How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

[KathleenGee]

Again, we have to look at documented history.

 

[Whadyamean]

Again, we have to look at documented history.

Of course, and some have to some degree and some kinds. I again remind you of Eusebius’ version of Catholic history and hos own comment on it. But from what perspective(s) of interpretation are we looking, and do we know what we are looking with and to what end?

 

[KathleenGee]

Understand the bias…but I am looking at documented, constructed sites, and what percentage was served by these various social institutions.

Likewise we are living in a global culture that invalidates and malign the Catholic Church and Christianity in general.

 

[Stephen168]

Thinking is thinking and is “religious” thinking only insofar as content when one is thinking about religion, whether they are or are not religious and whatever brand of it they practice or don’t.

Religious thinking causes people to do and abstain for various actions. Thinking can cause action (Matthew 25:31-46)

If the Muslims had taken over Europe you would be just as hot to purport that Islam is the reason for Western “civilization” because you wold be Muslim. Yes?

If Islam had taken over Europe and ruled it for 1000 years, it would seem to me that whatever Western Civilization is would be caused by Islam. Half of Spain was ruled by Muslims for 400 years and has had a lasting effect in Spain. But Islam did NOT rule the bulk of Europe for 1000 years; Catholicism did. Even at a gut level one would have to know that Catholicism made it what it is.

So what we are really taking about is human cultural norms as manifested in this instance in “Catholic” Europe. Those advances as mentioned in the book happened not because those people were specifically Catholic, but because they were thinkers who lived in an environment colored by a prevalent religion.

Yes, it was Catholic soil that grew Western Civilization. We can discuss where each nutrient and seed came from, but it was Catholicism that selected, planted, and tended them, so it grew into what it is.

Did the Catholic Church invent hospitals, colleges and monasteries? In general, I don’t think so, but it did invent Catholic hospitals, colleges and monasteries which were actively supported by the Church. I would suggest it is the Catholic idea of college and hospital that the rest of the world strives to be. The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope is also a standard for others to follow.

 

[John21652]

The division of the Roman Empire into two, east and west, made weakened the influence of Rome in matters of state. The eastern half became the Byzantine Empire and embraced Greek language and culture. Both halves of the Empire were constantly at war with tribes and peoples from beyond their borders. In Asia, the Persians were a constant menace and in the west, across the danube and the Rhine, the barbarian tribes od Sarmatians, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Bergundians, Alamanni, Quadi, Vandals and behind them, pushing forward for unknown reasons from the steppes, the ferocious tribe of Huns. The line could not be held as a rush of “immigrants” pushed into Roman territory. In AD 410 Rome was sacked by Aliric the Visigoth.

Aliric was typical of the incursions of foreign populations into the Roman Empire. His people had been permitted to settle and he himself was once in the Roman army. The Visigoths sought refuge from the advancing Huns and asked the Roman Emperor to be allowed to settle along the Danube River. Other Germanic tribes, such as the Franks, the Alamanni, the Ostrogoths and the other Germanic tribes had gradually pushed deeper and deeper into Roman territory and were assimilated in various degrees. Princeton University professor of History, Peter Brown, in his tome The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 , p174, states that “These invasions were not perpetual, destructive raids, still less were they organised campaigns of conquest. Rather they were a “gold rush” of immigrants from the underdeveloped countries of the north into the rich lands of the Mediteranean”. With the decline in Rome’s power and influence after the Emperor Constantine moved his capital to Byzantium, “…it became a time of confusion, disorder and violence when fearful and frequently hungy hordes ranged around Europe in search of food and security.” (The Templars, Piers Paul Read, p 31). In 406 the Vandals and Sueves , followed by the Burgundians and Alamanni, fled from the advancing Huns across the frozen Rhine River into Gaul. In 407 the Romans withdrew from Britain.In 410 Aliric sacked Rome. In 429 80,000 Vandals swept through Spain, over the straights of Gibralter and into the Roman Provinces of North Africa. St. Augustine dies in 430 while the Vandals were beseiging Hippo. In The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 p.122 Princeton University Professor of History, Peter Brown writes that this did not mean “…the dissapearance of a civilisation: it was merely the breaking down of a government apparatus that could no longer be sustained.”

because it wasn’t an ‘invasion’, but a migration, the immigrants became an integral part of the Empire before it crumbled. In The Templars,p32, Piers Paul Read writes that "The barbarians, who remained minorities in the lands they conquered, felt no antagonism to the empire and the idea of abolishing it never crossed their mind. In Early Medieval Europe, p.91, Edinburgh University fellow Roger Collins wrote “…the conception of that empire was too universal, too august, too enduring. It was everywhere around them and they could remember no time when it had not been so.”

Amidst all the political and social turmoil, the idea of the empire was held together by the Catholic Church.

 

[Whadyamean]

Religious thinking causes people to do and abstain for various actions. Thinking can cause action (Matthew 25:31-46)Thinking always precedes action. Religious thinking by definition is about faith, morals, allegedly spiritual matters, and the like. It is not scientific thinking.

If Islam had taken over Europe and ruled it for 1000 years, it would seem to me that whatever Western Civilization is would be caused by Islam. Half of Spain was ruled by Muslims for 400 years and has had a lasting effect in Spain. But Islam did NOT rule the bulk of Europe for 1000 years; Catholicism did. Even at a gut level one would have to know that Catholicism made it what it is.

 

[GraceSofia]

Why conflate religion and intellectual accomplishment? It is simply silly. Certainly there were wonderful intellectual accomplishments in our Church as in any other religion. But it wasn’t the religion that caused the accomplishment, it was the intellect, even if the subject mater was within the dogmatic scheme of the religion.

Religion creates culture; the culture creates intellectual accomplishment.

Catholicism, with its belief that faith and reason are compatible, created a culture of inquiry, experimental science, the freedom to ask and search. Other religions, that do not believe that faith and reason are compatible, produce different cultures, often cultures wherein progress stagnates because inquiry and asking questions is not allowed. If everything is fated, then why bother to improve man’s lot in life?

When a culture believes that God and, importantly, that His creation are orderly, this allows the culture to engage in quantitative inquiry in a search to understand the universe.

“Non-Christian cultures, on the other hand, did not possess the same philosophical tools, and indeed were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science” and in these cultures, science “suffered a stillbirth.” Nobody is denying that other cultures made some technological progress but in them “we do not see the flowering of formal and sustained scientific inquiry emerging.” (quotes from pp 76-77 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization).

 

[John21652]

.
Amidst all the political and social turmoil, the idea of the empire was held together by the Catholic Church.

The social organisation and cultural traditions of the Roman Empire survived the demise of a single centralised administration in the counties, as duchies and kingdoms started to take shape, such as the Ostrogothic principality in Italy; a Visigothic state in Spain and in Gaul as far as the Loire and further north, the Kingdom of the Salian Franks. By the end of the fifth century, the Franks, under their King, Clovis, had become the dominant power north of the Alps. Around 498 Clovis converted to Christianity, along with all his Barons.

Clovis’ conversion was as momentous as the conversion of the Emperor Constantine for the future of the Christian Church. This ‘marriage’ between secular and spiritual was very different to what it had been under the Roman Emperors. Clovis did not rule over an educated, ordered society. He was the leader of an uneducated ferocious horde of fighting men. He could not give the Church lavish gifts of land and fiscal priviliges. All he could give was the souls of his savage people and a committment to the universal, or ‘Catholic’ Church. So how was it that the Catholic Church could hold such sway over a barbarian tribe? Christianity was the religion of the Roman peoples subsumed under Clovis’s conquests. Some say Clovis converted after witnessing a miracle at the tomb of Martin of Tours, whose shrine was testament to the power and prestige of Christianity across the empire. Others say Clovis converted to further cement the bonds between his tribe and the people over whom he now ruled. Either way, it was the power of Christianity in the minds of the people that affected him. Clovis called the First Council of Orleans to reform the Church and forge closer ties between state and Church.

The Church had much to offer an uneducated barbarous horde. It was an intact organisation modelled on that of the Roman state. At its apex was the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome, now called the Pope, from the Greek pappas, meaning Father, with Cardinals as the department heads of his administration. Below him in what remained of the larger cities of the ruined Empire, were the arch-bishops, and in most towns of any stature, bishops with a corps of literate deacons and priests. And, of course, the Pope was the successor to St. Peter and Christ’s Vicar on Earth, with the power to “loose and bind”

Poes had turned away invaders. Fifty years after Aliric plundered Rome, Pope Leo 1 (The Great) went to Mantua where he successfully pursuaded Attila The Hun to stay away from Rome. In 455 he met the leader of the Vandals, Gaiseric, outside the walls of the city and persuaded him to not harm the people of Rome as he sacked the city.

A hundred years later, another Pope, Gregory, who like Leo was to be called "the Great’, faced a Lombard invasion and made himself responsible for the welfare of the citizens of Rome. Coming from a rich aristocratic family, he used his own resources to mitigate the suffering of the bpoor and he appointed rectors to maximise receipts from the patrimony of St. Peter, large estates all over Europe that belonged to the papcy. In 593, when the Lombard King Agilulf besieged the city, Gregory took command of the garrison and bribed the Lombards to leave.

The Church was also rich, having been generously endowed with large landholdings by Christian emperors. It was therefore able, following the collapse of both commerce and legality, to see to the material as well as to the moral well being of the people under its care, With the collapse of the political,and administrative institutions of the Roman Empire, the episcopate became the sole moral force and, thanks to its landed possessions, the sole economic resource that remained for the people.The Bishops replaced the state as the provider of public services, feeding the poor, ransoming captives and seeing to the welfare of the imprisoned. There is little evidence that the old Roman Empire had what we think of as hospitals, hospices and orphanages. Sickness and infirmity were regarded as the curse of the pagan gods and in Rome the infirm and sick were either abandoned, or killed. The Catholic Church instituted “…hospices, hospitals, orphanges and even inns as annexes of the churches and the monastries.” The Templars’ Piers Paul Reid, p. 33.

The Church took on more than the functions of the defunct Empire; it was the Roman Empire in the minds of the people. To be a Roman was to be a Christian; to be a Christian was to be a Roman. After the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, “…the Mediteranean world came to consider itself no longer as a society in which Christianity was merely the dominant religion, but as a totally Christian society. The pagans dissapeared in the upper classes and even in the countryside…the non-Christian found himself an outlaw in a unified state.” The World of late Antiquity: Brown p.174.

 

[Whadyamean]

Religion creates culture; the culture creates intellectual accomplishment.

Catholicism, with its belief that faith and reason are compatible, created a culture of inquiry, experimental science, the freedom to ask and search. Other religions, that do not believe that faith and reason are compatible, produce different cultures, often cultures wherein progress stagnates because inquiry and asking questions is not allowed. If everything is fated, then why bother to improve man’s lot in life?

When a culture believes that God and, importantly, that His creation are orderly, this allows the culture to engage in quantitative inquiry in a search to understand the universe.

“Non-Christian cultures, on the other hand, did not possess the same philosophical tools, and indeed were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science” and in these cultures, science “suffered a stillbirth.” Nobody is denying that other cultures made some technological progress but in them “we do not see the flowering of formal and sustained scientific inquiry emerging.” (quotes from pp 76-77 How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization).

With all due respect, GS, thinking and intellect create culture, not the other way around. Or maybe in your life you have your results* before* you think? And if you are capable of actually believing your last and quoted paragraph as being completely true, I invite you to read some history and get back to me with your necessarily different conclusion. What passes as “stillborn” inyour author’s mind will boggle you! And p;ease, none of this is an attempt to reduce the accomplishment, even great accomplishments of many Catholics who were and are geniuses, etc. It is just to put the order of manifestation in perspective. Piety is not serving clarity in this case.

 

[Stephen168]

Stephen168;8709477:

Religious thinking causes people to do and abstain for various actions. Thinking can cause action (Matthew 25:31-46)

Thinking always

precedes action. Religious thinking by definition is about faith, morals, allegedly spiritual matters, and the like. It is not scientific thinking.

Catholic thinking is not limited to faith and morals, which I think has been the rub Catholicism has had with the non-Catholic world for 400 years.

Catholicism influenced what it is.

You say tomato and I say tomahto. I don’t see any difference except there were/are areas actively supported by the Church (education and human care). Those areas are a big deal.

That is really a bit vague, don’t you think?

Yet, true. I think of the debate about whether man is different ‘in degree’ or ‘in-kind’ to the animals. When the ‘in-kind’ crowd points to a difference between man and the animals, the ‘in degree’ crowd will point out an animal that has that same characteristic. Yet, man drives to work at the factory, sends email to friends, and has traveled to the moon; contrary to the animals.

Why conflate religion and intellectual accomplishment? It is simply silly. Certainly there were wonderful intellectual accomplishments in our Church as in any other religion. But it wasn’t the religion that caused the accomplishment, it was the intellect, even if the subject mater was within the dogmatic scheme of the religion.

You cannot separate the two in regards to Catholicism, no more than you can separate running through the sprinkle with getting wet.

You sound so much like my Grandma who believed that every good thing in the world came from our nationality. Oh. and she was Catholic

The two problems I see with comparison to your Grandmother are: We are not talking about the WORLD, and I never said anything about the ‘goodness’ of western civilization. After running through the sprinkler, there are a number of factors which determine if an individual enjoys being wet.

With all due respect, GS, thinking and intellect create culture, not the other way around. Or maybe in your life you have your results* before* you think?

I would say in my life I don’t stop thinking after the action. You seem to be stuck in a very modern understanding of what “religious thinking” should be, not what it is; especially Catholic thinking. I see this modern confinement of “religious thinking” in debates over current events.
You could make the claim that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the success of Apple because he didn’t personally invent anything but to think that hundreds of engineers would have spontaneously produced Apple would be hard to prove. No matter what you think of Apple in general, it is what it is because Steve Jobs -]made it/-] influenced it to be what it is.

 

[KathleenGee]

One also has to go back to the source for the impetus of creating a new civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire…compare Christ centered civilization – with all the wrinkles – vs those on the outskirts…

By the time the Barbarians had reached Rome, the Romans were Christian…have to back to the dates…

We have to go back to the yeast…and it is Christ…what was of Christ and what was not…

 

[JustaServant]

Excerpt from Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization”:

Not for a thousand years–not since the Spartan Legion had perished at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae had western civilization been put to such a test or faced such odds, nor would it again face extinction till in this century it devised the means of extinguishing all life. As our story opens at the beginning of the fifth century, no one could foresee the coming collapse. But to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius, retire to one’s villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable.
It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it, by men so strange they lived in little huts on rocky outcrops and shaved half their heads and tortured themselves with fasts and chills and nettle baths.
As Kenneth Clark said, “Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome,** it is hard to believe that for quite a long time–almost a hundred years–western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea**.”

Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization – copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both** pagan and Christian**, while libraries and learning on the continent were being burned and forever lost
The history is there, not only did the Catholic Church build Western Civilization, they preserved it as well.

 

[Whadyamean]

Excerpt from Thomas Cahill’s “How the Irish Saved Civilization”:

Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization – copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both** pagan and Christian**, while libraries and learning on the continent were being burned and forever lost
The history is there, not only did the Catholic Church build Western Civilization, they preserved it as well.

Darn, the Sisters they imported from Eire to teach us their national anthem in Gaelic and learn us religion were right! Imagine that! Good going, SoM!

But about the libraries, do some research, Angel, on how many libraries and centers of learning the early Catholics destroyed. Then we might talk more about how “the Catholic Church build Western Civilization, they preserved it as well.” We have our own history of jihad, dear.

 

[John_Paul_Jones]

Stop bad mouthing those who disagree with you.

Stop spinning rebuke for your bad behavior, as refusal to debate.

State your view or counter view, without tagging derogatory remarks about the one you disagree with.

I enjoy debate, I enjoy learning where I am wrong; I won’t abide as receptacle to abusive remarks.

Civility is the oil that permits public discourse to proceed, isn’t it?

Factor out your insults toward me and I will be pleased to address your perspectives on the subject.

I like the whole “black and red” motif in your posts - for some reason it reminds me of the Baltimore Catechism.

 

[KathleenGee]

Whadyamean…

I have been reflecting on and off regarding the nature of your posts…waiting to read documented sources from your vision of history…

 

[KathleenGee]

The other issue is the use of reason…women are human beings…same as men…so we have the same rights and values of men…without the use of science, one can come to this conclusion.

There are many means to finding the truth about things of life…When we are looking at the Church, we are looking at the means to help us bring Christ present…we look at the Bible…but we have to also remember what the Bible…and the Church in part also do…bring us into the life of faith that touches on all aspects of our life, and a profound but simple moral code to protect us from ourselves.

But to use Bible as a source for scientific truth is making it into something the Bible is not.

To see the Church as a great instrument in building Western Civilization, one is also having to recall one is witnessing a human social institution comprised of many people, on many different levels.

So to just look at the Church by the fallen, and refuse to recognize the good many more have done is on par by what we see in the secular world…its right to address abuse within the Catholic Church, but on the other hand its deliberate ignorance of the great good most do in the Church.

And as matters of faith, we cannot separate the deaths of the early martyrs and consider their deaths as in vain…their blood also lay down the foundation of the Church and its expansion.

All this because the Church is founded not on itself, on its own humanity, but on Jesus Christ.

IF you separate the movement and life of Christ from the Church, all you will see is fallen nature…

 

[jschutzm]

I am currently reading this book (Thomas E. Woods) and am on the chaper The Church and Science and I am shocked at how our schools and media been able to get away with re-writing history for so long. http:////www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/0895260387/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=266239&s=books

Well think of it this way… Public Schools are not suppose to promote religion. IF they actually included all of the Catholic church’s influence on Western culture and science… it would APPEAR that they were playing favorites or endorsing a particular religion. Therefore, they have to at the very least, down play the role of religion in history, or at the very WORSE, play up its negative impact and advocate secular science and social darwinism.

Either way, what you end up with is a very biased view of history.

 

[Pepband_Mom]

Big difference between “playing favorites or endorsing a particular religion” vs.
telling the truth! Imagine schools having the guts to tell the truth about a whole lot of things.

A relative’s sister in law was a history teacher. My dad had a big discussion with her one day & could not even believe what she taught qualified as “history”

There is a massive abundance of vincible ignorance out there

 

[Catholic_Herald]

Far from being chaotic, Late Antiquity was stable and confident right up until the late 5th century

More…

 

[Pepband_Mom]

Great posts from Kathleen & about the Irish!

My JW coworker believes everything is in the Bible… To which I’ve responded the Bible doesn’t even say that! Especially in reference to Christ Jesus - all the books in the world could not contain everything about Jesus… Sad thing as she’s blind to His Divinity, she has a skewed picture of who He is.

Centuries of splendid accomplishments & progress because of love of Christ on the part of many devoted, selfless people. It’s not to say those who reject Him have not accomplished anything so please don’t anyone read something into my words something that I do not intend.