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.

annalex sez:

Regarding specifically Spanish Jews, the Holy Inquisition concerned itself only with the dishonest Conversos, that is, precisely, Jewish converts to Christianity that secretly maintained their Jewish faith.

Well, you are going to have to answer to historical reports from the Jewish side of the fence that these "Conversos" (known in the Jewish world as "Marranos") were conversions of coercion fueled by anti-semitism. And now that they pleased their Catholic neighbors by acting Catholic, they get whipsawed from the other direction. It scarcely needs to be said that Jesus Christ never won a single soul that way.

Moral Absolutes Ping.

Lively discussion; please skip over any sectarianist stuff... I agree more than 100% that people of different sects/monotheist religions should put aside their differences, realizing that the differences are much smaller than than agreements. If those who believe in God keep fighting with each other, guess who's happy?

Secularists/atheists/lefists/socialists/marxists/feminists/homosexualists etc etc. Nothing makes them as happy as sectarian or religious infighting.

Without faith in God and the sincere effort to follow His instructions, there would be no civilization. Not one we'd want to live in.

Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.

Safisoft, your ignorance of the Inquisition is astounding.

Since there was no such thing as the separation of Church and State in Spain during this time period--as in every time period but our own--the Church was concerned with supposed "converts" who had not really converted, but claimed to do so to obtain political benefits, which were limited by the Crown to those who were Catholic. Some of those fake converts were Jews (Marranos), some Muslims (Moriscos), and when their true religious allegiance was discovered, they lost their positions of power, they sometimes lost their property, and they sometimes lost their lives. It had taken the Catholic Spaniards five hundred years to remove the Moslem invaders and their collaborators of all religions from the Iberian peninsula, and the Crown and the Church dealt with fake converts with understandable seriousness.

If President Bush found out that one of his cabinet members had falsely taken his oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and had instead pledged allegiance to worldwide jihad, what would the US do? How do we treat those who would falsely pledge allegiance to our principles and assume positions of power? Removal from office, prison, death?

Damn right we have such penalites, and so did the Inquisition.

I agree more than 100% that people of different sects/monotheist religions should put aside their differences, realizing that the differences are much smaller than than agreements.

What exactly are you suggesting we set aside? If I mistakenly thought my wife was a secretary for a law firm but she really worked as a fashion designer, would it not be in my bests interests to know the truth? If I didn't care what was true about my wife, so long as I know she loved me, what kind of a marriage would that be? Rather, our love is only strengthened by the continual process of knowing more and more about what is true about the other's life and desires and wanting to share in them.

Why would the same not apply to one's love of God? If we are to truly love God it is imperative to know what is true about Him and an all-loving God would seek to reveal all that is true about Him so that we can grow into deeper union with each other.

To write off discussions over the nature of God and His plan for His people as "unimportant" or "irrelevant" is to claim that the nature of God or His will is not important or relevant. I would never say that to my wife, nor would I say that about God.

Although I suppose being content with all points of view allows one to avoid being challenged and having to think about their own beliefs.....and we can't have that now can we?

still do not understand why some Baptists keep Catholics at arms length

I am Baptist, and I keep Catholics at "arms length"....Just long enough for a good hearty handshake.
I will have to disagree that our beliefs are 99% similar though. There are very significant differences in some very important details.
I have several friends who are very dedicated Catholics and have spoken at great length with them. I have found that many times the terms that we use have different meanings to us.
I have also found that, like Baptists, some are Catholics just because they don't know what else to be. I was discussing Salvation with a friend once who was Catholic and he actually said, and I quote, "I'm Catholic, we don't have anything like salvation in our church." I went on and tried to witness to him about the Saving Grace of Jesus Christ, but he would have nothing to do with it. I would not, however, form my view on Catholicism solely on our conversation though.
Another friend, who is Catholic, I was convinced believed that he was Saved because he did good works, and was good enough. After a very long discussion, I found that his faith is in the saving blood of Jesus Christ alone. We had some very significant terminology differences to get through though.

When I take a public stand on moral issues that effect my children, and my ability to teach them to study Gods word, I frequently look around and see nearly all Catholics who are standing with me.
While I understand many of the significant differences in our faith, I will continue to consider all who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior , my brother (or sister) in Christ. I will also continue try and help them "come to the knowledge of the truth" using Gods word as a guide, just as many Catholics do with me.

Just my two cents worth

Cordially,
GE

I think you are mis-reading my intention. I am not suggesting that people of any faith should not persevere and increase their knowledge of and devotion to God.

I am just saying that vicious infighting between monotheists greatly please those who hate God and are busily attempting - with measurable success - to dismantle the basic religious foundations of human civilization.

Who is more dangerous to society - someone who believes in God but worships a little differently, on a different day, or in a different house of worship than you, or an atheist homosexual-promoting NAMBLA supporting ACLU activist who is trying to remove every reference to God in the public sphere?

I think the answer is pretty clear.

Maybe your view could be summed up like this:
In my office there are eight of us who are followers of Christ. Two Baptist, one Pentecostal, two Catholic, two Assembly of God, and a Methodist.
We frequently discuss scripture and debate faiths, but no matter what the discussion, when one who does not know Jesus Christ as their Savior joins the discussion we only continue with the parts we agree on - the Saving power of Jesus Christ and Mans need of that Salvation.
In private, or at lunch alone, we can get pretty heated (in a Christ-like way), but never in public.

Cordially,
GE

Yes, I'll agree that the terminology is a real stumbling block for both Baptists and Catholics. I've learned that Baptist Grace = Catholic Works + Catholic Faith + Catholic Grace.

However when you find a knowledgable, practicing, patient Catholic, you'll find that John 3:16 is pretty central to both faiths and that everything else is either a difference in terminology or procedure.

So Clement laid the foundation for the Papacy. This is exactly my point. Here is the start of the circular logic. After you unwind all of the layers, you end up with one man writing a letter that was rejected from the canon.

Two interesting things about 1 Clement. First, it claims inspiration (1 Clem 63:2). Second it speaks of the phoenix in Arabia as a real bird (1 Clem 25).

1 Clement is not canon for good reason.

conversions of coercion fueled by anti-semitism.

Conversion of coercion is not a good thing and was never encouraged by the Church, at least not doctrinally. I am sure abuse happened and I realize that many Jews never converted in their hearts, and that presented a problem for everyone around.

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.

It is also true that the Catholic Church would make an exception during WWII and accept converts without asking questions, if that helped save lives. But this was done when emigration was not an option. I don't know if the similar consideration was made during the Reconquest of Spain, and what the position of the Holy Inquisition was when a conversion was confessed to be one of duress.

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