Science and Eastern Orthodoxy: From the Greek Fathers to the Age of Globalization

A Note on Secondary Sources

a n o t e o n s e c o n d a r y s o u r c e s Historiographically, there has been a retrogression of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy . The two most influential nineteenth-century polemics on science and religion , John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), paid more attention to Eastern Orthodoxy than do many recent studies. Although Draper perpetuated the story of Hypatia’s brutal murder at the hands of Christians in Alexandria and chastised Cosmas Indicopleustes for advocating a flat earth, he generally treated Eastern Orthodoxy (and Islam) with respect, especially compared with his unrelenting attack on the Roman Catholic Church. White, who spent several years in the early 1890s in St. Petersburg as the United States ambassador to Russia, inexplicably overlooked Hypatia but devoted even more attention than Draper to the fallacious teachings of Cosmas (probably because this latter had an important influence in Russia ). White included discussions of the church fathers’ texts on the Creation, of John of Damascus’s interpretation of comets in the eighth century, of the twelfthcentury Greek church’s views on usury, and of the seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox patriarch Nikon’s interpretation of comets as divine portents. Unlike Draper, who never mentioned the Eastern Church after the Middle Ages, White referred to its attitude toward biblical interpretation in the eighteenth century and to the “Greek church” in Russia using scripture to forbid peasants from raising and eating potatoes. In his autobiography, he included a lengthy tale of the Russian church’s credulity about miracles.1 The paucity of attention paid to Eastern Orthodoxy in histories today can be seen in a quick survey of the most general recent literature. John Hedley Brooke’s influential Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991) says nothing about Orthodoxy. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (1986), edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. 198 A Note on Secondary Sources Numbers, devotes only a page or so to the Greek church fathers, as does their more recent When Science and Christianity Meet (2003). Gary B. Ferngren’s The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (2000) includes a five-page overview of “Orthodoxy”—but it took four scholars to write it. There is no sign that the situation is improving. Ronald L. Numbers’s iconoclastic Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009) says nothing about Orthodoxy except for a two-page debunking of the Hypatia myth. Despite its comprehensive title, Peter Harrison’s The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (2010) completely ignores Eastern Christianity— except to apologize for doing so—while Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, the editors of Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (2010), don’t even apologize for their neglect. Perhaps the most surprising omission appears in John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers’s cutting-edge Science and Religion around the World (2010), which devotes chapters to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, indigenous African religions, and unbelief but mentions Eastern Orthodoxy only in passing. This hardly seems appropriate for one of the largest Christian communions in the world, second only to the Roman Catholic Church.2 This paucity of interest in Orthodoxy is less apparent in recent histories of Christianity. The nine volumes of the Cambridge History of Christianity (2006– 8) devote considerable attention to Eastern Christianity. In addition to volumes 1 (Origins to Constantine) and 2 (Constantine to 600), which focus on periods when the greatest part of Christianity belonged to the East, volume 5 focuses exclusively on Eastern Christianity, and volume 3 (Early Medieval Christianities ) includes two chapters on Eastern churches. A classic book on the subject is Bishop Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church (1963): it describes the Byzantine Church, but after the fall of Byzantium it features the Russian church, neglecting the Greek patriarchates. Other influential studies are Joan M. Hussey’s The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (1986) and Steven Runciman’s The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (1968), the broadest overview. Sadly, none of these books discusses Orthodoxy and science in any detail.3 The first to write extensively about the cosmology and physics of the fathers of...