Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Only in Christianity do we find distinct markers of piety and intelligent rationality, mixed together in a great pot-pourri of intellectual and emotional ferment. The organisation and both immaterial and material concerns of monks and nuns is one such marker. A second is the role of the priest as a scientist during the Middle Ages. Few if any cultures can boast one, none can reference both. We take it for granted in our modern world suffused in material wealth, much of it concentrated with the few, saturated as it is with debts both present and future; that everyone throughout history has had the time and leisure to become educated, explore and discover. This is obviously a fiction. ‘Learning’ and naturalist investigation was always the prerogative of the rich and idle.
What is unique in the Western experience is the role of the scientist-priest. Running a church and a parish is a full-time job. It involves the spiritual and religious guidance of the laity, but also, the management of buildings, finances, people, and material affairs. It is in effect, the equivalent of running a business. Seen from this viewpoint there was not much time for idle-intellectual speculation or forays into complicated naturalist endeavours. Yet throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church produced a vast quantity of learned priests who transformed world history through intellectual, social, scientific, mathematical and mechanical innovation.
Sadly, much documentation pre-dating the 1200s has been destroyed through arson, war, pillage or natural decomposition. Tonnes of Latin manuscripts also lie unread in various crypts and archives across Europe waiting for translation. What we do know is that the 13th century was a cauldron of sophisticated education and inquiry, surely built on previous centuries of experimentation and effort. Roger Bacon a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was greatly admired for his work in maths and optics. He developed a scientific method and emphasised the importance of experiment and observation. He identified that long standing customs and popular opinions were too often, obstacles to truth.
Saint Albert the Great (d.1280), was a Dominican monk educated in Padua, who taught in Germany and at the University of Paris. One of his students was St. Thomas Aquinas. Besides teaching Saint Albert was the Bishop of Regensburg for 2 years and led the German Dominicans for many years. Albert was justly famous for his naturalistic investigations, experimentation and applied mathematics. As with Roger Bacon he developed a coherent method of investigation which focused on mechanical proofs. Outputs from Saint Albert traversed the areas of physics, logic, metaphysics, biology, psychology, and natural science. He refused to accept scientific ‘authority’ at face value, an attitude completely missing in our ‘modern world’.
Robert Grosseteste was another famed monk and chancellor of Oxford as well as a Bishop of Lincoln in England. He was deeply influenced by the school at Chartres and by Thierry in particular. He was probably the first priest-scientist to codify and write down his scientific experiments and the steps taken within each experiment. These methods and approaches were passed on down and were duly copied by scientists in the 17th century.
There are dozens of similar priest-scientists that are of great importance but rarely mentioned in history books. Father Nicholas Steno (d 1686) defined the science of geology, an area which is still suffused with problems and incorrect assumptions. In particular he scientifically examined fossils, rocks and geological strata, overturning the existing myths and a priori conclusions through careful research and applied experimentation. He was the first person we know of who believed that the Earth’s history could be known from its rocks.
The Jesuits as a religious order, until the advent of their subversion in the modern era were famous throughout the world for scientific, mathematical and astronomical observations. Father Matthias Rici became, circa 1610, the de-facto Chancellor of China through his demonstration of Western science, astronomy, maths and geographical knowledge. He was famous within China for teaching Chinese scholars not only scripture but advanced scientific ideas, including astronomical observations and calculations. Many Chinese converted to Catholicism due to Rici’s piety, Christian virtues but also due to the scientific achievements that the Christianised West could display to the pagan East.
The priest as scientist, academic and innovator is a Christian only invention. For 1000 years from the demise of Rome and its takeover by the German tribes, to 1600, the Catholic Church was at the vanguard of every important development in Western Europe. From its moral salvation, to responsible citizenhood, to the rise of the welfare state including hospitals, poor relief, orphanages; to ending both White and Black slavery; to the creation of universities and the foundations of maths and science; to the grander of faith and life expressed in art, architecture literature, learning; to its centrality in industry, technology and agricultural revolutions; the priest as savant is what enabled and ennobled Western civilisation.
Developed during the 11th century, the Cathedral school of Chartres was a seminal innovation in Western civilisation and the development of real science (not the faux science of materialism, fraudulent data and metaphysics). Inspired by the work of the polymath and scientist Pope Sylvester in the late 10th century, Chartres provided a foundation for scientific excellence during the 11th century under the leadership of Fulbert a former student of Sylvester. During the 11th and 12th centuries this school at Chartres was at the forefront of naturalist and scientific inquiry.
Fulbert and other academics at Chartres were versatile and fluent in the areas of medicine, logic, mathematics, and astronomy. Pagan concepts along with more modern Christian innovations suffused the school. In the western façade at the Cathedral of Chartres one can still see today the liberal arts as taught in the 11th century, reflected in the statues of Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Pythagoras. This façade was created by Thierry of Chartres in the 1140s, to represent the influence, learning and education from the ancients and pagans. There was no conflict between Christianity and science, either ancient or modern.
This school along with many others built during the 12th century, pursued the quadrivium as part of the seven core courses. The quadrivium included arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The patterns of God’s perfect creation and the natural laws of perfect harmony were investigated, pursued and contemplated. The trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, comprising the rest of the 7 core courses, made the expression of thoughts and conclusions from the study of these patterns, possible and intelligible. Man was invited to understand and glory in God’s created cosmos.
One of the most important contributions by Chartres was its systematic appraisal of nature as an autonomous creation, operating to fixed natural laws. Natural causations were to be utilised to explain how nature functioned. Gone were the gods and spirits of rocks, planets and movements (Aristotle, pagan naturalism). In their place scientific explanations had to be offered for the physics of nature, the movement of objects, the patterns of weather and seasons and the obvious design and cycles of life one could see in nature itself. It was a gigantic movement away from the incorrect physics of the ancients and polytheists to a rational investigation of reality and nature. This rational approach only appeared in Catholic Europe.
The famed scientist and philosopher Adelard of Bath (1080-1142) was a student at Chartres. He commented that rationality is what makes us human. The rational beauty of the universe pace Adelard demands an appreciation and understanding. Knowledge was a gift from God. William of Conches another student and scientist at Chartres agree emphasising that natural phenomena must be understand without recourse to the invocation of the supernatural. This attitude is why Christianity built modern science and the pagans and naturalists failed in the same endeavour.
Thierry and his successors at Chartres thankfully dispensed with the pagan notion that celestial bodies were divine. The Muslim Al-Lah for example, is historically an idol representing moon and celestial worship, common in the Near East reflected in the name Baal found in the Old Testament and associated with evil. The schools at Chartres believed that the planets were formed of material substances, not semi-divine characteristics and that they served a purpose in the firmament that needed to be discovered. Under Thierry and his successors, we can see the beginnings of true science and physics.
‘Averroists’, or those who followed the incorrect philosophy of Averroes the Muslim philosopher, were also dealt with by the Chartres school. Averroes believed that Aristotle was correct in his belief that the Earth was eternal. This contravenes common sense and the Bible, in which the Earth and the universe must have been created. Saint Thomas Acquinas, basing his work in part on the output from Chartres reconciled Aristotle with Catholicism, providing in essence scientific and logical proofs in his synthesis to prove the existence of God and the created universe.
After Acquinas’ death the Bishop of Paris issued the Condemnation of 1277, books and works that professors at the University of Paris were forbidden to teach. The condemnations targeted erroneous Aristotelian beliefs. Pierre Duhem the great historian of science believed that the Condemnations opened the path for real science to flourish. It forced academics and thinkers to break out of the prison walls of Aristotelian belief and pursue new and fresh paths of discovery. This energy and vitality led to the astronomy, physics and laws of inertia and motion developed in Paris and Chartres by Robert Grosseteste (13th century) and Jean Buridan (14th century), amongst many others.
The age of naturalist science was born in the 11th century in Western Christendom. This epochal achievement is seldom recognised or understood.
Exemplary physicist and science-historian Pierre Duhem traced the development of modern science and methods back to at least the 14th century. The Church’s role in the creation of science and mathematics was fundamental and crucial. Father Stanley Jaki, the prize-winning historian of science with doctorates in theology and physics, has analysed Duhem’s work and the history of Catholic science. Duhem and Jaki both prove that the Church was the main actor in the creation of real science (not to be confused with the modern world’s non-science or Scientism).
Catholics believe, premised on the Old and New Testaments, that the universe is orderly and rational. God, the great intelligence, created the universe, the world and natural phenomena, in a perfect harmony, full of beauty, wonder, and order. This universe is endowed with lawfulness, reason and purpose. In Wisdom 11:21 God instructs man that he has “ordered all things by measure, number, weight.” Christians have always sought to undertake a quantitative process of discovery and to measure ‘all things’.
No other civilisation has ever believed in a rational, ordered and non-cyclical universe. All other systems including the Greek and Roman were irrational, usually circular, mystical, with some (Hinduism, Buddhism) even denying that there is a reality or a world of the 5 senses. The birth of science, indeed universities and school systems, is a byproduct of a Christian worldview in which a rational creator has created ex-nihilo, a universe for humans to be lived in, discovered and understood.
This philosophical disposition allows Christians to pursue the functional of natural and physical laws. Other civilisations simply viewed the Earth as a gigantic organism of nature, dominated by nature pantheism, many deities, and endless cycles of birth, death and rebirth. This animism destroys rational pursuits of the physical and theoretical since it denies reason and order. Created beings on the other hand, will use their own mind and wills to explore, discover, and understand fixed patterns and logic.
Christianity rightly and rationally rejects animism and pantheism. God, his only begotten Son, and the Holy Spirit are immanent and universal. Other cultures can and have of course contributed to the development of science, but never in a sustained and scientific manner. Christian scientific inquiry stretched over 700 years – an unprecedented length of time in the journey to acquire knowledge and understanding.
Ancient civilisations including the Chinese, Greek, Babylonian, were unable to believe in the laws of nature or the rationality of creation. Aristotle, in a common ancient view for instance, ascribed the circular motion of planets as an ‘affection’ for that kind of travel. For the ancients, all natural phenomena was personal, generated by a deity or deities. For science to succeed, phenomena had to be de-personalised and the only group in history to do this was the Christian Schoolmen or Scholastics.
Scholastics believed in the rationality and reasonableness of God. Saint Anselm (11th century) for example maintained that God not only revealed himself and his moral order through Christ, but in nature itself has also shown that there exists a rational, logical universe. God expects the human to investigate and understand this rational and physical universe. As Saint Thomas Acquinas and many others expressed, God did not create a universe of chaos and incomprehension. The world and our cosmos are predictable and intelligible and can only be discovered through rational inquiry and importantly, mechanical experimentation which was only developed and sustained in Catholic Europe.
Jean Buridan and many others in the 14th century developed the laws of motion (inertia) which was picked up by Descartes, Galileo and Newton. Without the ‘Paris school’ and other Catholici universities the creation of modern physics would never have occurred. Contrary to myth therefore, our modern ideas of science can be found in copious writings and experiments dating back to the 1300s.
It should be noted that Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and others took great care to ‘erase’ all references and historical actors from their notes. Darwin, Einstein and many others have followed suit. They believe that by effacing their progenitors they will claim credit and boost their own egotistical importance. All they really claim is the appellations of fraud and plagiarism. It should be noted that Darwin, Einstein and many others never performed physical experiments and are not scientists but philosophers. Science took a wrong turn in the 19th century when philosophy and maths triumphed over reality and experimentation. We have never recovered from that colossal wrong turn.