PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

In order to better understand the term natural philosophy and its context in Histoires
prodigieuses, a comment on the relationship between religion and ‘science’ at the
time is first necessary. The initial thesis – expressed by titles such as John Draper’s
History of the conflict between religion and science (1874) – which claimed theology
to be an inhibiting force for scientific research in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, is nowadays refuted. Although Rudolf Wittkower’s point of view may still
retain a certain degree of validity, the fact remains that the once popular idea of
persistent dissention between ‘science’ and religion is no longer accepted by the
majority of scholars. 807 Recent studies by Kenneth James Howell, John Brooke and
Ian Maclean, and Kevin Killeen and Peter Forshaw, have established a new approach
for examining the concept of dichotomy between theology and natural philosophy,
proving their inextricable connection long before the time of Boaistuau. 808 The
founding stone of this connection was laid by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas,
who put a Christian cloak on Aristotle’s natural philosophical theories. Augustine first
set down the basic procedures for the application of natural philosophy to the
interpretation of the book of Genesis, and Thomas Aquinas, whilst he gave theology
principal status amongst all human sciences, did not disregard natural philosophy for
the assistance it could provide to biblical exegesis. 809
807 Wittkower, R., ‘Marvels of the East: a study in the history of monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, vol. 5 (1942), p. 190: ‘The growing sense for causation in nature and the desire to
discover its functions were weakened, however, under the weight of literary authority and timehonoured
tradition’.
808 Howell, K. J., God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early
Modern Science (Indiana, 2002); Brooke, J. Maclean, I. (eds), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science
and Religion (Oxford, 2005); Killeen, K., Forshaw, P. J. (eds), The Word and the World: Biblical
Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke, 2007).
809 Augustine (ed. J. H. Taylor), The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 2 vols (New York, 1982). On Thomas
Aquinas and natural philosophy a good place to start is Funkenstein, A., Theology and the Scientific
Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), esp. pp. 3-9, 299-326,
and Hood, J. Y. B. (ed.), The Essential Aquinas: Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Society
(Westport, CT, 2002), Chapter II.
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