Rienk Vermij, “A Science of Signs: Aristotelian Meteorology in Reformation Germany,” Early Science and Medicine 15, no. 6 (2010).

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Response

In “A Science of Signs” Rienk Vermij argues that Luther and his philosophical allies and successors altered the pedagogical and homiletic treatment of meteorology from Protestant German lecterns and pulpits, not by upending Aristotelian natural philosophy and cosmology, but by rejecting its essential and pure naturalism. This did not require that all natural explanations be done away with — God was still just as evident in his providential design — but added to them the existence of certain preternatural meteors: comets, northern lights, St. Elmo’s Fire, etc. Vermij refers to this as a “reformation” of natural philosophy at Wittenberg (the epicenter of Lutheran philosophy) whose purpose it was to harmonize a naturalistic system with “fundamentally anti-naturalistic principles.” The world in this Lutheran worldview became a stage where God could generate a preternatural comet over a sky overcast with natural rain.

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Notes

• 648 – “Luther, directly opposing the naturalism of Aristotelian natural philosophy, held that unusual events were often worked directly by either God or the devil, not by natural forces. . . . Meteorological text-books emphasised the final causes of the phenomena they described; not just their place in the general economy of nature, but also their function in warning and punishing sinners. . . .The text-books, however, did not fully break away from the tradition of commentaries to Aristotle’s Meteorologia, which emphasised naturalism. Only topics not discussed in this tradition were unambiguously explained as miraculous.”
• 649 – The Aristotelian philosophy that had dominated academic teaching up to that time was unacceptable to Luther. Luther’s reformation of theology went therefore hand in hand with a complete overhaul of philosophy, including natural philosophy. Although Lutherans did not succeed in formulating a real alternative to Aristotle’s philosophy, they did come up with a new interpretation, largely worked out by Melanchthon. In this way, Aristotelianism was accommodated to Luther’s religious principles.”
• “. . . Luther’s denouncements of Aristotle’s verbal monstrosities and of various teachings that were contrary to the Bible, such as the eternity of the world, the eternity of celestial motions and the mortality of the human soul.”
  • How many hundreds of years after the synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity before someone is like, “hey, Aristotle wasn’t Christian and his ideas are heretical”?

 

 

• • 650 – “However, none of the points mentioned in Melanchthon’s letter was really new. The discrepancies between Aristotle’s theories and Christian doctrine had been known for centuries. The philosophers of the thirteenth century had proposed solutions for them, which had gained wide authority. Although inevitably some debates remained, by the end of the Middle Ages few philosophers and churchmen would regard Aristotelian doctrines, if taken in their ‘proper’ sense, as a danger to the faith.”
• “In another instance, Luther declared that there was no book he believed less than Aristotle’s Meteorologia, exactly because it was based on the assumption that all things happen by natural causes.”
• 651 – “Such signs, which included comets, northern lights, images in the sky, as well as monstrous births and natural catastrophes, were fundamental elements in the religious experience of the sixteenth century, and certainly of the Lutheran Reformation. They were widely interpreted as signs of social and natural disorder and of the near end of the world. Such interpretations were not just a manifestation of uninformed ‘popular culture’, but formed a part of official Church doctrine. The interpretation of these signs was closely linked to the Protestant cause: God himself showed from the heavens his disapproval of the existing situation, and lent credence to the words of the reformers. The many pamphlets on the subject were for the most part written by Lutheran ministers and ecclesiastical dignitaries.”
• 652 – “. . . I want to show that the reformation of natural philosophy at Wittenberg was to a large degree determined by exactly these concerns [apocalyptic fears]. One of the main challenges of the Wittenberg philosophers was to find a natural philosophy that would not explain away, as Aristotle’s Meteorologia had done, divine signs, portents, and miraculous events. Therefore, the transformation of natural philosophy at Wittenberg had to be in large part a transformation of Aristotelian meteorology.”
• “The meteorological tradition as known in Luther’s time went directly against any belief in supernatural signs. Whereas in the early Middle Ages, theologians had been rather indulgent about incorporating all kinds of magical belief into Church practice, by the twelfth century, they tended to be more strict. Apart from divine miracles, everything in the world had to be explained by ‘natural’ causes.”
• 653 – “Nature was demystified, not by denying the wondrous effects themselves, but by explaining them as resulting from natural forces.”
  • How does this compare with Dixon’s claim that the late medieval world considered the material world a repository of the sacred?
• 653-4 – “Still, by the time of Luther, meteorological authors quite openly professed their goal to be combating superstition. An early sixteenth-century (pre-Reformation) textbook stated that the knowledge of meteorology ‘serves to remove the errors of the multitude of people, who, not knowing the causes of the natural effects, refer nearly all the works of nature immediately to God, which is the main reason that philosophical explanation was undertaken.”
• 654 – “Given Luther’s belief in the active intervention of God in the everyday world, he must have regarded Aristotelian meteorology as a very dangerous field of study indeed; a field, moreover, wherein one could not fall back on any existing scheme of accommodation. Exactly because of the importance of heavenly signs in Lutheran propaganda, this was a matter of concern. One could not leave the interpretation of celestial signs to naturalising philosophers. Neither could one, by simply dismissing these explanations, give free rein to self-proclaimed prophets and religious enthusiasts — especially not in the light of Luther’s belief that the devil, too, was active in the world and worked many wonders.”
• 657 – “In the wake of Luther, Peucer emphasised God’s direct interference with the world. He expressly denied that monsters and other deviations were only sports of nature, as Aristotle had considered them. The cause of deviations lay not in nature, but in a higher causality.”
• 659 – Curricular reform at Wittenberg – Replacement of Aristotle’s Meteorologia with Giovannia Pontano’s didactic poem Liber meteororum, Pliny’s natural history also an alternative to Aristotle
• 660 – “The choice for Pliny may well have been inspired by the fact that, unlike Aristotle or for instance Seneca, Pliny did not want to explain everything from natural causes. His works are full of stories of apparitions, presages, and other miraculous occurrences.”
• “Around the middle of the century, the university returned to a curriculum based upon Aristotle’s writings. This was possible because new interpretations had brought these into agreement with Luther’s demands.”
  • Aristotle rendered palpable to another Christianity

 

 

• 662 – “Meteorological teaching appears to have flourished in the period when the influence of Luther and Melanchthon was still strong. It is less clear what happed after 1574, when, in the wake of theological disputes within Lutheranism, the Elector of Saxony expelled the Philippists or ‘crypto-Calvinists’ from the university.”
• “All this indicates that at Lutheran universities, it was felt that a correct view on meteors was essential for the understanding of physics. Probably meteors were discussed in introductory courses, early in the curriculum, before the students were introduced to more general philosophical principles. It may well be, then, that the theory of meteors was regarded as more ‘basic’ and fundamental than the more abstract parts of philosophy.”
• 671 – “As can be seen from this example, philosophical authors were unable to detach themselves from the tradition and simply to dismiss the authorities in the field in which they wrote. In a scholastic vein, their philosophy did not consist in a systematic and critical re-evaluation of principles, but rather in combining, in a jumbled way, everything that had been said on a subject. . . . But this carelessness about assigning causes may also attest to the fact that these causes were in the end not their main concern. Philosophers at Wittenberg were above all interested in the meaning of the phenomena. Their meteorology was a science of signs, rather than a science of causes and principles.”
• 671-2 – “Even if, in our eyes, the anti-naturalism of the Lutheran philosophers was put forward somewhat half-heartedly, it was quickly picked up. The Reformation clearly was in need of such a legitimation of celestial signs. By the second half of the sixteenth century, most Lutheran ministers and intellectuals must have been rather familiar with meteorological ideas. . . . However, in most cases such explanations were mentioned only so as to refute them. In their view, such wonders could only have been worked directly by God or the devil.”
• 672 – “The new emphasis on direct, divine intervention was a general tendency within Lutheranism. Volker Leppin has suggested that the Lutherans who wrote on celestial signs fall into two groups. As he sees it, philosophically and humanistically inclined authors looked to astrological explanations, and their explanations were largely physical. Following this type of arguments to their logical conclusion would, according to Leppin, lead to the exclusion of God from nature. Other authors had a more radical, biblical stance. Their understanding of the power of God often made them deny natural causation. Leppin describes this situation as a ‘competition between worldviews’ and feels that the different views must stem from two different groups of authors, which, he suggests, may roughly coincide with two different wings within Lutheranism (Philippists and gnesio-Lutherans). Such a division into opposing views seems untenable.”
• 673 – “The tendency to regard signs as messages from God was at the heart of the Lutheran reformation and was also fully endorsed by Lutheran humanists and philosophers. Melanchthon and Peucer, who were the main propagators of the Wittenberg astrological program, both demanded that strange phenomena should be interpreted as direct divine interventions.”

 

• “Luther’s objections against Aristotle’s natural philosophy were not directed at some isolated points, but at the naturalism that lay at the heart of Aristotle’s thought and the tradition it had engendered. Lutherans regarded the world as a theatre where God and the devil were the main actors. God’s presence was felt not just in the purposeful and providential design of the created order, by which He preserved the world and cared for His creatures, but also, or rather especially, in a more direct way. Therefore, the study of natural philosophy at Wittenberg was not just concerned with natural causes, but, probably even more so, with phenomena that were emphatically not natural. The reformation of natural philosophy at Wittenberg therefore came down to bringing a thoroughly naturalistic system into harmony with fundamentally anti-naturalistic principles.”