Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Epistemic Infrastructure1
Rising From the Renaissance
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Rising From the RenaissanceScholasticism dominated the learned tradition of the late middle ages. Founded on the writings of Aristotle and elaborated through the patristic writings of the western Christian church, scholasticism ensured that philosophy and religion remained united the reinforcement of Christian beliefs. Scholasticism began to erode in the 13th century through the work of Thomas Aquinas, who adopted the view of Arabian scholar Ibn Roschd (Averroes) that Aristotle’s philosophy required the separation of religion and philosophy into two different spheres of mental endeavor. Aquinas successfully argued that the reason must prevail in the exposition of faith, thereby establishing intellect as a legitimate and dominant force in theology. Aquinas’ brilliance was in making intellectual inquiry a form of piety, thereby putting the power of the Church behind life of the mind. This reopened a tradition of intellectual innovation among religious leaders not seen since Ambrose and Augustine in the 4th century, and over the following three centuries produced such innovators as William of Ockham, John Wycliffe, and John Calvin. Between the 13th and 16th centuries Europe saw dramatic changes. The windmill had enabled the first widespread application of mechanical power to tasks such as milling and sawing, and had enabled land reclamation through water pumping. Advances in seafaring by the Portuguese had opened an age of exploration that led to the discovery of the New World at the end of the 15th century. Printing (1436) had extended the reach of knowledge far beyond the bounds of hand-written documents, and had played an instrumental role in the success of the Reformation in the early 16th century. The Roman Catholic Church had recognized the benefit Protestantism had derived from the requirement that its clergy be literate, and at the Council of Trent in 1545, established literacy requirements for its own clergy. The revolution sparked by the Christian capture of the library at Toledo had brought tremendous change. The Christian church had become the Western world’s most powerful advocate of literacy.10 By the early 17th century, Europe was on the threshold of what would become the modern era. The key intellectual breakthrough came in the early 17th century in the recognition that knowledge was a joint product of pure reason and empirical engagement with the world, and that whatever the nature of the product thus created, faith must be reconciled to it rather than the other way around. The breakthrough in pure reason was Rene Descartes’ Meditations Concerning First Philosophy, which was addressed to the faculty of theology at the University of Paris.11 Descartes dwelt at length on Aquinas’ arguments regarding the need to exercise reason in theology, but went further to argue that use of reason in addressing all problems of knowledge was a kind of worship that must not be suppressed in the ill-considered defense of the faith. In the realm of ideas, Decartes’ major contribution was a refutation of the effort to build general epistemic understanding from prima facie intuitions about particular items of knowledge. He argued that prima facie intuitions are unstable and unreliable, and recommended instead the use of method to develop settled and reflective intuitions that would allow construction of credible claims about particular knowledge. The resulting Cartesian revolution vaunted reason as the means to resolve ambiguities that arise when empirical facts do not match a priori assumptions. Descartes’ work is remarkable in that it survived the scrutiny of the ecclesiastical authorities even as the Church was reeling from the revolution begun by Martin Luther at the turn of the 16th century. Paris in the mid-17th century was in the grips of the counter-reformation led by Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul. Descartes was well aware of the gravity of his endeavor: his Meditations was actually a letter to the Church hierarchy presenting a meticulous apology for the importance of preserving reason above all in the work of the pious scholar. His success in this opened the door for the triumph of the rational in the Roman Catholic realm following the Reformation, and in so doing, established a common scholarly bond with the Reformed realm. The breakthrough in empiricism was Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration or Renewal of the Sciences.12 Like Descartes’ Meditations, Bacon’s work was addressed to church leaders who might regard it as a threat to the faith. Although Bacon worked from an England already swept by the Reformation, and was thus less at immediate risk of the charge of heresy than Descartes was, Bacon’s introduction to the Instauration nonetheless reads very much like Descartes’ introduction to his Meditations. Bacon takes great care to show that the scholarship and science he advocates are in the service of God and not a threat to faith. Moreover, he explicitly links his philosophy to Aristotle’s logic, naming the second part of his Instauration the New Organon, after Aristotle’s Organon. Unlike Descartes, Bacon argued that fundamental questions about the nature of the world could not be explained through rationality alone. Instead, ambiguity in understanding of the material world could only be resolved through systematic empirical investigation, and through the application of what would in time be called inductive reasoning. While Bacon’s philosophy never achieved the status of Descartes in the realm of the mind, his work had a profound practical influence on the conduct of scholarly inquiry. This is especially true in what we now call the natural sciences, where Bacon was arguably the most powerful advocate for getting out and looking at things rather than merely ruminating about them. The essential contribution of both Descartes and Bacon was the recognition that knowledge could only be achieved by the application of method, a systematic protocol abstracted from the effort to understand any given thing, but applicable to the effort to understand many things. The methodologies of reason and empiricism are complementary and are often used iteratively on the path to knowledge. The separation of faith and knowledge and the establishment of systematic method as the primary means of learning moved the center of European scholarship away from its focus on the nature of God and Man’s relationship to God, and toward the nature of Man and Man’s relationship with Nature. The Middle Ages saw the development of a veritable industry of salvaging, copying, and translating texts inherited from centers of Islamic learning. The monasteries of Christian Europe, awakening from centuries of intellectual impoverishment, were at the heart of this industry.13 Were it not for the "molding of Christian monasticism around the preservation and veneration of the written word," most ancient texts -- both religious and secular -- would have vanished from human knowledge.14 This was the beginning of the modern LAM, and it played a critical role in the evolution of these traditions from the early 17th century onward as the fundamental institutional mechanism of knowledge creation and sharing. The emergent LAM provided a distributed and consistent mechanism for scholars to exchange ideas and evidence, contributing directly to the Enlightenment. In time, the LAM were transformed from cloistered collections to public goods that played vital service for science, education, and entertainment. However, this transformation was neither easy nor inevitable. 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