Written by Kyle Wurtz on 12/14/2011
Prepared for Dr. Tara Wood
In the mid-1300s, one of the most devastating plagues in human history tore through Europe. Known as the Black Death, this pandemic severely disrupted Western Civilization. As the West recovered, and in the centuries that followed, there were several key developments that laid the foundation for the Western Civilization we know today. Between the time of the Black Death and the middle 17th century, three of the most significant developments for Western Civilization were the invention of the printing press, which allowed for faster spread of knowledge and ideas, the Reformation, which represented the first large-scale movement against the traditional Church, and the scientific revolution, which simultaneously provided for great technological advancements and completely shifted the Western worldview.
In the mid-1400s, German Johannes Gutenberg invented a machine that incorporated the movable type process to greatly reduce the overhead of publishing a book. Prior to Gutenberg’s printing press, books were copied by hand, a method that was not only extremely time-consuming but also less reliable as there was more room for human error. The result was that books, magazines, and other documents were rare and typically only available to the upper classes. Without access to publications, the people of the West were, by and large, uneducated. Gutenberg changed all of this with his printing press, making it an invention not only admirable for its technological advancements but also for its vast impact on society.
It is nearly impossible to count the ways in which the invention of the printing press and the resulting printing revolution impacted the development of the West. However, one extremely significant immediate impact was on the Reformation, which was in its childhood when the printing revolution began. The roots of the printing revolution took hold very quickly because of the low start-up cost of opening a print shop, and it is estimated that, “by 1500, a thousand presses were operating in 265 towns” (Noble, 340).
This sparked the Reformation by allowing “the ideas and scholarship of the Renaissance could move cheaply and quickly,” much more so than they could when copying by hand was the only option.” Because of this, “we cannot overemphasize the importance of the printing press to the development of the northern Renaissance and the Reformation itself” (The Northern Renaissance and Reformation Begins Overview). The Reformation was most certainly “a war of the presses,” with a variety of pamphlets being distributed by Reformers informing formerly uneducated citizens of the Church’s “biblical teachings, doctrine, AND the abuses” that detailed the Church’s shortcomings (The Northern Renaissance and Reformation Begins Overview). The Church consequently issued pamphlets and printed documents of its own, leading to a bitter struggle of the press. It’s interesting to note that the impact of the printing press didn’t stop with the actual documents. The printshop actually became a “center of culture and communication.” Some notable early printers were humanists, for example, and their printshops became “natural sources of humanist ideas.” Also, in the sixteenth century, printshops became natural sources of “Protestant religious programs” (Noble, 341).
We also see the enormous impact of the printing press during the scientific revolution, when printed documents allowed for standardized philosophical and scientific texts to be distributed throughout the West with very low cost. This allowed scholars throughout the European world to “feel fairly confident that they and their colleagues were analyzing identical texts,” including their own works (Noble, 341). The Reformation and the scientific revolution are only two such examples of the impact of the printing press, but the fact that Gutenberg’s invention was crucial to their developments alone makes it worthy of being considered one of the greatest events of Western Civilization between the 14th and 17th centuries.
The next influential development during this time period was the Protestant Reformation. Led by Martin Luther in the early 1500s, the Reformation challenged religious precedent and drastically altered the West’s religious landscape. For years, the Catholic Church had been abusing its power in a variety of ways. For example, the Church allowed Christians to buy indulgences (these were essentially bribes) to effectively pardon their sins. The Church also withheld the perception that it was essential for the average Christian to reach God (in other words, a Christian had to go through the Church in order to be approved in God’s eyes). Luther sparked a revolution of sorts in the Christian world to challenge not only these practices but their underlying theology as well.
Some of Luther’s ideas included Sola Fide (Justification by Faith Alone), Sola Scriptura (knowledge of God came from the Bible), and Priesthood of All Believers (all members of the Faith were equal in God’s eyes) (The Lutheran Reformation and its Spread Overview). These were extremely dangerous ideas to the Church, one of society’s most influential institutions. For example, Sola Scriptura indicated that the Bible, not the Church and its interpretation of the Bible, was the true authority. This effectively reduced the influential power of the Church. Luther’s Priesthood of All Believers also corroded the Church’s power by asserting that “all were on equal footing: kings on the same level as the pope on spiritual powers” (The Lutheran Reformation and its Spread Overview). This had an interesting effect not only on Western religion but also on Western politics, as it aided the development of the nation-state. The underlying thought was: If all Christians are equal in God’s eyes, do politicians (nobles and kings) really need the priests and the Pope to legitimize their power? Because of this, Luther and his followers actually received support from princes and kings. This makes sense, because those with political power “liked having the church support them as sacred monarchs, blessed by God, but they didn’t always like having the Church having its own law courts and authority within their territories” (The Lutheran Reformation and its Spread Overview).
The Catholics didn’t obediently bow to Luther’s theories and the support of governments, however. They fought back to preserve their power, and, as a result, “religious war would dominate Europe for nearly 100 years” (Zwingli/Calvin and the Reformation in England Overview). This ongoing battle between Catholics and Protestants was eventually settled (for the most part) when Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes decreed that Protestants, or those “of the said religion called Reformed,” be permitted to “exercise the said religion” within their regions” (Edict of Nantes). In other words, Catholics had to live with the competition Protestants provided.
It is interesting to note that Luther wasn’t the first person to realize these Church practices and theories were corrupt. In fact, people had actually been grumbling about the Church for centuries. The Reformation managed to take hold during Luther’s era partially because of the printing press (which allowed for the quick spread of information regarding the Church’s abuses) and the support from “new centralized national governments” because they saw “Church reform as beneficial to increasing their own authority” (The Northern Renaissance and the Reformation Begins Overview). These were only means to achieving religious revolution, however. The real reason that the Reformation was successful was that people connected with Luther’s ideas on a very deep level. Luther’s teachings actually empowered the common man. They emphasized “individual belief and religious participation,” not obedience to institutions of authority (Noble, 381). This was actually so powerful that many of Luther’s followers took the idea further than even Luther intended. Luther actually criticized the peasants who revolted in the name of his ideas, writing that they “act[ed] like mad dogs,” misinterpreted his words, and “practice[d] mere devil’s work” (Against the Murdering and Robbing Bands of Peasants). Despite Luther’s eventual lack of support for the movement his words sparked, and even though the “new” church institutions “that replaced the old church developed their own traditions of control,” the reform movement nevertheless acted as one of the first significant steps towards challenging the Church’s power and even its theological and philosophical ideas (Noble, 382).
A third historically significant development that has had a huge impact on shaping Western Civilization today is the scientific revolution that occurred in the 17th century. The Reformation, assisted in part by the printing press, had taken the first punch at the traditional notion of the Church, and the scientific revolution further attacked this precedent.
The scientific revolution was heavily rooted in past events. Scientists and philosophers of the era had been exposed “to the intellectual innovations of the Renaissance thought, the intellectual challenges and material opportunities represented by the discovery of the New World, and the challenge to authority embodied in the Reformation” (Noble, 473). It was the culmination of centuries of a gradual shift in the European worldview from religion-only to more broad thought processes that included logic, reasoning and careful observation of nature. An excellent example of this rediscovered respect for trusting one’s own senses and powers of observation can be seen in Galileo’s observations of the movement of Jupiter’s moons. He includes some diagrams and a detailed analysis of how “three starlets, small indeed, but very bright” moved around Jupiter over the course of a week (Galileo Galilei). The movement towards observation led to the creation of processes for reasoning, including Descartes’s deductive process that’s rooted in “never [accepting] anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such” (Rene Descartes) and Isaac Newton’s groundwork for the scientific method (Isaac Newton).
As scientists and thinkers learned to trust their powers of observation, they “gained confidence in human reason and the intelligibility of the world” and “turned to new speculation about human affairs.” This included beginning to “challenge traditional justifications for the hierarchical nature of society and the sanctity of authority” (Noble, 473). In other words, the scientific revolution wasn’t all about science. Rather, it was about questioning precedent, especially if that precedent had not been rigorously proven to be true. This had an enormous impact on nearly every aspect of society, but it had arguably the most pronounced effect on superstition and religion. Francis Bacon comments on this and argues that superstition tends to get in the way of valid (scientific) discovery of truth. For example, he references how the superstitions Christian Church ostracized those who “maintained the earth was round” (Francis Bacon). Galileo also implicitly criticizes the Church’s ideas by writing that his observations of Jupiter’s stars form “a fine and elegant argument for quieting” the argument of the Church that the Earth is the center of the universe. It is important to note that, while the scientific revolution didn’t necessarily explicitly attack religion and God, or even the presence of the historically large institution that was the Catholic Church, it represented a shift in how Westerners viewed the world from through the lens of religion to the lens of reason.
Throughout history, Western Civilization has progressed most when there is an increase in the number of ideas and/or the spread of those ideas. These three developments between the 14th and 17th centuries exemplify this phenomenon, from the Reformation and scientific revolution’s explosion of ideas and new ways of viewing the world to the invention of the printing press that allowed these ideas to reach people all throughout the Western World. It seems impossible that the West that we know today, which possesses a strong culture of individualism and emphasizes intellectualism, would have developed without these advancements.
My Thoughts
I found this essay really helpful to pin down some of the major events that were influenced by the invention of the printing press. The press made it possible for the mass spread of information to be possible, which resulted in The Protestant reformation and also helped to further the scientific revolution, many of the theories we live by today would not of been accepted without this ability to validate findings against other published works. The printing press allowed people to get their views and ideas out into the world. The press gave Luther the chance to expose the church for all their sneaky crimes that they had been commiting against the people. Essentially brain washing them into following and paying the church. Luther knew they were doing wrong and so used the printing press to spread his words far and wide. This in turn created a divide between the religions which in turn caused many wars and disputes over the years.
In terms of the scientific revolution, the printing press was a real fueling factor in its take off. When the press came about scientists were able to publish theories on all different kinds of matters, from the universe, to the anatomy etc. Over this period of time the world was much more clued up on how the world works. This mass awakening of the people lead people to think in a much more logical way, learning to trust their instincts rather than be lead. The press gave the chance for the common man to gain as much intellectual knowledge as the rich folk who could afford to read before. It is no doubt that the printing press was the back bone for how civiliazation functions today.
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