Like other none-historical anti catolic/christian myths the idea that the early church destroyed or held back the achievements of ancient science is widespread in populare culture with persons like Carl Sagan and movies like Agora.
This video takes that myth apart and shows that the early church did not destroy the ancient scientific achievements but was the one institution that preserevd it throughout
late antiquity and the early medieval period.
Highly recommend you watch it and share your own opinions on the subject in the comment section.
youtube.com/watch?v=Zn6XixUJUe8
I thought it was mostly an excellent video, and I particularly appreciated how you defended Tertullian and St. Basil from the charge that they were anti-science. (At first I cringed when you brought up the claim, saying “Some Church Fathers expressed this view” [or something like that], but then you fixed my cringe when you came back to the point later and exonerated them.)
There were one or two things that I would correct if I was making the video. (Someday, I hope to make a similar one for my own channel, History & Apologetics.) For example, Tertullian, Origen and John Philoponus were very important, but you listed them as Church Fathers when they technically weren’t. Tertullian was a former-Catholic who became a Montanist and died outside of communion with the pope. Some of his later writings were written as apologetics Against Catholicism, and for these reasons he is not counted as a Church Father or even as a saint.
Origen too had problems with the Church, but at least died as a Catholic priest in the firm belief that Catholicism was correct. He was, however, something of a “liberal Catholic” in his time, and there were several doctrines of Catholicism that he just could not accept, such as the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the doctrine that hell is everlasting. Because of his obstinate errors on these couple of points (and a couple others), his errors ended up getting condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and he has never been counted among the saints or Church Fathers. (He is still very important.)
John Philoponus, thirdly, never was a Catholic, but always belonged to a denomination called Nestorianism that split from the Catholic Church in the 400s. He did teach science at a Catholic school, though, and that was where he carried out his research. Like Origen and Tertullian, he has never been counted as a saint or Church Father. All three of these men are studied by patristics scholars, though, and in some ways they are more important than some of the “minor” Church Fathers. They actually have a category for people like Origen, Tertullian, and John Philoponus: the are called Ecclesiastical Writers, which is different from Church Fathers but certainly closely related. (The main difference is that Ecclesiastical Writers are not saints and are not always Catholic. Heretics such as Arius and Nestorius also go into the category of Ecclesiastical Writers, and their writings are very important even though the authors are not saints.)
Your video also made some statements that I think are mistakes about the extent of knowledge of Greek in the early medieval Church. At one point you said something like “the early medieval Christians knew hardly any Greek.” In the Greek-speaking lands such as Byzantium, that was not at all true. Catholics in Byzantium continued studying Greek science and doing additional scientific research long into the medieval period. I don’t think these medieval Catholic scientists should be neglected. Greek-speaking Catholic scientists of the early medieval period included Paul of Aegina, Anthemius of Tralles, Isidore of Miletus, Kallinikos of Constantinople, St. Boethius, John of Alexandria, Alexander of Tralles, and Aetius of Amida.
And that’s just the
native Greek speakers. Celtic monks in the far West showed a deep familiarity with Greek writings as late as the 800s, with celts such as John the Scot translating the Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek into Latin and the monk Dicuil quoting from Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Hecataeus. Irish monks, who studied Greek in depth in their monasteries, often were hired by the courts of Charlemagne and his successors to write diplomatic letters in Greek to Arabian courts, because Arabians and Westerners both had people who still knew Greek and thus it was a useful language for diplomacy.
There were a couple other things that I thought were more or less minor mistakes, but I want you to know that I did like your video. Thank you for posting it!
