Changing Paradigms Quickly: Reforms in Worldview during the Reformation Period

7/31/2019 Changing Paradigms Quickly: Reforms in Worldview during the Reformation Period

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DeLancett, Heather

2003

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Changing Paradigms Quickly:

The Reform of Worldview in the Reformation Period

The Reformation period was a cataclysmic stage of history filled with stress, violence and great

anxiety. The most exemplified parts of this period fit into the realm of the Reformation Period

of Christian History, and even these pieces which focus on the changing religious attitudes and

religious protest movements of the time are most accurately described in the plural, as

reformations. The traumatic change in religious attitudes, in hindsight, may be viewed as a

major cultural reaction or backlash as society sought to adjust from the medieval ideals of

tradition and authority to a new set of Humanistic ideals introduced by the Renaissance. This

adjustment, of reformation of worldview, while being the most visible in the religious arena, wasalso culminating in other areas of contemplative inquiry. These challenges to the medieval

paradigm and the traditional way of explaining things, as well as questions regarding the ideals

of human purpose, were abundant in the time leading up to the Reformation period, and flowed

in constant onslaught throughout.

In many cases, it seems that the Reformation period was the crux in history between the ancient

and medieval world and our current relative post-modernity. Undeniably, it is the point where

the world got a lot bigger in a myriad of ways. As the medieval focus on the heavenly hereafter

shifted to matters more terrestrial, people started looking around them with a new confidence

inspired by the ideal that life on earth mattered also. In particular, three areas of growth in

human knowledge well personify the magnitude of the changes in worldview taking place

during the Reformation. It is not my purpose to disregard the immense impact of the protests

directed at the Church, and the various reformations and breaks that occurred within the

religious attitudes and practices during the period. It is my intention to broaden the horizon of

our understanding of the Reformation Period by showing some of the other areas in which

reformations were also taking place, specifically in geography, social criticism in art, and

astronomy.

Enough for us that the hidden half of the globe is brought to light, and the

Portuguese daily go farther and farther beyond the equator. Thus shores unknown

will soon become accessible; for one in emulation of another sets forth in laboursand mighty perils. Peter Martyr (1493)

Common misconceptions abound regarding the journeys of Christopher Columbus and his

discovery of the Americas. This explorer, Columbus, did not need to revolutionize the masses

with ideas of a spherical earth, nor did he fight the Church much about the hermeneutics of

Biblical geography. The spherical nature of the earth was a commonly accepted belief by most

educated people of the 15th CE, thought it was not known that the earth revolved on its axis.


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Despite the lack of knowledge of the latter, through the contributions of Arabic astronomers

and navigators, the circumference of the globe had been calculated to a nearly exact degree

(Odell- Geographical Background of the First Voyage of Columbus). Columbus, a strong

Christian, had ready access to many of the translated Arabic texts housed in the great libraries,

the flowers of Spains brilliant Muslim-Christian-Jewish culture but seems to have purposefully

chosen to ignore some contemporary calculations in favor of the inaccurate traditional

estimates of Ptolemy (Vincent-Barwood, Columbus: What If?). Perhaps it was Columbus

reliance on faulty antiquity that encouraged funding for the expedition and optimism for the

supposed short duration of the mission intended to sail west and establish a new trade route to

the West Indies.

The landmasses that Columbus discovered in his four expeditions westward were never referred

to as the New World during his lifetime. Columbus was looking for the West Indies and the

shores of Asia, and convinced himself that he had found them, all the while exploring Jamaica,

Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles and Cuba and setting up the first permanent European

settlement in the New World (Boorstin, 239). Though Columbus did not accept his discoveriesas being anything but the Orient which he had sought, within a month after he had returned

from his first voyage and written a letter to his patrons describing his findings, Rome was privy

to the possible implications. On May 3rd of 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull

regarding the newly discovered and unchristian lands, mapping out authority of ownership to

Spain, (Borgias bribing patrons), in vague demarcations that would allow for even more new

lands near the West Indies to be discovered under her flag (Boorstin, 248).

The New World would come to be named America after the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci. In

1501, Vespucci repeated Columbus voyage and reported what he found there to his friend and

patron Lorenzo de Medici. Soon he had been commissioned as pilot major of Spain, a

position that he held until his death of malaria (contracted on a voyage to the New World) in1512 (Boorstin, 251). An obscure clergyman, Martin Waldseemuller, made the christening of the

New World naming it America due to reports that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered a new

land. Waldseemuller had a printing press at his disposal and a love of geography, leading him

to publish a new text Cosmographiaein 1507 that included a new mapping with the fourth

continent making an appearance and named America. This first book was so popular that

another edition was published four months later (Boorstin, 253). By the time Waldseemuller had

realized his mistake in crediting the discovery of America to Vespucci, the misinformation had

already been so far disseminated that it could not be stopped (Boorstin, 253).

The newly developed power of the printing press had another great contribution to the rising

Reformation Period. The 15th century had been a major turning point in the development of art

as a social message, and as the 16thcentury began, the artists role broadened greatly into the

realm of social critic (Shikes, 4, 10). The Reformation invoked many artists in northern Europe to

provide a new type of commentary to the illiterate, and create caustic images to accompany the

texts to reform protests, such as Martin Luthers pamphlets (Shikes, 10, 14). Many artists, swept

up in the struggle of the Protestant Reformation against the established church and papacy,


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were in effect attacking an important aspect of society itself, rather than engaging only in a

purely religious quarrel. The Catholic Church and the papacy werethe social order (Shikes, 13).

Besides the deep desire to reform the Church and the papal indulgences, there were other

conditions woven into the new social criticism of art. Major issues focused on were the misery

and horrible living conditions of the peasants and working class, and the root causes underlyingcivil, national and religious wars generally owing to the greed of the Church and the abusive

national rulers (Shikes, 10). During these early years of printmaking, the easily mass-produced

black and white print, (made with woodblock engravings or an etching upon a metal plate), was

the artists main means of self-expression because painting was generally done on commission

by the church or wealthy patrons (Shikes, xxiv). Efforts by the Church to stop the flow of anti-

propaganda were made in 1521 at the Edict of Worms. The Diets of Nuremburg of 1524 and

Augsburg in 1530 sought to strengthen these new censorship laws with little success (Shikes,

15). These efforts of censorship were met with increasingly brutal and mocking images, such as

Lucas Cranach the Elders series of woodcuts. Cranach certainly upped the ante on artistic self-

expression with On the Origin and Arrival of the Antichrist, (which he designed to accompanyLuthers Abbildung des Papstum), which illustrates the origins of the Pope as spawned by a

female demon and wearing a triple crown, being nurtured by various agents of the devil

(Shikes, 15).

Not everyone at the time was so eager to fall out of Church favor. Nicolaus Copernicus had

attended the University of Cracow, and was taught (as every student in every university was)

from the accepted authority Aristotle. Aristotles treatise On the Heavens propounded the

commonly accepted beliefs, including the theory of concentric spheres made of unchanging

aether, which moved the planets and the stars uniformly in circles around the universes center

i.e. the Earth. There had been problems noted with this theory, especially regarding the orbits

of Venus and Mercury when they seemed to move backwards. To save the great philosopherstheory, a number of inventive geometrical devices had been employed, beginning in the 1 st

century B.C. (Burke, 89). Copernicus was struck by a seemingly natural inclination that physics

and mathematics should be mutually synchronous. Sometime between 1508 and 1515, he

composed a short treatise, Commentariolus, which he did not publish due to the upheaval his

new calculations and theories might bring as well as fear of papal disapproval (Burke, 89-90).

Eventually, his close circle of friends encouraged him to publish his work, and he did so under

the name of his friend, Georg Joachim Rheticus, in 1540. The preface of Copernicus next work

On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, was addressed to Pope Paul III, pleading for papal

approval in his attempts to restore symmetria to the universe. (Burke, 90). The reactions to his

new ideas were strange. Mathematical astronomers used pieces of Copernicus calculations fit

into the old Aristotelian order, while ignoring or rejecting his more radical statements.

However, by the 1570s, his fellow mathematical astronomers were well acquainted with his

works and theories, often passing heavily annotated copies between themselves. One of these

annotated copies passed to the hands of Johannes Kepler when he was a young student (Burke,

90-91).


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Kepler was quite taken with the works of Copernicus, and wrote his first book The

Cosmographic Mystery in 1596 describing the Copernican world system (Burke, 91). Many

regard Kepler as a true revolutionary in early modern astronomy because it was his works, unlike

Copernicus and Tycho Brahe before him, that broke conclusively with the ancient axiom that all

celestial motions are both uniform and circular (Burke, 102). The Heavenly reforms introduced

by the Catholic Copernicus and the Lutherans Brahe and Kepler culminated with the dramatic

scientific contributions of an Italian natural philosopher and mathematician named Galileo

Galilei (Burke, 91). Though it was Kepler, with the help of Brahes observations, who laid the

foundations for a heliocentric universe, it was Galileo who put together the missing pieces of

the theory and announced it to the world in 1610. Galileo did engage in dispute of Biblical

hermeneutics with the Church regarding his new discoveries, and many questions arose as to

whether the Bible could continue in a tradition of literal translation as scholars protested that

Galileos theory was probably true (Burke, 91-92).

The discovery and excitement of the NewWorld, a new freedom of thought and artistic

expression with widespread dissemination of influence, and a new modeling of the cosmos andour place on Earth in it; these three issues alone indicate major paradigm shifts. When

considered in the wider sphere of all the other types of reformations occurring in and around

the 16thcentury, it is no wonder that the Reformation Period was a tumultuous time in history.

Unlike most other periods of history, it was not a few main ideas leading a thematic change in

worldview. The Reformation Period was a time to break down the authoritative structures which

the individual minds and societies rested on in previous centuries. It was a time period to find

new, nearly unthinkable ways to perceive God, the world, the universe, and individual purpose

within this new framework.

With Luthers affection for printing Protestant propaganda, perhaps it should not be surprising

that he gets most of the press in regard to this time period. With the various churches thatmake up Christianity still holding so much sway over reality in our society today, perhaps it is

not surprising that the study of the Reformation Period focuses almost entirely on the protests

against the Church. However, I think it is wise to keep our perspective within our eyes of the

time as broad as possible, to question what else was going on in the world at the time, to look

for other significant ideas in the historical period, and to try to understand how events played

into conditions which we may be tempted to take for granted. The Reformation Period seems

the most valuable to study when trying to break-up our own reliance on authoritative historical

perspective and tradition.

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Changing Paradigms Quickly: Reforms in Worldview during the Reformation Period