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Book Review

WOODS WRITES EYE-OPENER ON WESTERN CIV’S CATHOLIC BASE

By Diane Levero

Does the title, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, strike you as way too grandiose a claim for the author, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., to make?

I thought that although Woods was certainly well-intentioned, his bald assertion had to be a bit of a stretch.

But that was before I had read this engrossing and eye-opening book.

Woods has compiled the solid historical background to bolster his conclusion that, in all the areas that are the foundation of a civilization:  law, science, economic thought, university life, charity, morality, religious concepts, and art, in the West, “every single one of them emerged from the heart of the Catholic Church.”

Why is the average person, even the average educated and literate person, so ignorant of this?

Three reasons emerge:

1. We were simply never taught about it (thanks to anti-Catholic or secular influences).
2. We were taught the complete opposite (a prime example is what the average person “knows” about Galileo).
3. We are too close to the results of Catholic influence, and they are so ingrained in our perspective, we cannot see how unique they are.

Woods begins by dispelling the old canard that the “Dark Ages” were dark because they were dominated by the repressive and superstition-laden Catholic Church.

He quotes historian Will Durant, an agnostic, who declared, “The basic cause of cultural retrogression was not Christianity but barbarism; not religion but war.

“The human inundations ruined or impoverished cities, monasteries, libraries and schools, and made impossible the life of the scholar or the scientist.  Perhaps the destruction would have been worse had not the Church maintained some order in a crumbling civilization.”

Indeed, Woods shows that not only did the monks, especially the Benedictines, preserve literacy and scholarship after the fall of the Roman Empire; but through their extensive network of monasteries, and because they embraced manual labor as a channel of grace leading to salvation, they introduced new crops, industries and production methods throughout Europe.

The common conception of the Middle Ages, as well, is that it too was a period of ignorance, superstition and intellectual repression.  Nothing could be further from the truth, says Woods.

It is to the Middle Ages and to the Church that we owe one of Western civilization’s greatest – and unique – intellectual contributions to the Western world:  the university system.

Nothing like today’s university, with its faculties, courses of study, and examination and degrees, existed in ancient Greece or Rome.

Based on the fundamental belief that man is created “in the image and likeness of God,” in that he can think and reason, the Church consistently encouraged and promoted knowledge and learning.

Thus, by the latter half of the twelfth century, universities, evolving from cathedral schools and informal gatherings of masters and students, had emerged in Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge.

The popes were the universities’ consistent protectors, siding with them against local officials and fostering the robust and largely unfettered scholarly debate and discussion that we associate with the university.

In turn, the university system’s commitment to rational thought and rigorous logic, and its promotion of essentially free intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange provided the framework for the scientific revolution and modern science.

Undergirding this quest for scientific knowledge was the basic Christian concept of one good God who created an ordered and thus comprehensible universe, whose laws were discernable by reason.

This concept is so basic to Western thought that we take it for granted; we forget that other great cultures had a very different world view.

Many believed in a multitude of deities, often acting quixotically or in conflict with each other; and some, such as the ancient Greeks, even attributed conscious purposes to inanimate objects such as the heavenly bodies.

While these cultures certainly made some impressive technological contributions, they were not conducive to the flowering of the formal and sustained scientific inquiry that developed in Western civilization.

Woods’ enlightening exposition of what really went on between Galileo and the Church is, alone, worth the price of the book!

To begin with, nearly a century earlier, Copernicus’ theory that the earth revolved about the sun had been received with respect and even encouragement by high ecclesiastics, including Pope Clement VII.

But when Galileo made the same assertion – well, I won’t spoil it for you – read Woods’ detailed account, and your misconceptions about poor Galileo will go the way of the Piltdown Man.

Recent historians of science, Woods notes, have acknowledged the crucial role the Church played in the development of science.

Woods enumerates not only the medieval scholars who laid down some of the first principles of modern science, but the amazing number of Catholic priests, especially among the Jesuits, who made significant contributions in the sciences, from mathematics to geometry, optics, biology, astronomy, geology, seismology, and many other fields.

Woods sheds equal light on the Church’s contribution to international law, tracing its origins to sixteenth-century Spanish scholars such as Francisco de Vitoria.  

Father Vitoria and others, criticizing the often horrible Spanish mistreatment of natives in the New World, speculated about human rights and proper relations between nations, and laid the groundwork for modern international law theory.

Woods additionally shows that the development of canon law by the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with its rules of evidence and rational procedures, not only replaced a confusing hodgepodge of laws, but the barbaric Germanic “trials by ordeal.”

Canon law served as a model for the legal systems of the emerging states of Western Europe, and its scope was so sweeping that it contributed to the development of Western law in such areas as marriage, property and inheritance.

Western civilization is also indebted to medieval Catholic thinkers for developing the concept of natural rights, which, being rooted in natural law, are inalienable and cannot be taken away by earthly rulers.

Modern economic principles and insights, supposedly originating with Adam Smith and other eighteenth-century thinkers, actually began with the late Scholastics, says Wood.

From prices and wages to money and value theory, the late Scholastics anticipated the very best economic thought of later centuries.

Even secular critics will acknowledge, if grudgingly, the Church’s contributions in the cultural areas of  art, charitable work, and morality.

But Woods offers fresh insights and broadens the reader’s understanding of just how unique these contributions have been.

I cannot recommend this book too highly:  it should be required reading for everyone, especially high school and college students, and most especially in Catholic high schools and colleges.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how we might persuade the latter to make Woods’ book part of their curriculum, let me know