How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Once again the advantage of the family custom of reading books before they are given as gifts pays off. I am buying the above title (by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D.) for my father-in-law for Christmas, and I get first dibs.

The suspicion we always have with such titles is that it is going to be like the lessons our grandparents told us about our ethnic group. How A Swede Really Wrote The Constitution, or Ukrainian-American Scientists. There will be a special pleading, an unearthing of worthy but obscure figures who didn't get the credit they deserved, put forward in hagiographic fashion. "Did you know that Thomas Edison said that Radu Radulescu was a greater inventor than he was?"

The best send-up of this was National Lampoon's "White Studies" section "Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was a white man?" - circa 1973-74.

There is a whiff of that here, but not much. Woods makes the case that the Catholic church not only contributed to Western Civilization, but is the greater part of its foundation.

Since the writers calling themselves The Enlightenment rewrote history for their own purposes, inventing the Renaissance to contrast with the Dark Ages, their view of how Europe developed has been the framework on which all other historical information has been tacked. By their telling, Christianity in general and especially Catholicism was a rigid, oppressive structure which discouraged science, human rights, and thinking in general in order to maintain its control over Europe. Some grudging credit is given to monk copyists and the support of artists, but the overall picture is of a corrupt church resisting all change and improvements. The story of Galileo is trotted out. Most versions get the story wrong - almost backwards - and the critics are hard pressed to come up with another example, but the myth fits the required template.

When you send your kids to Baptist schools they get a considerable dose of this as well.

CS Lewis, who had the slight advantage of having actually studied the entirety of philosophy and literature of Europe covering a thousand-year period and more, usually in the original languages, rejected this view entirely. Over time, he has cured me of it as well. I am thus pretty sympathetic at the outset to scholars who challenge this prevailing view. It is worth noting the self-congratulatory aspects of the framework as a guide to why it is still attractive, as scientists (and even more, social scientists), artists, libertines, humanists, New Agers, extreme Protestants, and a dozen other groups can all congratulate themselves about how much wiser they are than those old Catholics. That is a powerful incentive to keep the Enlightenment framework.

Dr. Woods does not set out to explain why such a model is inadequate or oversimple; he stands the model on its head. The Roman Catholic Church did not advance agriculture, for example, by merely having some guys who happened to live in Catholic countries and grew apples and such. All agricultural advances in Europe came out of the network of monasteries sharing information. All. This devotion to improvement was intentional on the part of the monks, who studied stockbreeding, machinery, soil & fertilization, irrigation, preservation - all the arts of farming.

We lack a picture of how primitive Europe was before the arrival of Christianity. Justice meant not law and rights, but only revenge. Guilt was determined not by evidence and witnesses, but by ordeals of fire or boiling water. How pervasive these ideas were among the tribes the pitiful few preachers and monks lived among is evidenced by how long the customs persisted. In 1800 one could still find trials by ordeal in Europe, and duels to determine who was in the right. Cultures change but slowly. Odd that the Church, the only influence away from customs, should be blamed because its followers, also drawn from these cultures, were not changed quickly enough for our taste.

There was no reading and writing, save Ogham and scraps of runes. Even these reached their height only after the introduction of learning by the Church. There was no farming as we know it. People gathered and scattered a few types of grain, with no plowing and little scything. They fished in shallow areas. They hunted with spears, they wove no cloth. They kept a few sheep and chickens, and did know some metallurgy and small shipbuilding, knowledge acquired via predatory raids to the south.

Picture again what they had for architecture in Europe in the early centuries of the Common Era. Thatched huts; earthworks for defense; clusters of tiny stone houses half underground. The standing stones were all left over from earlier eras. What did they have of literature? Storytelling. Of music? Drums, animal horns. Even wood flutes and rudimentary harps did not come along until later.

Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins both have anti-religious books out recently. The idea is that the improvements we now hardly notice would have happened anyway; all those brilliant Bacons and da Vincis would have existed anyway and brought us forward. The church was at best a half-hearted encouragement to the improvements of earthly life, a mere accidental place holder. The structure and organization might have been helpful, and its folks were well-meaning enough to mitigate much of their intellectual harm. But religion has poisoned everything it touches, and we would have been better served if progress had been made another way.

Except that there was no other way. Europe started 2000 years behind the Levant, Egypt, & Persia, and an equivalent amount behind China, in every area of human endeavor, and in the space of a thousand years passed them all, taught by a relative handful of Christian monks. It is all very well to think how nice it might be if things had happened otherwise, but the point is they didn't. That much improvement at all levels in that short (yes, a millennium is short) amount of time has happened precisely once.

There is a parallel theme with my immediately preceding post linking to Grim's essay over at Blackfive. We forget how spectacularly primitive and violent most people have been at most times, and how very abnormal our normal lives are.