The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [156]
The Scientific Revolution was revolting against the Catholic Church and its reliance on holy scripture (in Latin no less) as interpreted by authorities in a rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy. This is, in part, why the Catholic Church reacted so violently to the Protestant Reformation—Martin Luther said it was acceptable for everyone to read the Bible in the vernacular, that anyone can have a relationship with God directly without a priestly intermediary, and that such rigid hierarchies were unnecessary. This set the stage for later cultural and political battles between conservatives and liberals that have carried forward to this day.
How did the book of authority maintain its grip on the human imagination? An example can be found in the first-century CE Roman writer Dioscorides’ work, De Materia Medica, the foremost classical source of botanical terminology and the leading pharmacological text for the next 1,600 years. De Materia Medica presented thorough descriptions of more than six hundred plants that the author collected while traveling with the armies of Emperor Nero and became the foundation of late medieval herbals when it was translated into seven languages and distributed throughout Europe. After Dioscorides’ death, however, his disciples studied Dioscorides instead of nature. In time, copyists copying copies created a whole new nature that had little correspondence to reality. Leaves were drawn on branches for symmetry. Enlarged roots and stem systems were added to fill in oversized folio pages. Publishers used stock blocks of wood carved individually for roots, trunks, branches, and leaves, and combined them into composite illustrations of trees that existed nowhere in the world. Copyists’ fancy and imagination became the norm. The “barnacle-tree,” for example, was believed to actually grow barnacles; the “tree-of-life” was enveloped by a serpent with a woman’s head; and the Narcissus plant grew tiny human figures. So powerful was Dioscorides’ influence over the ages that late in the sixteenth century the chair of botany at the University of Bologna was conferred with the title “Reader of Dioscorides.”18
The power of the book of authority is well exemplified in the illustrations in figure 14. The half-man / half-beast creature is “the true picture of the Lamia,” from Edward Topsell’s 1607 work The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes. The half-man / half-plant creature is the plant “Mandragora,” more commonly known today as a mandrake (in the nightshades family), originally printed in a 1485 German book, Herbarius. Who ever saw such creatures? No one. But once they were printed in volumes that were copied endlessly from century to century without anyone checking the original sources—much less nature—they became reified as species in God’s creation. Empirical observation and verification did not inhabit the cognitive space in the medieval mind. By contrast, the woodcut illustration of two artist-naturalists from Leonhart Fuchs’s 1542 De Historia Stirpium (The History of Plants) reveals a phase transition from the book of authority to the book of nature. Instead of copiers copying copies made from previous copies, naturalists went outdoors to check with nature instead, and that meant the extinction of Lamia and Mandragora (although Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster live on in our imaginations).19
This battle of the books involves two different ways of thinking—two belief engines, as it were. The book of authority is grounded in deduction—the process of making specific statements from a generalized conclusion, or arguing from the general