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.
Anathema to the ‘Enlightenment’, or to those who self-proclaimed their own greatness and ‘light’ using in their entirety, the ideas, concepts, culture, science, maths and even social wealth from the medieval-era as a foundation, is the story of Catholic monks and how they saved, built and extended civilisation. Nothing can be more repugnant to the so-called ‘rationalists’, or ‘positivists’ than the rational, positive fact that it was the Catholic Church who saved and created Western civilisation. Every single facet of the modern world was formed in the medieval.
The monks are largely to thank for this.
Eastern monasticism greatly influenced the Western, whose founder, Saint Benedict of Nursia established 12 small communities of monks at Subiaco, and after, the iconic monastery at Monte Cassino. In about 529, the composed the famous rule of Saint Benedict, universally adopted in some form, by all succeeding cenobitic communities. All were equal, a sustainable peasant-level standard of living was maintained, work and education emphasised, and charitable efforts mandatory, including poor relief and hospice care. The purpose of the monastery was to cultivate a spiritual life, and to work out salvation in an environment under a suitable regime, which imitated in part, the life of Christ.
As time went on, the monks became the beacons of learning, progress, industry and welfare. By the beginning of the 1300s, the Benedictine order had supplied 24 Popes, 200 cardinals, 7000 archbishops, 15000 bishops, and 1500 saints. It could boast some 37000 monasteries across Europe. A great many of the European great, good, not-so-good but wealthy and powerful had joined the order between 500 and 1300, including some 20 emperors, 10 empresses, 47 kings, and 50 queens. The Benedictine impact on the general culture was colossal.
Not only were the monks the great saviours of classical writing and the arts, transcribing and safeguarding texts from the pagan, ancient world that would have been lost, they were the leaders in the practical arts. The agricultural restoration of Europe and its ‘agricultural revolution’ which starts in the 10th or 11th centuries, is due to the work of the monks.
The monks, including Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans Cistercians and Benedictines, converted wildernesses, cleared forests, drained marshes, pursued the breeding of sheep, cattle and pigs; and innovated technology and soil management. Every monastery was a veritable agricultural college and engine for the region surrounding it. Standards of living rapidly improved, health and diets were augmented, and trade was facilitated. Roads, bridges, markets were all constructed in domains around a Benedictine monastery.
Manual labour expressly demanded by the rule of Saint Benedict played a central role in the monastic life. Tasks and hard work were the channels of grace and opportunities for penance and self-mortification. Draining swamps, long viewed as sources of disease, not only benefitted the region, it led to the development of drainage, dikes and water management. Fertile agricultural land was developed from these enormous efforts across the width and breadth of Europe.
Into these agricultural fields the monks poured new crops, industries, or production methods which were unique and innovative. They reared cattle, horses, and brewed beer and raised bees and fruit. In some regions the corn trade was exclusively built by the monks. In Italy they created cheese making, in Ireland salmon farming, in many locations great vineyards. Reservoirs of water, used during droughts, were built. Peasants learnt irrigation and the breeding of husbandry from the monks.
Technological sophistication was deployed in building and architecture. Water and wind powered mills and systems spread across Europe thanks to the monks. Machinery thus became embedded in European life and pursued as an integral part of a developing economy and society. Waterpower was used to crush grain, sieve flour, full cloth, and tan textiles. By the 12th century, the Cistercians alone had some 742 monasteries across Europe, all of them famous and linked in this technological revolution. Iron and mineral development was financed and worked by the monks, blast furnaces were created by the 11th century and smithing was everywhere. Advanced metallurgy was transforming Europe by the 11th century.
Unlike the pagan worlds of antiquity, mechanisation and machinery flourished in the medieval era, on an enormous scale. There was great progress in science where Aristotle is finally overthrown through observational evidence, and real physics, unknown to the ancients is developed by the 13th century. We can add in universities, the 7 core courses of study, maths, optics including the invention of eyeglasses, polyphony and music, string instruments such as the violin or cello, standardisation of writing and art, mechanical clocks, stained glass, the chimney and hundreds of other innovations, all propelled forward by monks.
It is unlikely that any of the egotistical self-obsessed ‘geniuses’ of the Enlightenment could have invented any of the above.
The Franks under Clovis in the early 6th century converted from paganism passing by Arianism which denied the divinity of Christ, to Catholicism. In the 8th century the Church blessed the Frankish transfer of power from the Merovingian dynasty to that of Charles Martel or the ‘Carolingians’, who had saved Eurupe from Islamification with his victory at Tours in 732 A.D. The Church enabled the peaceful transfer of power from the decrepit Merovingian house to that of Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father in 751 A.D.
Under the influence of Church, the Carolingians would become the great builders of Christian civilisation. Charlemagne (r. 758 – 814 AD) was probably the greatest ruler in medieval history. The myth is that he could not write and was unlettered, but this undoubtedly a fiction. A man of his standing and background would have been educated and literate. Charlemagne expanded Frankish Christendom into Switzerland, Germany and northern Spain and protected the Church in Italy, from the predations of the pagan Lombards – the main reason why the papacy was keen to have a strong Christian state and ally in Francia, and why it agreed to the transfer of power from the Merovingians to the Carolingians.
Charlemagne invested what today would be billions of £ into education, schools, arts, literacy, the arts and social welfare projects. It was a far reaching and transforming investment to both further Christianise and civilise Frankish society. This ‘Renaissance’ extended through the reign of his son Louis the Pious (r. 814-840). A central figure in the Charlemagnian Renaissance was the English monk Alcuin, educated at York by the Venerable Bede, the great saint and ecclesiastical historian. In 781 Charlemagne appointed Alcuin to lead educational and other social reforms. Alcuin was fluent in Latin a pre-requisite during the early medieval period for correspondence, and schooling. In fact the oldest surviving copies of most ancient Roman literature are dated to this period and shortly after, when Carolingian scholars rescued them from oblivion. Without this contribution most if not all of Roman literature would be lost.
Alcuin and the system he founded, was built on the Roman model of education and the 7 liberal arts. There was the quartet of astronomy, music, arithmetic and geometry and the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. This system provided the groundwork for everything that as followed in European education and university creation.
The Carolingians invented the Carolingian script, an innovation in writing that had a major impact on European development. This standardised script notation ended the confusing mixture of largely unintelligible or hard to decipher scripts across Europe. The Carolingians added punctuation, lower- and upper-case letters, sentence and paragraph structures and spaces between words. Without this innovation civilisation was unlikely to have developed as it did. It leads directly to the printing press.
In building and art the Carolingians were very confident that their civilisation would greatly surpass that of Greece and Rome, and so eventually it did. Beset by the Muslim, Viking and Avar invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries it is a wonder it not only survived but thrived. Catholic monasteries were built and extended, manuscript copying proceeded at a fast pace, and thanks to a common script, all manner of scientific collaboration began between the monks sited far apart. Schools were opened across the Frankish empire attached to a Church or monastery and for the first time in history the average person may have had the chance at some formal education.
Christopher Dawson the great historian of Western culture relates,
“It was the great monasteries, especially those of Southern Germany, Saint Gall, Reichenau and Tegernesee, that were the only remaining islands of intellectual life amidst the returning flood of barbarism which once again threatened to submerge Western Christendom. For, though monasticism seems at first sight ill-adapted to withstand the material destructiveness of an age of lawlessness and war, it was an institution which possessed extraordinary power.”
The monasteries could recover from and repair the devastation enacted by and in the secular world. Pagans and barbarians would sack, reduce, arson and destroy 9 out of 10 monasteries, but it only one survived, it would be the seed to replant and regrow the other 9.
These pagan barbarians sacked monasteries and Churches, destroying their books and libraries, their manufacturing and agriculture, their schools and hospices. Yet the monasteries, the buildings, the libraries, the schools, the hospices and hospitals were rebuilt and often improved. This preservation of civilisation as the horrific barbarian invasions from Muslims, Viking, Avars and Saxons to name but a few, which enveloped the Western world for 2 centuries is an unappreciated phenomenon.
The monks not only saved civilisation but produced one of the great Popes – Sylvester (r 999-1003). He was the most learned man in Europe with a breadth of knowledge that included astronomy, science, Latin literature, mathematics, music, philosophy and theology. Sylvester and the Church began to invest in astronomy and scientific investigation including naturalism.
The development of physics and complex geometry flowed from this investment, culminating in the new physics of Nicholas Oresme and the school of Paris in the 14th century, about a century after the incorrect physics of Aristotle was decisively overthrown. But few know this. From Charlemagne to Sylvester is a direct line of civilised progress. Today both men would be categorised as White supremacists, phobic, anti-science and racist.
The entire medieval period, from 500 AD to 1500 AD was ‘christened’ by Atheists and many Protestants as a ‘Dark Age’. This propaganda has been relentless since the poorly named ‘Enlightenment’ when self-obsessed and largely historically ignorant personalities decided to elevate themselves and their contemporary progress against the backdrop of a sinister, corrupt and brooding Church. In real scholarship no one accepts the appellation of a ‘Dark Age’, certainly not from the 8th to 16th centuries. This was a long age of survival, renewal, and energy, punctuated by revolutions in science, agriculture, war, the arts and governance.
The agnostic historian Will Durant, along with many others defended the Church from these baseless accusations including the charge against the Church for the social retrogression of the 6th and 7th centuries, especially in the ‘West’. Most people don’t understand that the Byzantine Christian empire of the ‘East’ was rich, powerful and expansionary during this period, culminating in the rather ruinous and expensive wars of Justinian in Italy and North Africa in the mid-6th century. These wars retarded and degraded the ‘West’ and caused extraordinary turmoil from war, disease and social destruction.
These conflicts were not the only source of Western dislocation. Germanic tribes post 476 AD and the takeover of the Roman empire by the Goths, continued to pour into Western Europe. These pagan incursions transformed the entire scene and upended the social and political landscape within the former Western Roman empire. This had nothing to do with the Church. In fact and in reality, without the Church the ‘West’ never would have withstood this onslaught and never would have developed along the lines and structures it did.
“The basic cause of cultural retrogression”, Durant writes, “was not Christianity, but barbarism; not religion but war. The human inundations ruined or impoverished cities, monasteries, libraries, 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 measure of order in a crumbling civilisation.”
This is rather obviously true.
The Germanic incursions emanated from various tribes who were rural and nomadic. There was no written literature, no settled life, no political organisation and no technological development. Rome for all its faults as a white-slave trading premised empire, did possess a legal system with a large corpus of laws and precedents, codified by Justinian I. The Germans did not. The Justinian codex, based on centuries of legal activity became the basis for Western Europe’s legal systems. This legal heritage was built and saved by the Church. No such history informs the Germanic tribes who were first and foremost nomadic warriors or at best semi-settled militarists.
Christoper Dawson, “The Church had to undertake the task of introducing the law of the Gospel and the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount among people who regarded homicide as the most honourable occupation and vengeance as synonymous with justice.”
The most significant event in Western European medieval history is likely the conversion of Clovis King of the Franks in around 496 AD. Compelled by his powerful wife who was a Christian to adopt the faith, the conversion by all accounts was a real and honest conversion by Clovis to Christ. The entire Frankish tribe soon converted en masse, and Christendom had secured the support of the most powerful of the Germanic tribes who would forge the future state of France. Of course, the ending of pagan naturalism and superstition would take many generations and entail hard work from Catholic missionaries and priests. Eventually the light of Charlemagne would shine on France, Italy and parts of Germany, and Christianity would be further spread eastwards, through missionaries like Boniface and through interminable wars with the heathen and pagan Saxons.
Without the guidance of the Church all would have been lost in Western Europe during the 5th and 6th centuries. Pope Gregory the Great was instrumental in salvaging civilisation in Italy during the early 6th century. The ongoing efforts of conversion and guidance in Gaul can be read in St Gregory of Tour’s ‘History of the Franks’ and that of the Anglo-Saxons in England, in the Venerable Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’. Saint Boniface undertook these efforts in Germany and reformed the Frankish church in the 740s as well.
People today are mostly ignorant about the benefices and fundamental importance of the Church during the long medieval era. The reality is quite simple: no Catholic Church, no modern Europe.
Christophobia and anti-White racism are the only acceptable forms of discrimination and bigotry, in the fast declining ‘West’. In our fake-news, fake-science world, nothing is off limits if you want to ridicule or slander Christianity or Whites. The same standards don’t apply to Muhammad’s cult, Muslims, pagans, Hindus, Asians, Blacks or non-Whites. As far as the average person’s ignorance goes, the Catholic Church was a repressive, superstitious, idiotic, power-mad, totalitarian entity, that warped and distorted mankind, or he/she/zhe-kind’s ascent to the sunlight uplands of the Age of ‘Reason’ which has led to the philosophical conundrum ‘what is a woman’?
In reality, the Catholic Church built Western Civilisation. The ‘Dark Ages’ are atheist and Protestant propaganda, a theory built on lies, illiteracy and a deep hatred of what transpired before the 17th century. Suffice it to say that the supposed ‘scientific revolutions’ were all constructed on about 800 years of painful effort by the Catholic Church. There is no argument against this fact acknowledged by historians during the past century including A. C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant,, Stanley Jaki, Thomas Goldstein and J.L. Heilbron.
The Catholic Church never repudiated the pagan legacies of Greece, Rome or of the Germanic tribes which dominated Europe from the 5th century onwards. Without the Catholic Church saving these legacies and building upon them, Western civilisation – notwithstanding its current demonic and parlous state – would never have existed.
The Catholic contribution to ‘Science’ went well beyond theory, so beloved by modern ‘science’, to proofs and physical experimentation, now demoted by modern ‘science’ as inferior to arcane maths. Nicholas Steno initiated the organised study of geology. Athanasius Kircher began Egyptology. Giamba Riccioli was the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body. Roger Boscovich was the first to elucidate atomic theory. Jesuits so dominated astronomy, seismology and the study of earthquakes that these were often referred to as the Jesuit ‘sciences’. Some 35 craters on the moon are named for Jesuit astronomers, and mathematicians.
In summary, the Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy over 6 centuries, than any other institution in history (Heilbron). The Church’s role in the development of maths, science, technology and engineering is one of the best kept secrets in Western Civilisation. The above examples are a tithe of what could be listed.
We can take the monks as an example. Without the monastic orders beginning in earnest in the 6th century (St Benedict and his order), it is unlikely that Western Civilisation develops. There is hardly a significant endeavour in the advancement of civilisation during the Middle Ages, that did not involve monks. In every sphere of society, the monks dominated development. There is no parallel to this in history.
Education and universities were developed by the Church – unique in their scope, outlooks and geographical density. These Catholic built universities dating from the 12th century, were foundations for learning in medicine, natural philosophy, the sciences, maths and law. Without them the entire direction of European development would be hindered and reduced.
Western law, both national and international is a gift from the Church. International law rights start in the 16th century with Vittoria and La Casa who defended the rights of indigenous Americans to their land and bodies. Church Canon emanating from the age of Justinian (6th century) is the basis for all the legal codes of European states. It was the Church who reconciled and unified disparate systems and ideas and formed legal jurisprudence as a system and entity of arbitration and peace-making. Legal rights, personal rights, individual rights come directly out of the Catholic Church and pre-date the theories of Locke and Jefferson by some 500 years.
Even in economics, the theories of Smith and Ricardo were preempted by the Late Scholastics of the 14th – 16th centuries, especially the Spanish theologians. Joseph Schumpeter named these Catholics as the founders of modern economics. So they were. Trade, price points, utility, demand and supply, government intervention, the impacts of taxes and other distortions were all discussed, debated and put into different frameworks by the 16th century. Because much of this innovation was Spanish and Catholic it was ignored.
The Catholic Church’s commitment to the poor, both in spirit and in physical need has no parallel in history. The first welfare systems were built by Catholics and the very ideas of hospitals, hospices, orphanages and charity to all who need it, were Catholic creations stretching back to the first century A.D. Indeed, one of the mainsprings of conversion in the centuries following Christ’s crucifixion was the social fact that Christians took care of their neighbours.
The pagan culture of might-makes-right, infanticide, polygamy, endless warring, barbarity, a legal system which benefitted only the rich, a society in which half the population were slaves in some form or other, was opposed by the Church which preached the opposite.
To take physics as a case in point, it is obvious that the pagan world’s pantheistic naturalism was an impediment to real science. Gods or demi-gods were according to the ancients, behind all movement, bodies and objects. Once you remove this pagan myth, real science can begin.
As proven by Pierre Duhem, physics as a discernible science, can be dated to at least the 13th century when Oresme dethroned Aristotle and removed pantheism from observational reality, building the basis of the laws of inertia and motion, later used by Galileo and Newton. In most areas far from producing science, pagan cultures retarded its development.
It was not only the Church's mission from God to save Europe from the barbarity of the Musulman Jihad, it was also the Catholic Church’s mission to educate, civilise and teach the barbarians inside the gates.