Thomas Woods on how the Catholic Church built Western civilization: part 2

Historian Thomas Woods, author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, has a great essay on the central role the Catholic church played in building Western civilization. This is a continuation my post from last week on Wood's essay.

Woods:

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows, orphans, the sick and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the church's enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity — that we help those in need not out of any expectation of reciprocity, but as a pure gift, and that we even help those who might not like us — finds no analogue in classical Greece and Rome, but it is this idea of charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world.

By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who has written on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these universities — the very opposite of the popular presumption.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to foster and protect the nascent university system, since the church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point instead to the 16th-century Catholic theologians at Spain's University of Salamanca as the originators of modern economics.

And the list goes on.

I can already hear the complaint: What about these awful things the church did that I heard about in school? For one thing, isn't it a little odd that we never heard any of the material I've presented here in school? Doesn't that seem a trifle unfair?

But although an episode like the medieval Inquisition has been dramatically scaled back in scope and cruelty by recent scholarship — the University of California at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of traditional Catholicism, published a book substantially revising popular view — it is not my subject here. My aim is to point out, as I do in my book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," how indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture teaches us to despise.

The Church, beginning with the Roman world devastated by the barbarian invasions and the fall of the great Empire, rebuilt the West, drawing on the best of Greek and Roman philosophy and law and culture, and uniting it to a spiritual revolution unprecedented in man's history. The Church melded Athens and Rome with Jerusalem. The result of the Christian revolution was the Western cannon of law, magnificent art and music and architecture, philosophical advances building on and exceeding even that of the classical pagan masters, a system of care for the poor and sick that heralded modern hospitals and social service programs, and a breath-taking explosion of scientific knowledge.

As Woods points out, it is a lie to assert that the Church was the enemy of learning and culture and science. The Church was the source of the astonishing achievements of the West.

Western civilization was, and is, Christian civilization. Those who would destroy Christianity-- and there are innumerable cultured and uncultured despisers-- would destroy the West as well.

What shall replace it?