Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
None of this happened in a vacuum. As early as the seventh century,
Benedictine monks initiated a postclassical reevaluation of work, endors-
ing simple, technological activities through the sanctification of labor as
prayer (
laborare est orare
). Indeed, the origin of the mechanical clock
can be traced, if Lewis Mumford is correct, to the Benedictine monas-
teries and the need for more precise and reliable timepieces to regulate
their strictly ritualized activities twenty-four hours a day and in every
season—a demand that obviously rendered the sundial and water clock
insufficient. In monastic life, order and regularity constituted the exter-
nal manifestation of a devotion to God, in effect raising mechanical
routine to the level of a virtue. Nicholas Oresmus, a fourteenth-century
philosopher, was the first to employ the clockwork metaphor for the
inner workings of the universe—a metaphor that was destined to become
a metaphysics that in essential respects is still with us today.
According to Lynn White Jr., the new mechanical technology took on
a moral dimension as well. Pointing to the iconography of the late
Middle Ages, White observes that mechanization acquired an aura of vir-
tuousness and sacredness. The Italian depiction of temperance in partic-
ular worked its way north and became the “icon of Christian life.” In
one painting, striking in its symbolism, Temperance is shown atop a
windmill, wearing a clock for a hat with bit and bridle in mouth and
rowel spurs at her feet. In telling contrast to Christendom in the East,
Latin Christianity appropriated the mechanical clock as an apt metaphor
for God's orderly cosmos and thus permitted, unlike its Byzantine neigh-
bor, the presence of astronomical clocks inside its churches. From this
White, himself a Christian, conjectures that “engineering was so creative
in Europe partly because it came to be more closely integrated with the
ideology and ethical patterns of Latin Christianity than was the case with
the technology and the dominant faith of any other major culture.”
2
Central to this “ideology” was the idea of a creator-God, an architect-
engineer really, who commanded humans, made in His image and like-
ness, to subdue nature and “complete” the original creation.
3
The
necessary corollary to this religious sanction of a more mechanical and
hence more powerful technology was a new feel for matter formed or
created for a spiritual plan in which humanity now played a key role.
4
Out of these theological assumptions that gave voice to a new under-
standing of humanity's place in the world, there then grew a positive
