Symbols and Science

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On the Interpretation of Symbols and the Christian Origins of Modern ScienceAuthor(s): Steven Louis GoldmanSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 1-20Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1203379 .

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On the Interpretation of Symbols andThe Christian Origins of Modern ScienceStevenLouis Goldman / LehighUniversity

There is a feature of medieval and Renaissance Christian thoughtthat seems relevant to understanding the still very puzzling fact thatmodern science uniquely developed in the Christian culture ofwestern Europe.' This feature is a marked inclination for ontologicalinterpretations of images, metaphors, symbols, and the theoreticalconstructions of the nature philosophers. By the ontologicalinterpretationof metaphors and symbols, I mean interpreting themliterally as depicting what they stand for, as being icons of a realityexisting external to the mind and beyond the senses. That such aninclination is relevant to the rise of modern science is suggested bythe central role played in modern science by just such iconic inter-pretations of the mathematical modeling of natural phenomena. Thisrole became manifest in the course of the transition, in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Newtonian mechanicsto relativistic and quantum mechanics. Alfred North Whitehead's"fallacy of misplaced concreteness,"2for example, was intended tocall attention to precisely this (to Whitehead, invidious) feature ofmodern science: the tendency of scientists to identify theoreticalconstructions with the external reality that they conceived to be theobject of science. This criticism of Whitehead's brought to a focusmore than half a century of earlier attacks upon science for just this"error"by J. B. Stallo, Ernst Mach, Henri Bergson, and Emile

'This is discussed at length in my "AlexanderKojeve on the Origin of Modern Science:Sociological Modelling Gone Awry," Historyand Philosophy f Science6 (1975): 113-24. Thisarticle was a rebuttal of Kojeve's argument that elementarv conceptual features of modernscience uniquely derived from Christian theology.2A. N. Whitehead, Science nd theModernWorld New York: Macmillan Co., 1967).'01982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/82/6201-0001$01.001


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The Journal of ReligionMeyerson, among many others.3 Concurrently, within the scientificcommunity itself there was developing a sensitivity to the gulfseparating experimental observations and their increasingly esoterictheoretical explanations. This culminated in the really quiteremarkable emergence, in the late 1920s, of the Copenhagen schoolof quantum mechanics. Led by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg,this group of physicists argued that the ultimate object of sciencewas not the external world in and of itself, but our experience ofthat world.What I have to say here does not at all depend on the correctnessof the views of the Copenhagen school. I mention them only as ameans of referencing my claim that iconic interpretations oftheoretical formalisms were widely perceived, in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, to be a central feature of modernscience, and a problematic one at that. In this paper, I wish first tosketch the evidence supporting my claim of a marked iconictendency in medieval and Renaissance Christian thought. Thissketch will draw liberally upon researches by Kristeller, Yates,Gombrich, Walker, Pagel, Michel, Rossi, Crombie, and Cassirer, ineffect showing that this point has already been well established bythem. I will then highlight the distinctive character of this feature ofChristian thought by contrasting it with what appears to me to bean intensely aniconic, deliberately nonpictorial, and consequentlypositivistic attitude toward metaphors and symbols in thecontemporary Judaic thought. This contrast is particularly signifi-cant because it was in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, thetime when the conceptual framework of modern science was laiddown in the body of Christian culture, that the Christian Westbecame familiar with Judaic philosophy, and especially with itsmystical nature philosophical speculations. Finally, I will point tofurther indications (than those referred to above) that this contrastbetween Judaic and Christian attitudes toward the interpretation ofsymbols may provide part of the answer to the question of why

3These criticisms form only one expression of the rise of positivism in the second half of thenineteenth century, to be set alongside the influence of Comte's writings, especially in theemergent social sciences, the formulation of pragmatism by James and Dewey, of logicalpositivism by the Vienna Circle, and of relational theories of space, time, motion, force, andmatter in early twentieth-century physics. Abetted by the conventionalisms promoted byPierre Duhem, Karl Pearson, and Henri Poincare, and Percy Bridgman's operationalistinterpretationof observation and measurement, Carl Becker was able to write in 1932, in avery widely acclaimed work, as if what I have called the aniconic interpretationof scientifictheories were a self-evident, if only recently discovered, fact about science. See TheHeavenlyCity of the EighteenthCenturyPhilosophersNew Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969),esp. pp. 22-27.2


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Symbolsand the Origins of Modern ScienceChristian nature philosophy, alone of the earlier and often moresophisticated nature philosophies of the Greeks, Indians, Chinese,Moslems, and Japanese made the transition to modern science.II1. As Kristeller noted,4 Marsilio Ficino attributed ontological signifi-cance to the relation between a symbol and its original, in a mannerthat paralleled the Platonic and Neoplatonic attribution ofontological significance to the relation between ideal "originals" andtheir "copies" in matter. The reality of the latter derives from theirparticipation in their ideal original form. From this participationthere somehow flows into the rudely organized matter some measureof the potency of the original, immaterial idea. Just so a symbolcould participate in the virtue of the original after which it wasmodeled and the potency of the latter could, similarly, flow into acorrectly modeled symbol. Thus, for Ficino, symbols did not merelyrepresent objects or meanings; symbols embodied the distinctivevirtues of the objects after which they were fashioned. In theNeoplatonic cum Neopythagorean (Hermetic) thought of Ficino, ofCornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, of Paracelsus, of John Dee, ofGiordano Bruno, to mention only the most familiar representativesof this school, the attribution of ontological significance to symbolswas the common basis of talismanic magic.5 The arcana that wereconceived to be at work within objects were conceived to be at workas well within authentic, accurate, and correct symbolic represen-tations of those objects.6 At the same time, objects themselves couldbe recovered from their symbolic representations. That is, from an

4P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. V. Conant (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1943), pp. 96-98.50n Agrippa, C. G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Champaign:University of Illinois Press, 1965). On Paracelsus, Walter Pagel, ParacelsusNew York: S.Karger Verlag, 1958); A. E. Waite, Paracelsus: The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings (New York:University Books, 1967); also, C. G. Jung's two essays on Paracelsus'magic as inner-directedin his Psychologyand Alchemy and Alchemical Studies in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, BollingenSeries, vols. 12 and 13, respectively (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967-68).On Dee, J. W. Hamilton-Jones, trans., TheHieroglyphicMonad(London: John M. Watkins,1947); and Allen G. Debus, John Dee. The Mathematical Praeface (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1978); F. A. Yates, The RosicrucianEnlightenmentLondon: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1972); TheArt of Memory Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); P. H.Michel, The Cosmology f GiordanoBruno,trans. R. E. W. Maddison (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1973). Also see F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1969); and D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino toCampanellaLondon: Warburg Institute, 1958).6E. H. Gombrich, "Icones ymbolicae:he Visual Image in Neoplatonic Thought," Journalofthe Courtauld and WarburgInstitutes 11 (1948): 163-92.3


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The Journal of Religionauthentic symbol one could obtain a more perfect knowledge of theoriginal object than was possessed explicitly by the mind in its initialreflection upon that symbol (or even than was explicitly possessed bythe mind that fashioned the symbol). Symbols, therefore, had twocomplementary aspects to them, one operative and one contem-plative. Operationally, symbols of celestial and of terrestrial objectswere a means of refracting into the domain of the wielder of thesymbols the characteristic powers associated with the originalobjects, or at least some measure of those powers. Contemplatively,symbols were routes to the most perfect knowledge of externalobjects and thus of the nature of reality.We can see both the general teaching concerning symbols and themore specific teaching of the complementary operative-contemplativefacets of symbols worked out in the writings of John Dee. In his TheHieroglyphicMonad, Dee revealed a graphic device that seems to themodern reader to be an arbitrary drawing from which a certainamount of programmed information can be retrieved, as from anymnemonic device. To Dee, however, his symbol disclosed "explicitlyby its inner movement the secret mysteries" of a host of physicalphenomena. Nor was this disclosure a passive recital of known factsabout phenomena. One "who devotes himself to these mysteriessincerely will see clearly that nothing is able to be without thevirtues of our Hieroglyphic Monad." Dee's construction, therefore,was conceived by him to be a symbolic embodiment of centraldynamical features of the physical world. What Dee meant by thisbecomes clear in his enormously popular and influential preface tothe first English-language edition of Euclid's Elements. Dee wroterhapsodically there of the twofold power of mathematics. We may,for utilitarian purposes, use mathematical knowledge to descend intothe innermost (physical) natures of things by means of numbers andalgebraic equations, there to gain practical, manipulative masteryover things. Or we may use that same knowledge of numbers and ofequations to ascend in contemplation to the ultimate source of thebeing of all things, "even to the finding of our own name gloriouslyexemplified and registered in the Book of the Trinity."Both the manipulative "descent" into number and thecontemplative "ascent" are possible because the physical natures ofmaterial things are, for Dee, the expression of certain constant lawsof numbers planted in things by God. This is not merely an echo ofthe ancient Pythagorean attribution of ontological significance tonumber and to geometric form. Dee extended this classicalattribution in a most important way by adding algebra to numberand geometric form as also an authentic expression of the secret4


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Symbols and the Origins of Modern Sciencepower of mathematics vis-a-vis physical phenomena. There areobvious grounds for associating number and geometry with thephysical world, but to interpret the abstract forms of algebraicequations as equally associable with reality is a considerable develop-ment. It reveals the depth of Dee's personal metaphysical commit-ment, but it is very likely that just such an interpretation played animportant role in the widespread acceptance of the new symbolicnotation for algebra, of analytic geometry, and of the calculus in theseventeenth century. The manifestly Pythagorean cast of themathematical work of Kepler and Galileo; the Pythagorean characterof Descartes's and Leibniz's search for a "universal characteristic" inwhich to calculate the outcomes of all physical processes; andNewton's identification of his mechanical and gravitational equationswith the forms of universal physical process, all testify to this.72. From John Dee's ontological interpretation of mathematicalforms, we can look backward to Robert Grosseteste and RogerBacon and forward to Johannes Kepler. Grosseteste and Bacon laiddown a program for a universal mathematical physics that was aconsequence of an ontological interpretation of light as a symbol ofthe Deity and his action. An analogous interpretation ofmathematical form explicitly underlies Kepler's astronomical work.It is obvious that the elaboration of a universal mathematicalphysics was central to the emergence of modern science.Grosseteste's claim, in the thirteenth century, that all physical actionhad a precise mathematical description, analogous to the mathe-matical description of the behavior of light rays, is thus an importantmoment in the history of science. It is at least arguable thatGrosseteste, and his disciple, Roger Bacon, were responsible for theappearance of productive schools of mathematical physics at theuniversities of Oxford and Paris in the thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries.8 The contributions of these schools to the

7This adoption of an ontological interpretationof algebra has an intimate affinity with thedoctrine of symbolism referred to above, the algebraic equation holding in its form preciselythe analogue of what magical symbols were supposed to hold. It, like them, was a finiteembodiment of an infinity. It can be argued that the transition from a Dantean cosmos to aNewtonian universe, the former displaying its principle of order overtly, the latter covertly, isfigured in just this attribution of ontological power to algebraic equations that we finddefended in Dee.8A. C. Crombie, RobertGrossetestend the Originsof ModernExperimentalcience Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1962), esp. chaps. 5 and 6; TheOpusMaiusof RogerBacon,trans. Robert B.Burke (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), esp. p. 4. See also Curtis Wilson, WilliamHeytesburg:MedievalLogicand theRise of Mathematicalhysics Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1956).

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TheJournal of Religionmathematical analysis of physical phenomena are now welldocumented. Grosseteste's arguments, against Aristotle, for theessentiality of mathematics for an understanding of physics wererooted in an ontological "turn" that Grosseteste gave to Neoplatoniclight metaphysics and biblical light symbolism. In part, he wasinfluenced in this by Solomon ibn Gabirol's Fountain of Life.9 Forobvious biblical reasons, and consonant with ibn Gabirol's analysisof light as a first corporeal form universally underlying all physicalphenomena, Grosseteste made the transmission of light paradigmaticof all physical causation. As light had a precise mathematicaldescription, so must all physical action. The conviction that lighthad a precise mathematical description, only partially supportedempirically by the achievements of classical optics with regard toreflection from plane and curved mirrors, motivated the latemedieval search for the mathematically precise form of the refractionof light rays when passing from one medium to another, as well asthe search for a mathematical theory of the rainbow, the achieve-ment of which would be gratifying on biblical, metaphysical, andphysical grounds.

Meanwhile, Roger Bacon took his mentor's ontological "turn"onestep further when he claimed that there was no essential differencebetween the elements of mathematical description of physicalphenomena as mathematical elements or in the physicalphenomena.10 That is, a straight line in a geometrical proof and thestraight line of a transmitted light ray were equally, identically,straight lines. On the one hand, this claim explicitly achieved thatidentification of physical and mathematical space that AlexanderKoyre has argued was so fundamental to the emergence of modernscience,11 but more than 300 years prior to Galileo and Descartes.On the other hand, Bacon himself used this claim as the basis for afurther, equally radical claim: his rejection of the classical distinctionbetween celestial and terrestrial physics. Bacon argued that thepassage of light rays between these two regions, the supra- and theinfralunar, was continuous; the transmission of light rays was, asGrosseteste had taught, paradigmatic of all physical causation; the

9Solomon ibn Gabirol, Mekor Hayyim. Apart from Latin editions of the Fons Vitae ofAvicebron (see n. 37 below) and an abridged English version, there is a complete Frenchtranslation extant by Jacques Schlanger, Livre de la Sourcede Vie (Paris: A. Montaigne, 1970),with notes and introduction. An extensive summary of ibn Gabirol's philosophy is available inHebrew in J. Klausner, MiPlaton ad Spinosa (Jerusalem: Hozaat "Mada," 1955).'?Opus Maius of Roger Bacon, trans. Burke, close of chap. 3."Alexander Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York: Harper & Row,1958).6


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Symbols and the Origins of Modern Sciencemathematical straight lines of propagation of the light rays were alsophysical straight lines-that is, as straight lines there was nodifference between geometrical and physical optics; therefore, theremust be physical, no less than formal mathematical, continuitybetween the light-emitting heavens and the light-receiving earth.12Kepler's life ambition was to demonstrate that the physical orderof the sun and planets was a realization of the abstract perfection ofthe five regular solids of classical Greek geometry. For Kepler, as forso many early modern mathematicians, God was a geometer and itwas geometric form that revealed his hand as the master of nature.13Pythagoras had persuaded Western intellectuals for two millenniathat the sphere was the most perfect solid form, and Greekgeometers had proven that there could be only five solid bodies eachof whose faces were congruent with every other face (the cube, thetetrahedron, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and theicosahedron). Using these as his elementary "materials" Keplersought to recreate the solar system, conceptually, in the processrevealing why there were just six and only six planets: because thefive regular solids could define only six intervals for the sphericalplanets to orbit on great circles about the central sun. Eventually,Kepler had to give up this quest, when Tycho Brahe's observationsof Mars convinced Kepler that its orbit was not circular, but Keplerpersisted in his pursuit of a Pythagorean perfection in the heavens, amathematical harmony of the worlds. This was of greater import tohim than the three laws of planetary motion for which we hold himin such high regard. Furthermore, it was Kepler who first made thesun into the dynamical center of the planetary system, activelyholding the planets in their positions and causing them to orbitabout it as they do, and he did so for aesthetic, metaphysical, andreligious reasons. Prominent among these were his interpretation ofthe Platonic symbolization of the godhead by the sun. The sun, forKepler, does not passively symbolize God the Father, it activelydirects its "household" as a father would do. (This same notionplayed an important role in Copernicus's thought as well.)14

'20pus Maius of RogerBacon,trans. Burke, chap. 9.'3The storyof Kepler's research is well told in Arthur Koestler, The WatershedNew York:Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1963). This dramatic rendering needs to be supplementedby more thoughtful and informed studies, for example, chapter 1 of Gerald Holton's ThematicOrigins of ModernScience(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); or MaxCaspar, Kepler,ed. and trans. C. Doris Hellman (London: Abelard-Schuman, Ltd., 1959).'4N. Copernicus, On theRevolutionsf theHeavenly pheres,Great Books of the Western WorldSeries, vol. 16 (Chicago: W. Benton, 1952).7


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The Journal of Religion3. Francis Yates has shown that the sixteenth century saw arevival of the classical memory arts and in particular of ontological

interpretations of the memory arts.l5 In Giulio Camillo's TheatreofIdeas and in Bruno's Seals we see attempts at symbolic representa-tions of the whole domain of being. These were not mnemonicdevices in a closed and static sense, but totalitarian images ofreality, reflection upon which could provide new information notpreviously known explicitly. This notion, and especially theconcentric circular design of Bruno's sketches of such devices, recallsthe circular slide rules of reality designed by Ramon Lull in thethirteenth century.16 These had as their scales the elementaryconstituents of the sphere of being, from the juxtaposition of variouscombinations of which one could calculate the natures of particularexistents. Lest Lull's or Bruno's schemes seem hopelessly bizarre, itseems only fair (if perhaps also generous) to recall that quantumchemistry today seeks to calculate the physical properties of combi-nations of atoms from the mathematical formalism describing theinteraction of their (more or less) elementary constituents prior toactually combining the atoms physically. Also, it is a commonplaceof the history of science that the logical consequences of importanttheoretical models, when studied in detail, often lead to altogetherunanticipated empirical discoveries.4. Yates and Walker have shown that the sixteenth century alsosaw a revival of ontological interpretations of poetry and music,conceived as capable of embodying the harmonies, patterns, andproportions of the arcana working within things. 1 In this way thingscould be manipulated by properly composed music and poetry.Effects of a quite particular sort could be achieved, effects like thoseachieved at'will, according to tradition, by Orpheus and Amphionwhen they moved not only the passions of men and beasts as itpleased them, but moved stones and wood as well, even buildingcities by playing on their musical instruments. Thus fundamentalharmonies, from antiquity claimed to lie at the core of all physicalexistence, now became the objects of concrete investigations, in

15Yates,The Art of Memory; lso Walker, Spiritualand DemonicMagic on Camillo's Theatre.'6F. A. Yates, "The Art of Roman Lull,"Journalof the Courtauldnd Warburgnstitutes17(1954): 115-73.17F. A. Yates, The FrenchAcademies f the SixteenthCenturyLondon: Warburg Institute,1947); and D. P. Walker, "Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries,"MusicReview,vols. 2-3 (1941-42). (On Giorgi, see Yates, FrenchAcademies, . 43, n. 2.) See also theInstitutions armoniquesf Solomon de Caus (Frankfort, 1615), reprint ed. (New York: BroudeBros., Ltd., 1969), especially the frontispiece, introduction, and first chapter, for a detailedPythagorean interpretation of music.

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The Journal of Religionintellectual history, being the foundation stone of rationalism. ForDescartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz-that is, for the most eminentmodern rationalists-the order and connection of ideas is the sameas the order and connection of things.22 The conviction that logicallynecessary truths were eo ipso privileged candidates for absolutetruths underlies not only Descartes's metaphysics but also hisscientific method: inventing hypotheses whose logical consequencesfit the experimental facts. It was precisely the centrality of thisassociation of logic with the structure of reality, a corollary of whichis that physical causality becomes an analogue of the "innermovement" of the syllogism from premises to conclusion, that madethe elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries and statisticalmechanics such dramatic developments for Western culture. Both ofthese, by attacking the connection between logic and ontology,contributed to the undermining of rationalism.237. The Christian careers of the metaphors that nature was a bookwhose author was God,24 and that nature was a machine,25 arefurther instances of ontological "turns" given to symbolic devices inthe later Middle Ages and Renaissance. The literal interpretation ofthe former played an especially important role in legitimating the

22Cf.Ernst Cassirer, ThePhilosophy f Symbolic orms New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 1961), vol. 1, introduction.23This attribution was well criticized by al-Ghazali in his Tahafutal Falasifa (see n. 53below), by William of Ockham (and later by Nicholas of Autrecourt, following William), byHasdai Crescas in his Lightof the Lord(see n. 39 below), and by David Hume. It was notdecisively challenged, however, until the advent of non-Euclidean geometries in the mid-nineteenth century and the subsequent development of alternative, and exclusive,formulations of theoretical representations of the same domain of phenomena in physics. Abeautiful illustration of this is provided in Heinrich Hertz, Principles f Mechanics, eprint ed.(New York: Dover Publications, 1956), especially the introduction. Acknowledgment withinscience of the validityof this challenge finds expression, for example, in Max Bohr, AtomicPhysicsandHumanKnowledgeNew York:John Wiley & Sons, 1958); Werner Heisenberg, ThePhysicist'sConceptionf Nature, rans. A. J. Pomerans (London: Hutchinson Publishing Groups,1958), and Physicsand Philosophy New York: Harper & Row, 1962); and Karl F. vonWeizsacker, The History of Nature, trans. Fred D. Wieck (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1949).24Acommonplace of Muslim nature philosophy from the ninth or tenth century on. See S.H. Nasr, An Introductiono Muslim CosmologicalDoctrines(Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1964). See also Bernard Sylvester of Tours, Cosmographia,or a very earlyChristian occurrence. The recent edition of the Cosmographiadited by Peter Dronke (Leiden:E. J. Brill, 1978) contains an excellent discussion and analysis by Dronke of Bernard.25The very striking phenomenon of the immediate acceptance and explosive spread ofmechanical clocks, with their spaptial representationof time's passage, is surely related to theontological interpretationof the machine metaphor in modern science. It seems possible, too,that this attitude toward the machine encouraged the kind of partial modeling of physicallyunreal systems that Galileo and other pioneers of modern science did, but which the Chinesenever did in the same way (that is, within the same metaphysical framework).10


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Symbols and the Origins of Modern Sciencestudy of nature and in promoting the search for a universal charac-teristic, that is, for the language in which the book was written.26

8. It is probably at this point, of describing nature as a bookwritten by God, that Judaic nature philosophy found its way intothe Christian world. Medieval Judaic mysticism is distinguished byits focus on cosmogonic speculations, by its concern to elaborate thearchitectonic of creation.27 The early medieval Book of Formation,28for example, claimed that the world was fashioned out of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten sefirot, perhapsmeaning by sefirot ust the numbers one through ten, by the way ofpermutations rung on them guided by the letters of thetetragrammaton name of God. The Zoharic books develop theclosely analogous theme that the Pentateuch (Torah) is eo ipso thelogos of the world, but that only a few know how to read the textcorrectly. These themes seem to converge in Lodovico Lazzarelli'sCrater Hermetis.29 Lazzarelli writes that it is possible to give aquasisolid form to the utterances of Hebrew letters, creating thereby"Atlantiad gods of the earth that would be our servants and do ourbidding." This theory appears to derive from a literal interpretationof certain cabbalistic themes and the alphabetical meditationexercises of Abraham Aboulafia, both of which were consideredabstractions in Judaic circles, and from certain passages in Ficino onthe near-corporeality of musical sounds that we hear and feel.309. Judaic influence may also be present in the Renaissance revivalof the image of man as a microcosm, an image elaborated in greatdetail in a tenth-century cabbalistic work.31 From the time of Cusa

26Theobvious illustration of this is Galileo's description of nature as a book, etc. But SaintBonaventure's The Mind's Road to God (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970) is a moredramatic instance, not so much for being 400 years earlier, but for the startling turnaboutfrom the Pauline attitude toward nature so prevalent until the twelfth century.27G. Scholem, Major Trends nJewish Mysticism New York: Schocken Books, 1961).28SeferYetsira,Mishna 1 et seq. Ithamar Grunewald has published a critical edition andtranslation of the relevant portion of the SeferYetsira, SomeCritical Notes on the First Part ofthe SeferYetsira," evuedesetudesjuifs132, no. 4 (1973): 475-512. His paper "KnowledgeandVision: Towards a Clarification of Two 'Gnostic' Concepts in the Light of Their AllegedOrigins," IsraelOriental tudies3 (1973): 63-107, incidentally supports my thesis in this paper,where he notes the un-Jewish character of the gnostic ontological interpretationsof conceptsapparently borrowed from Jewish circles and, conversely, the nonontological interpretationsamong Jews of gnostic terms.29Walker,"Musical Humanism in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries."30Scholem,Major Trends;also, his On theKabbalah ndIts.SymbolismNew York: SchockenBooks, 1969). This is now embedded in a revised Hebrew edition, Pirkei YesodBehavanathHaKabbalahVe-SamlehaJerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1976).31SabbetaiDonolo, SeferHakhmuni, commentary on the SeferYetsirahnd commonly boundtogether with it.11


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TheJournal of Religionon, this image regularly received a far more radical ontologicalinterpretation in Christian, than in any Judaic, circles. Man was notmerely the measure of all things; formally man was all things to theRenaissance magi.32 Total self-knowledge was thus total knowledgeof all that was, or could be, real. Man stood at the logical andontological center of the domain of being, whose unity was possibleonly through man. Indeed, this had to be so because, if the Ficinianteaching concerning symbols was the ground of talismanic magic, ofoperation with the contemplation of the real, of memory systems andmathematics, of cosmic and instrumental music, and of poetry, thisteaching was itself grounded on the ubiquitous Renaissancedoctrine, as fundamental to astrology as to poetry, that the imagina-tion latently contained the forms of all things. The whole Ficinianteaching concerning symbols depended upon the possession by themind of authentic symbols, and it was through the imagination, notthrough the senses or through discursive reason, that man came topossess such symbols. The imagination was superior to discursivereason for the Renaissance magus, because discursive reason hadlimits well short of the real. The imagination, by contrast, couldpropel the mind past reason to an intuitive, supradiscursiveperception of the real.IIIIn Judaic philosophy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, theimagination was systematically subordinated to discursive reason.Bahya ibn Pekuda ranks reasoning with the aid of images andparables below reasoning without such aids.33 Maimonides arguesthat the imagination is inferior to reason, noting as suggestivesupport for this that the prophets do not attribute imagination toGod while they do attribute reason to God, and that the prophetsnever attribute even figuratively that which by its nature is inferiorto God.34 Thus they attribute seeing, hearing, and smelling to God,but not touch; and they attribute reason to God but notimagination.35 Maimonides' predecessor as an Aristotelian Spanish-

32Cusa'snotion of the Maximal Man is perhaps the best illustration of this in all ofChristian thought. See, for example, J. P. Dolan, ed., Unityand Reform Notre Dame, Ind.:University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), and compare with the notion of the PerfectImam/Imam of the Anthropos in Nasr, Introductiono Muslim Cosmologicaloctrines.33HovotHa-LevavotDuties of the heart], shaar hayichud 1-3.34Moses Maimonides, Guide or the Perplexed,rans. M. Friedlander (New York: DoverPublications, 1956), vol. 1, chap. 47.35Ibid.Virtually all of part 1, from the introductoryremarks on similes through chap. 70,constitutes a systematic aniconic interpretation of Scripture.12


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The Journal of ReligionMidrashic literature than mashal, which means "parable," "analogy,"or "metaphor." It is exceedingly common in the Midrashic literatureto find the meaning of a passage of Scripture approached by way ofa mashal, and this technique was adopted by the medieval mystics aswell for approaching the meaning-structure of reality. Themethodology for interpreting such parables/analogies/metaphors isgiven explicitly in the pseudo-Nachmanidean treatise On Faith andBelief, probably written in the thirteenth century by a student of theNachmanidean circle of rational mystics.40The author quotes a Talmudic parable which purports to explaina subtlety of the prayer ritual by way of a mashal about a princessand the hunger pang she experiences when, passing the servants'quarters, she inhales the aroma of a pot-au-feu cooking there.Typically, the author does not decipher the parable for the reader,but tells the reader how to go about understanding such an"explanation," which bears no obvious resemblance to the problemthat evoked it. The reader must first try to perceive what relation-ships are comparable in the problem and in the parable so that aparable of this sort, involving these elements, was chosen toilluminate this problem. Second, the reader must disengage theseparate elements from the parable and from the problem and then,setting the two sets of elements parallel to one another, see how therelationships between the elements of the parable suggest a way ofcorrelating the elements of the problem so that a solution to theproblem is perceived. The elements of the parable have nothing totell us about the elements of the problem. It is only the "innermovement," as Dee might say, of the parable that transforms into aninner movement among the elements of the problem, and this latter,finally, points the way to a solution.Another thirteenth-century work, the Gatesof Light by the Spanishcabbalist Joseph Gikatilia, was of immense influence in both Jewishand Christian circles, having been translated into Latin in thesixteenth century and known earlier (at least to Pico, Reuchlin, andAgrippa).41 The author prefaces his analysis of the meanings of thevarious scriptural names for God with a very carefully wordedcaution to his reader. It is necessary to "know and to understandthat between [God] and [Man] there can be no comparison from theperspective to substance or pictorial form; rather the forms of our

40SeferHa-EmunahVe-Habitachon,n Rabbi C. D. Chavel, ed., KitveiR. Moshe benNachman(Jerusalem: Hozaat Mosad HaRav Kook, 1963), vol. 2, chap. 3.41J.L. Blau, The Christiannterpretationf theCabala n theRenaissanceNew York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1944).14


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Symbols and the Origins of Modern Sciencelimbs are made in similitude to signs of hidden higher things thatthe intellect can only comprehend by way of mnemonic compari-sons."42The vivid pictorial language he will be using must abso-lutely not be understood literally, he warns, but only as so manyvehicles for conveying to the mind certain functional, and notstructural, features of the divine nature. Thus there is absolutely noiconic resemblance intended when Scripture refers to God's hand,feet, eyes, ears, or arm. These locutions refer to certain esotericfunctional characteristics of the corresponding human organs thatbear some sort of resemblance to certain functional characteristicsofthe Deity's being, without there being any structural resemblancebetween what subserves that function in man and in God. Just so,neither the form of the individual letters nor the form of the name"Jacob"bear any iconic resemblance to our friend Jacob, althoughthe word is capable of crystallizing certain aspects of the person inour mind. The names of God can perform an analogous function,but are far more profound as names when properly understood.Although the preface is relatively short, it is insistent in cautioningagainst interpretingthe images and metaphors in the text iconically.This caution is echoed in Gikatilia's sixteenth-century editor andcommentator Matityahu Delacorte. Delacorte warns the reader notto take to heart either pictorially or substantively the images,metaphors, and symbols that Gikatilia uses. As did the author of theZoharbefore him, Gikatilia did not hesitate to use imagery that issuperficially impossible, calling facets of the Deity's behavior "fatherand mother,""son and daughter," "poorand rich,"the reason beingto "breakthe ear" of the reader. (The seventeenth-centurycabbalistand ethician Moses Hayyim Luzzato wrote that a blatant falsehoodfools nobody and therefore such locutions can be used effectively asteaching vehicles.) That is, such locutions cause the reader tostumble over them, in the process forcing the mind to grapple withthem at a nonsuperficial and nonpictorial level.In a precisely comparable context Hayyim Vital, author of theclassic text of Lurianic cabbalism of the late sixteenth century, alsowarned that the imagery he used was not to be taken pictorially.43He noted that his master, Rabbi Isaac Luria, prefaced all hisdiscourses with a remark that his language was to be understood inthe manner of a parable.44Luria based his own use of such imagery

42ShaareiOrah,shaar aleph, pp. 1-5.43EtzHayyim,Hozaat Mekor Hayyim (erusalem, 1963).4Ibid., shaar hahakdamoth (Vital's prefaces).15


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The Journal of Religionon their use in the Zoharic corpus, where in almost every work thereare parallel disclaimers that there is anything in the "higher" worldthat bears any resemblance structurally or formally to the imagesused in the texts. Even the Hebrew alphabet, the most abstract andleast "objectionable" of the cabbalistic symbols, has no image in theworld "above," Vital explicitly cautioned. And this caution wascarried down through the centuries, by Moses Hayyim Luzzato inthe seventeenth; by Elijah Gaon of Vilna in the eighteenth; and byRabbi Hayyim, dean of the great seminary in Volozhin, in thenineteenth, in their respective commentaries on the Zoharic booksand on Vital's Tree of Life.The locution "breaking the ear" of the reader, so popular injustifying the use of superficially impossible images describingcosmogonic processes, seems to go back to a tenth-century work bythe physician and mystic Sabbetai Donolo.45 This work elaboratesthe senses in which man both is created in the image of God and isan image of the creation. While the latter can be elaborated in termsof forms and structures of the human body, and is so elaborated byDonolo, the former cannot be, because there can be no formful orstructural resemblance between God and man. Instead, he says, thelanguage of imagery is definitively nonpictorial and intended tobreak the ear of the reader, forcing him to a more abstract level ofanalysis.This is echoed in several places in Maimonides' Guide to thePerplexed, which takes great care to emphasize the nonpictorialcharacter of all scriptural allusions of God, to his being, and to hisrelation to nature and to man, that seem to have structuralanalogues in the realm of human experience.46 It is for this thatMaimonides held that a student of Scripture who was ignorant ofthe natural sciences could not penetrate to the meaning of Scripture,because he could not recognize when a passage demanded anonliteral, abstract interpretation.47IVIt was singularly appropriate, therefore, in light of the precedingremarks, that Francis Bacon should have launched his strongestepistemological criticisms at the Renaissance doctrine of the

45Donolo, SeferHakhmuni.46Forexample, chap. 1, on the meaning of the word "toar"precisely matches Donolo'slanguage, Maimonides, GuideforthePerplexed.47Ibid., introduction.16


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Symbolsand the Origins of Modern Scienceimagination.48 But Bacon's role as "father" of modern science is toosubtle and too freighted with qualification for us to infer that theRenaissance view of the imagination, or of interpreting symbolsontologically, faded away with the memory of Bruno and Fludd andthe Cambridge Plationists simply because Bacon wished it so.Galileo's insistence on physically interpreting what could have beenproposed as mathematical models merely; Newton's demand for truecauses (vera causae) and his consequent rejection of Descartes's"feigned" hypotheses; the short shrift given Huyghens's and Leibniz'srelational views of space and time by contemporary proponents ofabsolute views; the indifference throughout the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries to Berkeley's telling critique of matter andHume's critique of causality; the failure of what Dijksterhuis called"mechanicism" to win coequality with mechanism until the latenineteenth century; the scientistic insistence that materialism,determinism, and mechanism were truths rather than metaphysicalspeculations; the insistence of Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, and deBroglie that science aimed to hold a mirror up to reality, not merelyto organize experience effectively: all of these attest to thecontinuance in modern science of precisely the same ontological"turn" given to theoretical and symbolic constructs in Renaissancethought. Even the Renaissance doctrine of the imagination, thatthrough an indwelling genius there can crystallize in the humanimagination forms that were not derived from empirical experiencebut which are nevertheless authentic images of reality, had itssupporters in modern science, for example, in William Whewell, inClaude Bernard, and in Albert Einstein.49It seems clear enough, then, that in some important sense it isnecessary for progress in science that scientists take their theoreticalconstructs seriously as regards their correspondence with reality.While the radically Pythagorean attitude of an Eddington seemsunlikely to win a sympathetic audience among modern scientists,nor even the weaker Pythagoreanism of a Whitehead, it seemsequally unlikely that more than lip service will ever be paid toauthentically positivistic arguments either. Perhaps the same sort of

48P. Rossi, FrancisBacon, trans. S. Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1968).49E.J. Dijksterhuis, in TheMechanizationf the WorldPicture, rans. C. Dikschoorm (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1961), discusses at length the distinction between the mechanist-iconic andmechanicist-aniconic interpretations of seventeenth-century science. Einstein's attempts tohold onto an iconic interpretation of science in the face of the new (post-1925) quantummechanics came to an end with his essay "Physicsand Reality,"Journalof theFranklin nstitute221 (March 1936): 349-82.17


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Symbols and the Origins of Modern ScienceThere seems to be a very strong force in traditional Judaic cultureworking against the conviction that symbolic devices hold up a

mirror to reality. In Judaic thought, such devices are at best "basecamps" for assaults on reality, intrinsically of little value andpotentially dangerously misleading, while Christian thought hastaken them so seriously that it has allowed its perception andconception of what is real to be shaped by the elements of theirsymbolic constructions. It is really impossible to conceive of thathappening in traditional Judaic cultures. For much the samereasons, it is also impossible to conceive of that happening in Islamicculture either. Indeed, the hostility toward icons is far greater inIslam than it is in .udaism. Furthermore, a crisis was reached inmedieval Islamic nature philosophy in the early twelfth century thatbears upon the significance for the development of modern science oficonic versus aniconic attitudes toward symbols.After almost 200 years of enormously fruitful development alongrationalistic and naturalistic lines, Islamic science came almost to ahalt in the twelfth century and continued moribund thereafter.There are doubtless many reasons for this, but one event seemssalient. Shortly before the close of the eleventh century, the greatintellectual ability of the Persian Moslem philosopher al-Ghazali wasturned definitively away from, and turned against, rationalism andnaturalism. Al-Ghazali had become convinced that contemporarynature philosophical speculation was being taken iconically by itsproponents, in particular the Aristotelean disiples of al-Farabi andibn Sina, the Neoplatonic Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan as-Safa) and therationalist theologians of the Mutazilah.53 The upshot of the iconicinterpretation of the philosopher's modeling of the world had, for al-Ghazali, to be blasphemy or apostasy. If one looked to one's modelsof reality as the sources from which phenomena could be deduced,then there was no room in reality for God's will. Al-Ghazali'spowerful and influential Refutation of Philosophyis, at least in spirit,the original attack upon the ontological interpretation of causality ofwhich the later attacks of William of Ockham, Nicholas ofAutrecourt, and David Hume are echoes. Is it a coincidence that thedramatic decline of Islamic science followed swiftly upon thisconfrontation, admittedly within the mind of one great andprominent man? A generation after al-Ghazali's death his refutation

53Detailed access to al-Ghazali's Tahafuts best found in S. Van den Bergh's edition of ibnRushd's attempt at rebutting it, Averroes' ahafutal-Tahafut,2 vols. (London: Luzac, 1954).Majid Falchry's Islamic OccasionalismLondon: Allen & Unwin, 1958) and S. H. Nasr'sIntroductiono Muslim Cosmologicaloctrines trongly bolster my argument here.19


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The Journal of Religionof rationalism and science still so strongly gripped Islamicintellectual life that ibn Rushd subjected it to a massive andwithering critical analysis, in his Refutation of the Refutation. To noavail. Where Bernard of Clairvaux, almost concurrently, triumphedover Peter Abelard's intellectualism in the church councils only tolose out in the halls of the new universities, ibn Rushd triumphedintellectually but lost the cultural battle.In Chinese culture a very different motif militated againstontological interpretations of scientific constructs. This was theTaoist influence over Chinese intellectual life, an influence that wasmaintained even during the dominance of establishmentConfucianism. The holistic teachings of Taoism belie takingseriously, that is to say, taking iconically, partial, idealized, abstractmodels of the external world. Such models cannot offer directinsights into reality because they are partial, idealized, and abstract.This does not allow seeing in the constructs of Galilean-Newtonianscience true explanations of the reality behind phenomenal appear-ances, for its equations described, not real bodies moving in realspace and time, but idealized bodies moving in an idealized spaceand time.Were there comparable cultural pressures against ontologicalinterpretations of nature philosophical constructs at work in Greek,Indian, and Japanese culture? If we could find them, that wouldstrongly reinforce the notion that the prevalence of such interpreta-tions in medieval and Renaissance Christian culture played somerole in the progress from medieval and Renaissance naturephilosophies, hardly startling and very largely derivative, to modernscience, decidedly startling and enormously original.

Symbols and Science

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