Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has called anti-Catholicism the one remaining acceptable prejudice in America. His assessment is difficult to dispute. In our media and popular culture, little is off-limits when it comes to ridiculing or parodying the Church. My own students, to the extent that they know anything at all about the Church, are typically familiar only with alleged Church “corruption,” of which they heard ceaseless tales of varying credibility from their high school teachers. The story of Catholicism, as far as they know, is one of ignorance, repression, and stagnation. That Western civilization stands indebted to the Church for the university system, charitable work, international law, the sciences, important legal principles, and much else besides has not exactly been impressed upon them with terrific zeal. Western civilization owes far more to the Catholic Church than most people—Catholics included—often realize. The Church, in fact, built Western civilization.
Western civilization does not derive entirely from Catholicism, of course; one can scarcely deny the importance of ancient Greece and Rome or of the various Germanic tribes that succeeded the Roman Empire in the West as formative influences on our civilization. The Church repudiated none of these traditions, and in fact absorbed and learned from the best of them. What is striking, though, is how in popular culture the substantial—and essential—Catholic contribution has gone relatively unnoticed.
No serious Catholic would contend that churchmen were right in every decision they made. While Catholics believe that the Church will maintain the faith in its integrity until the end of time, that spiritual guarantee in no way implies that every action of the popes and the episcopate is beyond reproach. To the contrary, Catholics distinguish between the holiness of the Church as an institution guided by the Holy Spirit and the inevitable sinful nature of men, including the men who serve the Church.
Still, recent scholarship has definitively revised in the Church’s favor some historical episodes traditionally cited as evidence of the Church’s wickedness. For example, we now know that the Inquisition was not nearly as harsh as previously portrayed, and that the number of people brought before it was far smaller—by orders of magnitude—than the exaggerated accounts that were once accepted. This is not merely special pleading on the author’s part, but the clearly stated conclusion of the best and most recent scholarship.1
The point is that in our present cultural milieu it is easy to forget—or not to learn in the first place—just how much our civilization owes to the Catholic Church. To be sure, most people recognize the influence of the Church in music, art, and architecture. The purpose of this book, however, is to demonstrate that the Church’s influence on Western civilization goes well beyond these areas. With the exception of scholars of medieval Europe, most people believe that the thousand years prior to the Renaissance were a time of ignorance and intellectual repression in which vigorous debate and lively intellectual exchange did not occur, and that strict conformity was ruthlessly imposed on whatever scholarly community might be said to have existed. My students can hardly be blamed for believing this; after all, it is only what they were taught in school and in American popular culture.
Even some professional authors can still be found giving credence to this view. In the course of some research, I came across a 2001 book called Second Messiah by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. These authors paint a picture of the Catholic Church and its influence on Western civilization that could not be more wrong. They get away with it thanks to the strong prejudice against the Middle Ages, as well as an overall lack of knowledge of the period, that exists among the public. For example, we read: “The establishment of the Romanised Christian era marked the beginning of the Dark Ages: the period of Western history when the lights went out on all learning, and superstition replaced knowledge. It lasted until the power of the Roman Church was undermined by the Reformation.”2 Again: “Everything that was good and proper was despised and all branches of human achievement were ignored in the name of Jesus Christ.”3
Now, I realize that this is precisely what many readers were themselves taught in school, but there is scarcely a single historian to be found today who would view these comments with anything but amused contempt. The statements made in Second Messiah fly in the face of a century of scholarship, and Knight and Lomas, who are not trained historians, seem blissfully unaware that they are repeating tired old canards that not a single professional historian any longer believes. It must be frustrating to be a historian of medieval Europe: No matter how hard you work and how much evidence you produce to the contrary, just about everyone still believes that the entire period was intellectually and culturally barren, and that the Church bequeathed to the West nothing but repression.
Not mentioned by Knight and Lomas is that it was in “Dark Age” Europe that the university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church. Historians have marveled at the extent to which intellectual debate in those universities was free and unfettered. The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange—all sponsored by the Church—provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution, which was unique to Western civilization.
For the last fifty years, virtually all historians of science—including A. C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Goldstein, and J. L. Heilbron—have concluded that the Scientific Revolution was indebted to the Church. The Catholic contribution to science went well beyond ideas—including theological ideas—to accomplished practicing scientists, many of whom were priests. For example, Father Nicolaus Steno, a Lutheran convert who became a Catholic priest, is often identified as the father of geology. The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was yet another priest, Father Giambattista Riccioli. Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory. Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as “the Jesuit science.”
And that is far from all. Even though some thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians, the Church’s contributions to astronomy are all but unknown to the average educated American. Yet, as J. L. Heilbron of the University of California at Berkeley points out, “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”4 Still, the Church’s true role in the development of modern science remains one of the best-kept secrets of modern history.
While the importance of the monastic tradition has been recognized to one degree or another in the standard narrative of Western history—everyone knows that the monks preserved the literary inheritance of the ancient world, not to mention literacy itself, in the aftermath of the fall of Rome—in this book, the reader will discover that the monks’ contributions were in fact far greater. One can scarcely find a significant endeavor in the advancement of civilization during the early Middle Ages in which the monks did not play a major role. As one study described it, the monks gave “the whole of Europe…a network of model factories, centers for breeding livestock, centers of scholarship, spiritual fervor, the art of living…readiness for social action—in a word…advanced civilization that emerged from the chaotic waves of surrounding barbarity. Without any doubt, Saint Benedict [the most important architect of Western monasticism] was the Father of Europe. The Benedictines, his children, were the Fathers of European civilization.”5
The development of the idea of international law, while at times tenuously associated with the ancient Stoics, is often attributed to the thinkers and rights theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, however, the idea is first found in sixteenth-century Spanish universities, and it was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law. Faced with Spanish mistreatment of the natives of the New World, Vitoria and other Catholic philosophers and theologians began to speculate about human rights and the proper relations that ought to exist between nations. These Catholic thinkers originated the idea of international law as we understand it today.
Western law itself is very largely a gift of the Church. Canon law was the first modern legal system in Europe, proving that a sophisticated, coherent body of law could be assembled from the hodgepodge of frequently contradictory statutes, traditions, local customs, and the like with which both Church and state were faced in the Middle Ages. According to legal scholar Harold Berman, “[I]t was the church that first taught Western man what a modern legal system is like. The church first taught that conflicting customs, statutes, cases, and doctrines may be reconciled by analysis and synthesis.”6
The idea of formulated “rights” comes from Western civilization. Specifically, it comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson—as many might assume—but from the canon law of the Catholic Church. Other important legal principles associated with Western civilization can also be traced back to the Church’s influence, as churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal concepts in place of the superstition-based trials by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order.
According to old economic histories, modern economics comes from Adam Smith and other economic theorists of the eighteenth century. More recent studies, however, emphasize the importance of the economic thought of the Late Scholastics, particularly the Spanish Catholic theologians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some, like the great twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter, have even gone so far as to call these Catholic thinkers the founders of modern scientific economics.
Most people know about the charitable work of the Catholic Church, but what they often don’t know is just how unique the Church’s commitment to such work was. The ancient world affords us some examples of liberality toward the poor, but it is a liberality that seeks fame and recognition for the giver, and which tends to be indiscriminate rather than specifically focused on those in need. The poor were all too often treated with contempt, and the very idea of helping the destitute without any thought to reciprocity or personal gain was something foreign. Even W. E. H. Lecky, a nineteenth-century historian highly critical of the Church, admitted that the Church’s commitment to the poor—both its spirit and its sheer scope—constituted something new in the Western world and represented a dramatic improvement over the standards of classical antiquity.
In all these areas the Church made an indelible imprint on the very heart of European civilization and was a profoundly significant force for good. A recent one-volume history of the Catholic Church was called Triumph—an entirely appropriate title for a history of an institution boasting so many heroic men and women and so many historic accomplishments. Yet relatively little of this information is found in the Western civilization textbooks the average student reads in high school and college. That, in large measure, is why this book was written. In many more ways than people now realize, the Catholic Church has shaped the kind of civilization we inhabit and the kind of people we are. Though the typical college textbook will not say so, the Catholic Church was the indispensable builder of Western civilization. Not only did the Church work to overturn the morally repugnant aspects of the ancient world—like infanticide and gladiatorial combats—but after Rome’s fall, it was the Church that restored and advanced civilization. It began by tutoring the barbarians; and it is to the barbarians that we now turn.