it took another fifty before the huge St. Peter’s Square was completed.”
“It must be a gigantic church!”
“It is over 200 meters long and 130 meters high, and it covers an area of more
than 16,000 square meters. But enough about the boldness of Renaissance man. It was
also significant that the Renaissance brought with it a new view of nature. The fact
that man felt at home in the world and did not consider life solely as a preparation for
the hereafter, created a whole new approach to the physical world. Nature was now
regarded as a positive thing. Many held the view that God was also present in his
creation. If he is indeed infinite, he must be present in everything. This idea is called
pantheism. The medieval philosophers had insisted that there is an insurmountable
barrier between God and the Creation. It could now be said that nature is divine—and
even that it is ‘God’s blossoming.’ Ideas of this kind were not always looked kindly
on by the church. The fate of Gior-dano Bruno was a dramatic example of this. Not
only did he claim that God was present in nature, he also believed that the universe
was infinite in scope. He was punished very severely for his ideas.”
“How?”
“He was burned at the stake in Rome’s Flower Market in the year 1600.”
“How horrible ... and stupid. And you call that humanism?”
“No, not at all. Bruno was the humanist, not his executioners. During the
Renaissance, what we call anti-humanism flourished as well. By this I mean the
authoritarian power of State and Church. During the Renaissance there was a
tremendous thirst for trying witches, burning heretics, magic and superstition, bloody
religious wars—and not least, the brutal conquest of America. But humanism has
always had a shadow side. No epoch is either purely good or purely evil. Good and
evil are twin threads that run through the history of mankind. And often they
intertwine. This is not least true of our next key phrase, a new scientific method,
another Renaissance innovation which I will tell you about.”
“Was that when they built the first factories?”
“No, not yet. But a precondition for all the technical development that took
place after the Renaissance was the new scientific method. By that I mean the
completely new approach to what science was. The technical fruits of this method
only became apparent later on.”
“What was this new method?”
“Mainly it was a process of investigating nature with our own senses. Since the
fourteenth century there had been an increasing number of thinkers who warned
against blind faith in old authority, be it religious doctrine or the natural philosophy of
Aristotle. There were also warnings against the belief that problems can be solved
purely by thinking. An exaggerated belief in the importance of reason had been valid
all through the Middle Ages. Now it was said that every investigation of natural
phenomena must be based on observation, experience, and experiment. We call this
the empirical method.”
“Which means?”
“It only means that one bases one’s knowledge of things on one’s own
experience—and not on dusty parchments or figments of the imagination. Empirical
science was known in antiquity, but systematic experiments were something quite
new.”
“I guess they didn’t have any of the technical apparatus we have today.”
“Of course they had neither calculators nor electronic scales. But they had
mathematics and they had scales. And it was now above all imperative to express
scientific observations in precise mathematical terms. ‘Measure what can be