How the (Catholic) Church Built Western Civilization

CORAM, New York, SEPT. 26, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Contrary to popular opinion, the Catholic Church historically has been the champion of scientific, economic, legal and social progress.

So says Thomas Woods Jr., history professor at Suffolk County Community College and author of "How the Church Built Western Civilization" (Regnery).

Woods shared with ZENIT how the Church has contributed to science, the development of free-market economies, Western legal systems and international law, and why Catholic intellectual and cultural figures desperately need to redeem Western civilization.

Q: How did it come to be that the Church is considered the enemy of progress, freedom, human rights, science, and just about everything else modernity champions, when in fact your book claims that the Catholic Church is at the origin of these phenomena?

Woods: There are many reasons for this phenomenon, but I'll confine myself to one. It is much easier to propagate historical myth than most people realize.

Take, for instance, the idea -- which we were all taught in school -- that in the Middle Ages everyone thought the world was flat. This, as Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown, is a 19th-century myth that was deliberately concocted to cast the Church in a bad light. It couldn't be further from the truth.

The matter of Galileo, which most people know only in caricature, has fueled some of this fire. But it is both illegitimate and totally misleading to extrapolate from the Galileo case to the broader conclusion that the Church has historically been hostile to science.

It may come as a surprise to some readers, but the good news is that modern scholarship -- say, over the past 50 to 100 years or so -- has gone a long way toward refuting these myths and setting the record straight.

Scarcely any medievalist worth his salt would today repeat the caricatures of the Middle Ages that were once common currency, and mainstream historians of science would now be embarrassed to repeat the old contention that the relationship between religion and science in the West has been a history of unremitting warfare -- as Andrew Dickson White famously contended a century ago.

Q: Can you briefly describe the Church's particular contributions to the origins and development of modern science?

Woods: Let's begin with a few little-known facts. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. Father Nicholas Steno is considered the father of geology. The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher, and the man often cited as the father of atomic theory was Father Roger Boscovich.

The Jesuits brought Western science all over the world. In the 20th century they so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as "the Jesuit science."

Some Catholic cathedrals were built to function as the world's most precise solar observatories, and the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna was used to verify Johannes Kepler's theory of elliptical planetary orbits.

The science chapter of "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" is by far the longest. In addition to discussing examples like the ones I've just mentioned, it also notes that certain aspects of Catholic teaching -- including the idea of God as orderly and even mathematical, thus making possible the idea of autonomous natural laws -- lent themselves to the development of modern science.

Q: One question you have examined in particular in your books is the Church's role in the development of free-market economies. Many historians, including Catholics, claim that it was only with the Enlightenment and Adam Smith that Western nations were able to expunge "medieval" notions of economics and bring about the Industrial Revolution. Why do you think this is a misreading of history?

Woods: Recent scholarship has discovered that medieval economic thought, particularly in the High and Late Middle Ages, was far more modern and sophisticated than was once thought.

Many scholars, but above all Raymond de Roover, have shown that these thinkers possessed a deeper understanding and appreciation of market mechanisms, and were more sympathetic to a free economy, than traditional portrayals would suggest.

In general they did not believe, as has been commonly alleged, in an objectively ascertainable "just price" of a good, or that the state should enforce such prices across the board. To the contrary, the Scholastics were deeply indebted to Roman law, resurrected in the High Middle Ages, which described the value of a good as what it could commonly be sold for.

The common estimation of the market in effect determined the just price. Debate and discussion on this matter continues, but no serious scholar has been so foolish as to reject de Roover's findings root and branch.

I develop this point at even greater length in my book "The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy," which has received the endorsements of the economics chairmen at Christendom College and the University of Dallas.

An interesting tidbit, by the way, that I discuss in "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" is that at the very time Henry VIII was engaged in the suppression of England's monasteries, those monks were on the verge of developing dedicated blast furnaces for the production of cast iron. Henry may have delayed the Industrial Revolution for two and a half centuries.

Q: One of the more interesting claims of your book is that Western legal systems developed from canon law. How was this possible considering the seemingly incongruous subject matter?

Woods: What I argue is that canon law served as a model for developing Western states seeking to codify and systematize their own legal systems. Harold Berman, the great scholar of Western law, contends that the first modern legal system in the Western world was the Church's canon law.

And that canon law, particularly as codified in Gratian's "Concordance of Discordant Canons," served as a model of what Western states sought to accomplish.

Scholars of Church law showed the barbarized West how to take a patchwork of custom, statutory law and countless other sources, and produce from them a coherent legal order whose structure was internally consistent and in which previously existing contradictions were synthesized or otherwise resolved.

Moreover, the subject matter of canon law was not as far removed from that of civil law as we might think.

For example, the Church had jurisdiction over marriage. The canon law of marriage held that a valid marriage required the free consent of both the man and the woman, and that a marriage could be held invalid if it took place under duress or if one of the parties entered into the marriage on the basis of a mistake regarding either the identity or some important quality of the other person.

"Here," says Berman, "were the foundations not only of the modern law of marriage but also of certain basic elements of modern contract law, namely, the concept of free will and related concepts of mistake, duress and fraud."

Q: Additionally, you note that the concepts of international law and human rights were developed by 16th-century Spanish scholastics such as Francisco de Vitoria. How might this fact be relevant to today's discussions of international law, as well as the Holy See's role in shaping international institutions?

Woods: People such as Francisco de Vitoria were convinced that international law, which codified the natural moral law in international relations, could serve to facilitate peaceful coexistence among people of disparate cultures and religions.

The idea of international law, as the Late Scholastics saw it, was an extension of the idea that no one, not even the state, was exempt from moral constraints. This idea ran completely contrary to the Machiavellian view that the state was morally autonomous and bound by no absolute moral standards.

While the idea of international law is morally indispensable and philosophically unimpeachable, there are practical difficulties associated with its enforcement by an international agency.

If the institution has no coercive powers it will be impotent; if it does have coercive powers then it, too, must be protected against and becomes a threat to the international common good.

There is also the risk that the organization will seek to go beyond mediation and peacekeeping and seek to intervene in the domestic matters of member states or to undermine traditional institutions in those states.

This, of course, is what has happened today, what with the radical politics on constant display at the United Nations. The Holy See's role in international relations, it seems to me, is both to advance peace by means of its own initiatives, and to remain the great obstacle to the leftist social agenda put forth at typical U.N. conferences.

Q: It seems that over the last 40 or 50 years, Catholic contributions to art, literature and science have waned. Additionally, Catholic influence in the academy and other important cultural institutions has also declined. Why do you think this is the case?

Woods: This is a tough one to answer in brief, though I take it up to some extent in my book "The Church Confronts Modernity." That book looks at the great vigor of the Catholic Church in America during the first half of the 20th century.

Here was a self-confident Church that engaged in healthy interaction with the surrounding culture without being absorbed by it.

Hilaire Belloc observed at the time that "the more powerful, the more acute, and the more sensitive minds of our time are clearly inclining toward the Catholic side."

Historian Peter Huff notes that the Catholic Church in America "witnessed such a steady stream of notable literary conversions that the statistics tended to support Calvert Alexander's hypothesis of something suggesting a cultural trend."

According to historian Charles Morris, "Despite the defeat of Al Smith, American Catholics achieved an extraordinary ideological self-confidence by the 1930s, much to the envy of Protestant ministers."

That self-confidence and sense of mission has, for a variety of reasons, diminished substantially since the 1960s.

It is dramatically urgent that Catholic intellectual and cultural figures regain that old confidence and sense of identity, for people need to hear the Church's message more than ever. Pope Benedict XVI has made abundantly clear his displeasure with the moral condition of Western civilization and its need for redemption.

Simone Weil once wrote, "I am not a Catholic, but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded."

Western civilization seems to be learning that one the hard way.

The author makes a dubious claim about a "Machiavellian view"

"-- as the Late Scholastics saw it, [there] was [an] idea that no one, not even the state, was exempt from moral constraints.
This idea ran completely contrary to the Machiavellian view that the state was morally autonomous and bound by no absolute moral standards. -- "

True, no one, not even the state, is exempt from constraints.

But to the contrary, - Machiavelli rejects the whole idea that the morality that does and should hold between individual human beings automatically extends to 'moral' relations between government & citizens.

This means that Machiavelli rejects the natural law tradition, according to which the basic principles of human morality, both private and public, as incorporated in political constitutions, are natural and built into the structure of the universe, rather than products of human history.

Machiavelli's own stance is one of pragmatism. -- To him whether a policy is political correct or not depends entirely on the consequences, the practical upshot, and not on an application of high moral principles, decreed by men who deem themselves superior.

For Machiavelli, justice (for example) does not exist either in nature or by God's commandment.
Rather, justice is whatever the common man, in juries of your peers, decides it to be.

your ignorance of the Inquisition is astounding.

Don't lecture me. I am not at all ignorant on this. I was responding to the unflinchingly unrepentant attitude in which the Inquisition was being 'explained' away. I shudder to think of such 'explanations' offered to the Righteous Judge.

Sometimes they lost their property

Right. Dream on buddy. Your's is a sick and twisted history, and a sick and twisted religion if that is where it takes you.

Reading your account of history and your excuses for the abuses of the Catholic church remind an awful lot of Muslim revisionism, and Muslim excuses for much the same dispicable actions.

This thread has convinced me that Catholicism before the Reformation was simply a few dozen years more advanced that Islam.

The circular logic of the Catholic Church is based on the assertion: "The Catholic Church is always right." It is often covered in several layers of abstraction, but it is always there none the less.

1 Clement starts the whole process and that's the real corner stone of the Papacy.

Catholics will claim it is the keys, but that's further down the circular logic track. First claim primacy, second claim the right to interpret the Bible, then claim primacy through interpretation.

Which came first, 1 Clement or the keys?

It reminds me of the Supreme Court. Some judges look to the Constitution for truth and principle. Other judges look to the Constitution to prove their own belief.

The keys given to Peter are an example of looking to the Bible to prove an existing belief.

The keys given to Peter are an example of looking to the Bible to prove an existing belief.

Before Christ gave the "keys" to Peter, another momentous event took place.

Mark 3:16; John 1:42 – Jesus renames Simon "Kepha" in Aramaic which literally means "rock." This was an extraordinary thing for Jesus to do, because "rock" was not even a name in Jesus' time. Jesus did this, not to give Simon a strange name, but to identify his new status among the apostles. When God changes a person's name, He changes their status.

Matt. 16:18 - Jesus said in Aramaic, you are "Kepha" and on this "Kepha" I will build my Church.

And there is the Scriptural foundation.

If you study the history of Christianity, you will not find "sola sciptura," "sola fides," rejection of the sacraments, rejection of the priesthood/celibacy, rejection of intercessory prayer, etc., prior to Martin Luther.

Wow. Your history gets wilder and wilder. You need to get out more. You think Luther invented the ideas of Reformation? Truth be told, the excesses of the Papacy from 1200 to 1500 had a greater effect.

Put aside whether Luther was right or wrong (I am not a Luther fan myself), your history must be coming from the same source that says burning at the stake only hurts mildly. Sheesh. There is a LONG list of people exterminated by the Roman Church for very much the same things that the Reformation pressed.

Peter Waldo predated Luther by almost 400 years. He taught many of the same things that Luther/Calvin/Zwingli did 400 years later - and it brought the Waldensians the same harsh and murderous treatment as the Jews would receive in Spain 300 years later. Tell me, what excuses does your "All Saints' Excuses, A Catholic History" book say for the treatment of the Waldensians? There are many more, and many more earlier, but you are welcome to your revisionism.

My advice to everyone contemplating conversion to Catholicism, do not do it for extraneous reasons, even under great duress as it won't help your soul.

If you'd get off your high horse long enough to see, anybody who would believe you are a reliable source for that would be a RC anyhow.

I've heard the "inquisition wasn't so bad" line a number of times.

It is like reading an article in the Saudi opinion pages. Maybe the shills for the violence of the Catholic church is who the mullahs learned it from.

only mild torture... only their property was taken...

I have a better understanding of what drove the Puritans to leave Europe.

Naw, the Mullahs came by it independently... the work of the devil is partial to no religion.

I look at this fetish of Catholics for human inflicted pain and torture, somewhat moderated in modern time but still present, then look at the bible and say sheeeeeesh, who piled this doctrine on top?

Actually - yes you do misrepresent the faith, but that is not surprising.

People didn't just happen to "start" reading the bible centuries after the canon was established. What they did is they started to stray from the interpretation held by the Church since the beginning.

But yes...moving along is a good idea as I have grown weary of the same old conversation...

protestant: "you catholics worship Mary and the saints"
catholic: "umm...no we don't"
protestant: "yes - you catholics worship Mary and the saints"
catholic: "no - we catholics do not worhip Mary and the saints"

and so and so forth.
Very boring.

Since you've heard of catholic.com and seem intent on arguing, why don't you take it up with these folks here?

http://forums.catholic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=20

I for one think my time is better spent reading scripture.
God Bless you.

Peter Waldo predated Luther by almost 400 years. He taught many of the same things that Luther/Calvin/Zwingli did 400 years later - and it brought the Waldensians the same harsh and murderous treatment as the Jews would receive in Spain 300 years later....

and gave rise to the establishment of the Inquisition in the early 13th century

If you can show me where in the Bible Christ removes the priesthood, as an office, I'm all ears.

That is the problem, you are trying to see through the holes in your head that were made for hearing.

If you can show me in Scripture where anyone other than the Levitical priesthood, or the order of Malki-Tzedek are priests, I am ready to read. In the TaNaKh (Old Testament to you) there are two priesthood's dedicated to G-d. Only two. Descendants of Aharon [Aaron], and Malki-Tzedik. Scripture is quite clear that anyone trying to operate as a priest must be in one of these two orders, and when I say 'order' of Malki-Tzedek, it is an order of one, since we have no geneology or descendants for him. So that means all your Catholic priest are Kohen [descendants of Aharon], right? Wrong, they merely participated in the murder of countless kohenim, descendants of Levi.

If you have a "New Testament" page over to the book of Hebrews and you will see that there is no "order of Rome" listed. Only two: descendants of Aharon, and Malki-Tzedek.

Now, go clean our your ears and use them for hearing and heeding. And put salve in your eyes, they are for seeing.

looking to the Bible to prove an existing belief

The Catholic church is apostolic. The Bible is not the source of its truths; Christ is, Who is the incarnate Word, and the Church propagates the Word. It is always right because Christ is her bridegroom, not because of a particular verse or a particular encyclical.

Nevertheless, the Scripture, as NYer pointed out, shows ascendancy of Peter at several junctures: the profession of Peter followed by the granting of the new name, promise of Christ's Church built, symbolically, on Peter the Rock, handing of the keys, another profession of Peter's love for Christ, and the charge to feed and guide the sheep. The primacy of the Chair of Peter, nor its location in Rome, was never challenged in the Early Church, as the letter of Pope Clement (among other patristic documents) illustrates. So, the primacy of the Papacy is both scriptural and apostolic.

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