same throughout the universe

·        He said that the tides must be affected by the lunar movements

·        Kepler’s Law of Planetary Motion, which he came upon after many years and many, many calculations said that the earth and the planets follow an elliptical orbit, not a circular orbit around the sun. Also the line joining a planet to the sun (the radical vector) sweeps out equal areas in equal lines

·        Kepler hated the fact that the planets’ orbits were elliptic and not perfect circles. He struggled for ten years after his law of planetary motion trying to find where God went in the picture, until he found one that gives proof of the divine mind: The square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun.