Mosaic Physics

In a 2000 article in Isis, Ann Blair examines what she describes as “Mosaic physics,” an effort to derive principles of physics from a literal reading of the creation account in Genesis 1.

Most philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to offer a pious natural philosophy, one that coordinated with Christian teaching more smoothly than Aristotle: “Even Rene Descartes, in devising his new philosophy, felt that he was fulfilling a mission assigned him by Cardinal Berulle, one of the leading figures of the French Counter-Reformation. In the renewed quest for a pious natural philosophy in the late Renaissance, many championed other ancient philosophies, like Epicureanism (Pierre Gassendi) or Stoicism (Justus Lipsius) or varieties of neo-Platonism (Marsilio Ficino, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi).”

Trying to use this other ancient philosophies was just as problematic as using Aristotle, and this led some writers to attempt a philosophy and a physics based on Scripture. She argues that the anti-Aristotelian philosophers of the time were all “Mosaic” in some sense, all attempting to argue for a natural philosophy that was compatible with the Bible. Earlier historians of philosophy, including Johann Jakob Brucker, gave a prominent place to these efforts, but they have been forgotten in more recent treatments.

Blair gives her most extensive attention to the work of John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) whose Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light; or, A Synopsis of Physicks went through four Latin editions and was translated into English. Comenius acknowledged a place for reason, sense, and experiment, stating the methodological assumption that “the onely true, genuine and plain way of Philosophie is to fetch all things from sense, reason and Scripture.” Judged by these criteria, “the Peripatetick philosophie is not onely defective in many parts, and many ways intricate, full of turnings and windings, and partly also erroneous, so that it is not onely unprofitable for Christians but also (without correction and perfection) hurtfull.”

But there is a clear hierarchy here. Reason judges and corrects sense experience, and reason has to be corrected by faith, albeit that the correction is “not violent . . . but gentle, so that that very thing which is corrected, acknowledgeth, and admits it of its own accord, and with joy.” Comenius admired Bacon, but was impatient at the slowness of Bacon’s method, which would require generations of experimental scientists. Comenius believed that the Bible could speed up the progress of discovery.

The results were meagre. Some pious philosophers simply discussed biblical topics that were relevant to natural philosophy (animal classification, salt), as a kind of appendage to biblical commentary. In others, biblical exposition became an adjunct to the existing body of natural philosophy, often drawn from pagan sources, even from Aristotle.

By the end of the seventeenth century, pious philosophy had been largely abandoned in favor of two alternative strategies, which Blair labels “separationist” and “natural theology. “For those who advocated a separation of the natural philosophic spheres, the natural philosopher dealt exclusively with philosophy and might be left, in the long run, with little sense of a religious motivation or constraint.” Natural philosophers saw their work as a support for the worship of God, but as independent of revelation. Many eighteenth century scientists were, of course, Christians, but the project of Mosaic physics was largely abandoned.

(Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,” Isis 91 [2000]: 32-58.)