During the scientific revolution, there was a shift in thinking about nature from a religious perspective to an intellectual perspective. The Roman Catholic Church enforced that the Earth was the center of the universe and the other planets and the sun revolved around it in a perfect circle. Galileo challenged the church’s idea of perfectness and the idea of the Earth being the center of the universe. The church also enforced that God and the church should be the center of everyone’s lives, and Rembrandt challenges this idea through his painting, Raising of the Cross.
In Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo represents the pope as Simplicio, the fool, to reference to the church’s beliefs. Simplicio represents the church and talks about the views with great confidence and appears firm on his beliefs, just like the Roman Catholic Church. The confidence in his speech proves that the church was not open to new ideas, and Galileo uses the pope to convey the message that the church already had a preset idea of what was right and wrong. This sense of opposing straightforwardness is also addressed in Rembrandt’s painting. Instead of using linearity and straight lines, that allow the viewer to find a definite contrast between the background and the subject, Rembrandt uses painterly lines that appear to blend in with the background causing the painting to appear obscure and ambiguous. This blending of subjects with background emphasizes that even though the church pretends to have all the answers, no one can truly have all of the answers and there will always be a sense of uncertainty.
In the Dialogue, Simplicio says, “Now when we see this beautiful order among the planets, they being arranged around the ear...
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...ch makes them imperfect. Through Rembrandt and Galileo, it can be concluded that there is shift to this new idea of change being beneficial.
While there were people like Galileo and Rembrandt who wanted to move past traditional ideas, many religious and intellectual scholars found the idea of new science as threatening because of the undesirable challenges it results in the installed traditions. Since these people remained quite, the church continued to control their beliefs, and remained powerful for a longer time.
Works Cited
Galilei, Galileo. “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Trans. Drake Stillman. Ed. James Bowley, et. al. Heritage Reader. Jackson,
Mississippi: Millsaps College and Copyright Clearance Center, 2014. 10-11.
Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1660. “Raising Of The Cross.”
ARTstor Digital Library. Web. 15 Feb. 2014
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During the Scientific Revolution, the struggle between faith and reason was exhibited through Galileo and his discoveries. The Catholic Church during the time period of the Scientific Revolution did not approve of any outside scientists who came up with new theories and observations. The Church believed that all information about how the world worked was in the bible and that was the only right source. In an excerpt from “What is Scientific Authority?” written by Galileo in 1615, it states, “Showing a greater fondness for their [Catholic Church’s] own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny & disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them…” Galileo Galilei himself knew that the Church was not willing to approve of new ideas from other scientists, but only from the teachings in the Bible. Later on in the excerpt, Galileo writes, “They [Catholic Church] hurled various charges &…made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properl...
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The first argument Galileo made was that while the Bible could never be wrong, the implications of its words could be misunderstood. He maintained that the Holy Scriptures are “often very abstruse” and that interpreting them verbatim could cause one to “fall into error”. Galileo supported this claim by stating that all theologians seemed to agree with this notion. Moreover, he argued that if his belief were not true, then the interpreters of the Bible should have never disagree...
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