2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.5.5 The Case Of The Missing Centuries | ||||
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Over and over again
we find in the accounts of an historical process the need to work around or
explain the existence of the eonic effect
as if in disguise, in the form of a
consideration of the cyclical nature of the
long-term emergence of a process or cultural evolute. The case of science and democracy are two
examples. More specifically, author after author is forced to begin his
discussion of origins in the period of the early Greeks, continue his account
for the duration of this period, and then, without notice, jump to the modern
world to complete the ‘evolutionary’ account of this process or historical
sequence. We should note, having invoked the In general, the most striking example of this perception, finally explicit, and one that is driven to an attempt to wrestle with a ‘law of evolution’, whether successfully or not, is Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, an account of the rise of science, or more particularly, the physical and cosmological sciences, whose history fits over the eonic effect like a glove. It is a fact that every history of science must reckon with. Less frequent than it used to be, denigration of the Middle Ages explains nothing, indeed omits the not inconsiderable developments in this deep source. But there is a clear discontinuity in any account of the rise of science.[ii] Koestler’s account, notwithstanding its ‘debunking of medieval darkness’, is interesting for its extremely stylized outline of this pattern, and one whose particulars we do not necessarily need to accept, as it begins with the ‘heroic age’ of the Ionian Greeks, finds a ‘dark interlude’ in the period of the Middle Ages, and resumes its discussion in the sixteenth century with Copernicus and the ‘watershed’ era on its heels in the seventeenth century with Kepler, Galileo, and finally Newton. This pattern is evident in almost any history of science, and is not contradicted by the tremendously important alternate view that there were important prior developments in the Middle Ages. But it is useful to accept the broad pattern to see it for what it is, the more so as its obvious correlation with so many other parallel developments in the rise of modernism show that the phenomenon is not a fluke, and has nothing to do with science. The pattern can be extended backwards, in this as in so
many other cases, to include the period of the rise of proto-science in the
Mesopotamian and This cyclical structure in the history of science itself is only one, but one of the most notable, examples of the actual discrete evolutionary process in action in the realm of human civilization, and its artifacts of science, philosophy and art. As Koestler notes, the creative rise of Greek science that had started ca. –600 as a ‘Promethean venture’, had, by the end of the third century B.C., completed its most creative phase, losing its reputation as it began to fall into decline, to the point of being almost forgotten, for a millennium and a half. In his words, there is only one step from Archimedes to Galileo. He gives the image of a destroyed bridge with rafters jutting out from both ends, with a void in between. His explanation of this distressing gap is partisan, quite understandably and quite forgivably, to the viewpoint of the rise of science, and sees the cause in the ‘breakdown of civilization’ in the Middle Ages, and in the distinction of spiritual and material as such, the retreat from material considerations in the religious medievalism whose dominant outcome seems so surprising after the brief surge of progressive culture in the transitional era of the classical Greeks. One difficulty with Koestler’s account is the thesis, so
frequent in the many accounts of medievalism, of a ‘breakdown of civilization
’ where there was none to break down, the fringe area of Gaul, Germania, and
northern The second comment one can make is that the distinction of
the material and the spiritual is not really the issue. We will see that this
distinction applies reasonably well to the Greeks, but not to the creative
period of the Persians and the Israelites, nearby, to say nothing of the Indian
and Chinese Enlightenments occurring simultaneously. The issue of the decline of
science is seen to be far more complex than the passage from worldliness to
otherworldliness, although these express very well ‘symptoms’, to the partisan,
of the phenomenon. For the same phenomenon of falloff is evident in what would
be considered spiritual phenomena also. If we compare the period of Buddhism
and Jainism at their birth with that of
the Vedantic Hinduism of the It is in the epilogue to The Sleepwalkers, that Koestler, a well-known Darwinian critic, begins to really consider, somewhat more cogently, what is really involved in this long cyclicity of the ‘spiral, or jump-start emergence’ of science. Seeing that the model of continuous progress in the development of scientific knowledge will not work, he notes, “There occur in biological evolution periods of crisis and transition when there is a rapid, almost explosive branching out in all directions, often resulting in a radical change in the dominant trend of development.” And then he notes that this process seems evident in the evolution of thought in the period near the sixth century B. C. and the seventeenth A.D. This perception of two steps in a sequence should of course drive us to consider the question, for which we do not have sufficient data to really answer, of the early period of Sumerian civilization in relation to the rise of ‘proto-science’. It is there, but we do not perhaps recognize it for what is was, not yet recognizably the form of science as we know it, with elements of writing, commercial reckoning, astronomy, socio-religious politics, and divination mixed together as the political mythology of the first forms of the state.
[i]
Cf. C. Leon Harris, Evolution: Genesis and Revelations,
[ii]
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers
(New York: MacMillan, 1968). |
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