№ 164/2024 from Sep 05, 2024

The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Christoph Sander an ERC Starting Grant to fund a research project for the next five years at Freie Universität Berlin. The project, SCIGMA (“Science and Dogma: Tracing Natural Knowledge within Scholastic Theology [1545–1789]”) aims to investigate the considerable influence the natural sciences had on European theology during the early modern period.

The early modern period is commonly known as a period of profound change, and included substantial breaks with traditional thought, for example, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. Historians have often linked these two seemingly disparate transformations in many different ways, but one important dimension is yet to receive the attention it deserves. This is where SCIGMA comes in. The research team’s main hypothesis is that knowledge in the natural sciences significantly influenced dogmatics as a central branch of theology in the early modern university. For example, many university theology textbooks at the time eagerly addressed questions related to the natural sciences, such as: Can the bodily resurrection be understood from a physiological perspective? Which physics apply for the Eucharist?

While much has been written on the impact of theology on the natural sciences, SCIGMA will turn the tables to uncover their truly entangled relationship. The project will systematically investigate how empiricism and the scientific method informed scholastic and dogmatic theology across all Western Christian denominations – from the Council of Trent held between 1545 and 1563 to the French Revolution in 1789. The aim is to situate theology as a “scientia” in the premodern university and thus to include it within the history of science and knowledge.

SCIGMA’s primary objective is to discover the multiple and changing ways in which the natural sciences informed premodern scholastic theology, which sought a rational reconstruction of faith. Additionally, the team aims to uncover what effective epistemological frameworks accommodated this interplay of empiricism and revelation, and the role played by religious and secular institutions of learning.

This complex historical analysis will reveal the significant role of the “physico-dogmatic domain” in institutional learning, and shed novel light on how premodern Western societies fundamentally reshaped and secularized scientific inquiry.

Christoph Sander studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin before completing a doctoral degree at Technische Universität Berlin. He has held research positions at various institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and currently works at the German Historical Institute in Rome as a knowledge and software engineer. His work at Freie Universität Berlin will provisionally begin in 2025.