in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent
- A World Lit Only by Fire, by William Manchester
Learning was still regarded as paganism:
The church encouraged ignorance: “Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the most influential Christian of his time, bore a deep distrust of the intellect and declared that the pursuit of knowledge, unless sanctified by a holy mission, was a pagan act and therefore vile.”
– A World Lit Only by Fire - The Medieval Mind and The Renaissance, by William Manchester
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
– Saint Augustine of Hippo, 5th century
The facts of history prove that:
(1) The pagan power to which Christianity succeeded in Europe had already given the world a fine general system of education.
(2) Christianity contemplated the complete ruin of this school-system without a murmur, indeed applauded its disappearance, and made no effort to replace it.
(3) So little was done in the way of education during the thousand years of absolute Christian domination that more than ninety percent of the people in every Christian nation were illiterate and densely ignorant.
(4) The modern school-systems which have opened the eyes of the masses and enabled them to rise are due entirely to secular sentiment, and their development was in most cases opposed and retarded by the Churches.
– The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, historian and former Franciscan monk
The ancient Roman and Hellenic world had been highly literate. Under the ignorance brought on by Christianity with its hatred of all that was pre-Christian, most of Europe and the Christianised countries of North-Africa, which had earlier been part of the Greco-Roman world, were sunk into illiteracy.
The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher, in the porch of a house perhaps, teaching the children how to write on wax-faced tablets. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
– The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe
The Church, however, got an early and fair start on its wonderful career as the organizer and creator of civilization. In 529 [by priest-prompted edict of Justinian] “the schools of philosophy were closed. From that date Christianity had no rival.” (CE. ii, 43.) We have read the Imperial Law of Justinian with the fatal title: “Pagans Forbidden to give Instruction”; consequently “the State schools of the Empire had fallen into decay.” (CE. xiii, 555.) Thenceforth the Church, inspired by its Holy Ghost, was the sole Mentor and Instructor of Christendom.
– Forgery in Christianity, by Joseph Wheless, where CE refers to the Catholic Encyclopaedia
What the Church did
In the course of the fifth century this Roman system of schools was entirely destroyed. By the year 400, as I said, Christianity had become, by imperial decree, the sole religion of the empire, which means of the entire civilized world apart from India and China. By the year 500, there was not a single trace left of the pagan structure of schools. No writer on education can prove the existence of a single school in Europe at that date. To say, therefore, that Christianity gave the world schools, when its triumph was followed by the annihilation of the finest system of education the world ever had until the second half of the nineteenth century, is a constructive untruth of a monumental character; for there is not the least controversy anywhere about these two facts – that the pagan Romans of the fourth century had a fine system of general and higher education, and that the whole of it perished in the fifth century.
Although I was for several years a professor, and ultimately head of a college, in the Church of Rome, I then knew nothing whatever about these facts. We merely copied from earlier apologists, and repeated the traditional claim that “Christianity gave the world education.” These traditional claims we never dreamed of checking by modern authorities. The preacher who repeats them today is usually honest. They are given to him as part of his clerical education. They occur still, as brazenly as ever, in his apologetic literature. There is not one preacher in a thousand who goes further and inquires if the facts, as given in modern history, support the claims he makes.
Learning in the Middle Ages
How profound was the night that now enveloped Europe, and how fully the Church was responsible for it, may be gathered from a letter written by Pope Gregory “the Great” to a French bishop. Gregory ruled the Church from 590 to 604 A.D. The triumph of Christianity was now complete. Paganism was very dead; and civilization had almost expired with it. Rome had not been destroyed by the Goths, but it was suffered, decade by decade, to fall into ruin by the forty thousand miserable and grossly ignorant Christians who now moved, like lizards, amongst the moldering buildings that had once housed a million happy, open-eyed folk. Europe at large was correspondingly desolate.
