Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - Jáki Szaniszló: A középkori kereszténység találékonysága a technikában és a tudományban

SZANISZLO JAKI: INGENUITY OF THE MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY In cultural histories, including histories of science and technology, the centuries known as the Middle Ages are usually written off as a period of rank obscurantism. The debunking of the Middle Ages, which was the Age of Faith, was an essential strategy of the gurus of the Enlightenment who aimed at securing, intellectually and socially, the secularist autonomy, which man purportedly gained by mastering the art of doing science and exploiting it to the full for his technological needs. For the past fifty years or so there has been a growing recognition that crucial breakthroughs in science and technology took place during the Middle Ages. According to the chief representatives of one group of scholars, such as A. Pacey, D. S. L. Cardwell, and Lynn White Jr., all technology of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was based on medieval inventions. Charles Singer, a chief representative of the other group, tried to leave intact the old image of the Middle Ages, by insisting that the Middle Ages, which according to him began around 400 and ended around 1300, were merely the end of a preparatory period reaching back into ancient times. According to the former group, the Middle Ages comprise the times that stretch from Charlemagne to about 1450, or six and a half centuries. During those centuries Western Europe witnessed an explosive utilization of watermills and windmills. Moreover, the rotational motion thus obtained was transformed, through the invention of the cam, into linear motion, which in turn made possible mechanically operated saws and hammers. The latter made possible the production of paper in large quantities, which in turn served as a framework for the invention of printing from movable type, at least fifty years before Gutenberg. The marked increase of population during the medieval centuries was made possible by advances in the rotation of crops. Among the many smaller medieval inventions is the introduction of lenses. The chief medieval technological innovation was, of course, the construction of mechanical clocks, moved by a weight, whose fall was made uniform through the introduction of an escape mechanism, which consisted in a double feedback. It was partly in terms of mechanical clocks that the medievals achieved their most decisive contribution to science, or the formulation of the idea of inertial motion. Even more important, however, was the theological factor that made the new thinking about motion possible. This factor relied on the Christian view about the Creator who is powerful enough to give autonomous laws to the universe which He created, without endangering thereby His full domination over it. Finally, attention is drawn to some considerations, widely entertained during the Middle Ages, about the proper use of technology, which should seem particularly timely in a modern cutture that finds its own environment threatened by a heedless exploitation of technology.