Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark

Author:Rodney Stark [Stark, Rodney]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Templeton Press
Published: 2016-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

They [the Scholastic faculty] reviewed past authorities and current opinions, giving [their] analysis of them and [their] reasons for rejecting some and accepting others. Altogether, the methodology already in place by the early twelfth century shows the scholastics’ willingness, and readiness, to criticize the foundation documents in their respective fields. More than simply receiving and expanding on the classical and Christian traditions, they set aside ideas of those traditions deemed to have outlived their usefulness. They also freely realigned the authorities they retained to defend positions that those authorities might well have thought strange and novel. [Commentaries] were now rarely mere summaries and explications of their author’s views. Scholastic commentators were much more likely to take issue with their chosen author or to bring to bear on his work ideas from emerging schools of thought or the scholastics’ own opinions.16

Of crucial importance, from the start, the great medieval universities were dominated by empiricism. If it was possible to put an intellectual claim to observational tests, then that was what should be done. Nowhere was the Scholastic commitment to empiricism more fully displayed than in the study of human physiology. It was the Scholastics, not the Greeks, Romans, Muslims, or Chinese, who based their studies on human dissection.17 In fact, during classical times, the “dignity of the human body forbade dissection,”18 which is why Greco-Roman works on anatomy are so faulty. Aristotle’s studies were limited entirely to animal dissections, as were those of Celsius and Galen. Human dissection was also prohibited in Islam. But, with the founding of Christian universities came a new outlook on dissection. The starting assumption was that what was unique to humans was a soul, not a body. Therefore, dissections of the human body had no theological implications. To this, two justifications were added. The first was forensic. Too many murderers escaped detection because the bodies of their victims were not subjected to a careful postmortem. The second was that adequate medical knowledge required direct observation of human anatomy.

Consequently, in the thirteenth century, local officials (especially in Italian university towns) began to authorize postmortems in instances when the cause of death was uncertain. Then, late in the century, Mondino de’Luzzi (1270–1326) wrote a textbook on dissection, based on his study of two female cadavers.19 Subsequently, in about 1315, he performed a human dissection in front of an audience of students and faculty at the University of Bologna. From there, human dissection spread quite rapidly throughout the Italian universities—given added impetus by the calamity of the Black Death. Public dissections began in Spain in 1391, and the first one in Vienna was conducted in 1404.20 Nor were these rare occurrences—dissection became a customary part of anatomy classes. The “introduction [of human dissection] in the Latin west, made without serious objection from the Church, was a momentous occurrence.”21

Moreover, the popularity of human dissections reflected the autonomy of medieval universities. As Nathan Schachner (1895–1955) explained:

The university was the darling, the spoiled child of the Papacy and Empire, of king and municipality alike.

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