July 21 at 8:04 PM

While Donald L. Rosss July 8 Free for All letter, Setting the record straight on Martin Luther, was on the right track in concluding that Luthers Reformation is only partially responsible for giving birth to the modern Western world, heconflated Renaissance humanism and the Reformation with a third revolution he did not mention: the scientific revolution. That observation is cemented by Rosss belief that Isaac Newtons Principia Mathematica in 1687 inspired the Enlightenment more than anything else. To say Renaissance humanism had begun at least 150years earlier in Italy, Ross must be counting back from Luthers 95 Theses on that Wittenberg church door in 1517 to the mid-1300s, when Francesco Petrarch rediscovered the letters of Roman politician and philosopher Cicero. In fact, Petrarch was so taken with Cicero that he described the 900 years of cultural stagnation that preceded his own time asthe Dark Ages.

In the 1450s, the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed using mass-produced movable metal type, marked the beginning of the printing revolution that spread information and learning to the masses and eventually played a key role in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In 1605, the first modern newspaper was published in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg when Johann Carolus distributed a weekly journal in German by reporters from several Central European cities (giving rise to our use of the word press). The philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment came to dominate European ideas about individual liberty, progress, reason and religious tolerance in opposition to the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. But while the French like to place the Enlightenment between 1715, when King Louis XIV died, and 1789, when the French Revolution began, the case can easily be made that it actually started in the early 1600s, when the scientific revolution fostered questioning of orthodoxy both religious and scientific in favor of increased empiricism and scientific rigor. We all know what happened to astronomer Galileo in 1633 the Roman Inquisition confined him to house arrest for the rest of his life because he wouldnt agree that the sun circled the Earth. The scientific revolution and therefore the Enlightenment were well underway by the time Newton published Principia Mathematica.

George Diffenbaucher, Alexandria

Follow this link:

Setting the record straight on 'Setting the record straight on Martin Luther' - Washington Post