The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture by George Ovitt, Jr

Abstract

Book Reviews—Labor and Technology The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture. By George Ovitt,Jr. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 272; notes, bibliography, index. $32.00. The quest for perfection, however one conceives it, has had a long history as a motivating force behind human work. This new book takes its title from Sir Francis Bacon’s hope, expressed in the Prooemium to The Great Instauration, that the new empirical science of his day might open a path for humanity to recapture “its perfect and original condition,” a project which, in Bacon’s eyes, the religiously oriented philosophy and science of the millennium before him had only made more remote. By taking a long look at the ways medieval writers saw the value of human labor and technology in a world made imperfect, in their view, not by ignorance but by sin, George Ovitt suggests alternative criteria to those commonly accepted since Bacon for evaluating technology and shaping its development—criteria based on the healing of human relationships and on reverence for nature and the promotion of community rather than on the development of new techniques for exploiting our planet and our less fortunate neighbors. Ovitt devotes the first chapter of his book to ideas of human prog­ ress. After surveying the main notions of progress current in learned literature since Bacon—almost all of which identify it with advances in technological hardware and the growth in material wealth it pro­ duces—Ovitt presents, with apparent sympathy, the alternative view of most early and medieval Christian writers, for whom real human progress is a growth in mastery over the self, which is part of the growth of all human society toward a reestablished union with God. In his second chapter, Ovitt examines the argument of Ernst Benz and Lynn White, jr., that the Christian interpretation of the biblical Creation story, with its conception of God as craftsman and of the human person as set over the rest of nature, provided the medieval West with its main stimulus for technological creativity and for an exploitative attitude toward the world. By surveying patristic and medieval commentaries on the first chapters of Genesis, Ovitt shows there is little evidence to support this thesis; rather, he finds in the classical Christian theology of Creation the outlines of an ethic of cooperation with nature and a call to realize human ascendancy in the moral terms of reverence and stewardship. Permission to reprint a book review in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 913 914 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Taking up Max Weber’s argument that Christian monasticism gave work a positive religious sanction in the Middle Ages, Ovitt devotes his third chapter to a study of the place of labor in early monastic rules. Again, he provides important nuances to this accepted view: manual work had an important place in Christian monasticism as an antidote for idleness and an expression of fraternal care, but it was always seen as secondary to the monastic community’s central purpose of supporting spiritual growth and worshiping God. Ovitt reviews, in his fourth chapter, a variety of medieval attempts to classify the kinds of human knowledge, in order to locate “the mechanical arts” in the accepted medieval scale of cultural values. Although such classifications always ranked technology in the lowest place—presumably because the authors were always clerical intellec­ tuals—Ovitt notices a growing respect, during the 13th century, for the integrity and scientific character of technological skills. In the fifth chapter, he suggests the reason: revolutionary developments in ag­ riculture, the use of energy, and the management of commerce and money during the 12th century had led to the gradual detachment of work and technology from their subordinate place in a spiritually integral view of the cosmos and its history and so to a gradual “sec­ ularization” of labor. The growing recognition by theologians and monastic writers that laborers constituted a separate “order” in society was simply a response to a line of development that had taken place independently of Christian values and that was to prove, in some ways, contradictory to...