Christianity lagging behind

The scientific endeavours of the 17th century led onto a painful relativisation of the place of Christians in the universe, a process already initiated by the discovery of the New World. The ideas of Copernicus adopted by the advocates of the new sciences deprived our planet of its central position. The tangible limits of the Universe were pushed back by the telescope and the microscope. The same went for the range of human history. The ‘short chronology’ imposed by Christianity encapsulated humanity’s adventure on Earth between two boundary markers. For the beginning, the date of the creation of the world could be deduced from the Bible, which lists the generations which separate the birth of Adam and the death of Christ. The date of the end times was less certain. But up until then everybody accepted that the ‘time of man’ was limited to several thousands of years. Faced with a continuous flow of new discoveries, the moderns who tried to elucidate the origins of humanity constantly pushed back the beginning limit of the Christian tradition, whilst the emerging ideas of progress in science and morality prompted people to imagine a limitless future.

Making a living: between getting by and hard times

In our day and age, researchers are educated and trained by the universities and linked to an institution which supplies them with the material and financial means to carry out work which is intended to be published. But the situation was different at every point in the 17th century. Passing through a university or other places bestowing traditional knowledge was at that time perceived as a simple restrictive stage, from which open minds have not much to expect. And certainly not funding for research likely to call into question received ideas! Galileo and Descartes at first accepted the traditional teaching they would subsequently oppose. Hobbes submitted himself to it with disgust. Locke and Newton tried to benefit professionally from a system which, intellectually, could offer them nothing. Leibniz followed a complete curriculum but renounced the academic career which would stifle his plan to reform knowledge.

But how did they ‘get by’ financially? Galileo, forced to give up teaching after his famous trial, continued his work under house arrest thanks to the benevolence of the Medicis. Hobbes picked up a post as a private tutor which allowed him the leisure time to devote to his work. The astronomer Pierre Gassendi was also a priest, which provisionally meant he didn’t have to worry where his next meal was coming from. But he ended up having to teach young seminarians, which obliged him to promote, in the classroom, the philosophy which he criticised in secret in his chambers. The son of a well-off family, Descartes ended up selling his land in order to continue his research in the United Provinces and then in Sweden, where he was ‘protected’ by the Queen. Pascal’s itinerary was similar, whilst Spinoza lived in poverty from his lens grinder profession. There were thus multiple and varied trajectories. They depended on the means people had at the beginning, financial needs, the benevolence of the powerful. But the problem was the same for everyone: finding the time, and thus the money, to cultivate thinking which was non-conformist and thus difficult to find funding for. The field of science was not yet professionalised and no system of remuneration guaranteed authors stable incomes.

In such conditions nobody could do without a network, even Spinoza, who is nonetheless described as a hermit who fled society like the plague. The Republic of Letters fulfilled this function of a ‘network incubator,’ an effective tissue of personal relationships which helped to overcome geographical distances. Within this community the recognition of one’s peers was the promotional factor. Galileo only really became an astronomer when the German Johannes Kepler gave him the Accolade in confirming his observations. Learned societies enabled reputations to be magnified. The Dutch Christian Huygens constructed a telescope and a pendulum clock; he was also exploring probability calculations. On the strength of this work he presented himself to the Paris Academy and the Royal Society in London, where his work was recognized. Leibniz followed the same itinerary to demonstrate his calculating machine.

Correspondence provided the cement for the network: it was a relatively dependable and inexpensive means of scientific communication. The tireless Leibniz thus exchanged 15,000 letters with the savants of the whole of Europe! The letters took the form of various genres, but some were genuine unpublished short treatises, or fully fledged works. For the rest the letters served above all to create or to maintain connections between savants and from time to time were accompanied with florid compliments.

Letters of recommendation sometimes led to voyages. But at the time, only France, England, Italy and the United Provinces really attracted erudite travelers, whilst the Germanic Empire and Spain were considered intellectual deserts. But the Republic of Letters, an informal universe leaning on interpersonal relationships, no longer sufficed. Over the course of the century private initiatives led to the creation of learned societies which arranged the pooling of the means and the results of research. They offered the new science, excluded from the universities, the institutional anchorage it was lacking. Thus a multitude of subjects excluded from traditional university teaching could be tackled within them, such as the circulation of blood!