Christianity’s Contributions to World Culture

By Paul Herrick

It is seldom noted today, but both [experimental science and modern mathematics] were born in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within institutions of higher education that had been founded by the Catholic Church and that were staffed with faculty who were all believing Christians.

Modern Science

Turning to modern science first, the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark (1934–2022) constructed a list of every working scientist active during the birth of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Next, he researched the religious beliefs of this group of fifty-two, each a pioneer in his field. Fifty of the fifty-two were either devout or conventional Christians; only two were skeptics. Both skeptics, however, like the others, had been educated at Christian universities and had conducted their research within institutions reflecting Christian  theological beliefs.

Indeed, the pioneers in nearly every branch of modern experimental science as it emerged were actually monks and priests who combined scientific research with their religious duties. The historian Thomas Woods writes:

For example, Father Nicolaus Steno . . . is often identified as the father of geology. The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was yet another priest, Father Giambattista Riccioli. Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory. Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as “the Jesuit science.” Even though some thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians, the Church’s contributions to astronomy are all but unknown to the average educated American.

Thus, “the Catholic contribution to science,” writes Woods, “went well beyond ideas— including theological ideas—to accomplished practicing scientists, many of whom were priests.”

The size of the church’s contribution to science is also seldom noted today. The historian Charles Homer Hoskins wrote the following in his now classic work, The Rise of Universities: “Between 1200 and 1500 at least 80 universities were founded in Europe, many starting out on church property.”

The Christian origin of modern science is hard to deny. The first modern scientific laboratories, scientific research institutes, scientific societies, scientific libraries, and science journals were all founded by churchmen and Christian scholars educated in and associated with church institutions. Stark argues that there is a conceptual link between (a) the Christian conception of a rational God who created an intelligible universe fit to be probed by the human mind and (b) the birth of modern experimental science in Europe. Other scholars have argued the same point, including the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a founder of modern symbolic logic. In a famous lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1925, Whitehead argued that medieval Christianity and the Christian conception of God and God’s relation to the world provided “the soil, the climate, the seeds” for the birth of modern science. This is a deep subject that I will not enter into here.

From the Monastery to the Laboratory

The eighty or more universities of medieval Europe that gave the world modern experimental science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew out of monasteries and cathedral schools scattered across the continent from Ireland to Italy. Each of these institutions was originally a small Christian community of monks, students, and spiritual individuals seeking God in communion with others through a life of physical labor, private and communal prayer, charity, humility, study, and spiritual meditation.

Going further back, the French historian Pierre Hadot has shown that the spiritual exercises practiced in the early monasteries of medieval Europe were influenced by modes of spirituality taught in the Stoic schools of ancient Rome and ultimately trace back to spiritual practices associated with Plato and Socrates. A continuous line of development can therefore be traced from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to Christian spirituality to the birth of modern experimental science.

The monastic institutions of early medieval Europe are often looked down on by modern secular scholars who consider them centers of crude thought and superstition. To the contrary, most were centers of learning where knowledge was valued both for its own sake and because true learning, it was believed, elevates the soul toward the source of all truth, God. The point deserves a moment of attention.

The intellectual milieu in the medieval monasteries of Europe has been described as a “theocentric humanism” in which truth is sought in all areas of thought and all knowledge is unified by being related ultimately to God, the source of all truth. Scholars were encouraged to explore and apply logical reasoning to every aspect of the natural world. Learning was actually considered a form of worship, for the study of the natural world was thought to be the study of God’s handiwork and, as such, expressed respect and reverence for the Creator. Within this cultural matrix, all knowledge was valued, and disciplined logic and rational debate were prized.

The spirit of medieval scholarship is exemplified in the work of Saint Albert the Great (ca. 1200–80), the teacher of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Albert taught his students that no topic is off limits to the Christian scholar; all truth is to be sought, in every area, for God is to be sought, and since God is the source of all truth, the search for truth in any area ultimately leads us to God.

Albert was so interested in the natural world and observational science that he once had himself lowered over the edge of a cliff in a rickety basket just to watch eagle eggs hatching. Contrary to the way they are sometimes portrayed by their modern critics, medieval scholars such as Albert and Thomas Aquinas were not all ivory tower dreamers wasting time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The philosopher and historian Steven Marrone writes that in the medieval monasteries can be seen “the birth of a society in which the learned were free to turn their efforts to analysis and speculation for their own sakes, and eventually to that use of pure reason on which philosophy prides itself today.” New “habits of mind” were giving birth to a new “literate culture.” The monastic scholars, he argues, were the intellectual pioneers of the rationalist movement that paved the way for the birth of the modern university system. Thus, in the monastic system, 

the major disciplines of high medieval learning started to take shape, crystalizing around the seed of newly composed and soon universally adopted textbooks that were structured as collections of debating points touching on all significant aspects of the subject field. At the heart of all stood logic, now the paradigm for investigation and summary in all fields.

Monastic scholars saw no conflict between their Christian religious faith and the scientific study of nature; they considered them concordant.

Modern Mathematics

Since modern science makes heavy use of mathematics, it should not be surprising to learn that modern mathematics was also born in the same intellectual milieu, within European universities and institutions established by the Catholic Church and staffed by Christian scholars. Although elementary algebra was founded by Persian and Arab mathematicians during the early medieval period, the big advances that ushered in modern algebra and beyond occurred in Europe during the Renaissance. For example, during the seventeenth century, John Napier (1550–1617) published the first book on logarithms; Blaise Pascal (1623–62) discovered probability theory; René Descartes (1596–1650) discovered analytic geometry, and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Isaac Newton (1641–1727) independently discovered differential and integral calculus. The process grew from there to the magnificent structure of mathematics and mathematical logic that led to the birth of the digital computer in the twentieth century in England and America and the extraordinary advances that have followed.

The First Modern Political Philosophy

The same intellectual matrix that gave birth to modern science, modern math, and the rest of today’s college curriculum also gave birth to the first modern theory of universal human rights, the first modern theory of international law, and (underlying both) the first modern political philosophy.  

Although it is true that political theory as we know it today builds on philosophical ideas going back to ancient Greece and Rome as well as to wisdom recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, modern political philosophy was born in Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, as Christian theologians, preachers, scholars, and philosophers discussed the following set of interconnected ideals circulating throughout the continent.

• All human beings, by virtue of their humanity alone, regardless of age, wealth, religion, income, socio-economic status, sex, or nationality, reflects the image of God in their soul. This is the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei.

Comment. The imago Dei is called a “Judeo-Christian” moral principle because it appears in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament.

• By virtue of this image of divinity, each human being possesses an intrinsic and equal value that is independent of social status, nationality, and so forth—a sacredness that even the highest authorities must respect. 

• By virtue of this intrinsic value, each human being possesses inalienable rights that can be asserted against every other person and even against the highest authorities, including the state.

• The most basic of these rights are rights to life, and liberty, and the right to own property.

• The primary purpose of any legitimate government is to serve the people by protecting their human rights—rights they received not from the state but from God at birth.

• The rights of the individual are most secure when they are protected by an elected government whose power is limited by written constitutional law endorsed by the people on the basis of reasonable considerations and regarded by all as the highest law of the land.

I hasten to add that these principles are ideals: they are not descriptions of present reality. Ideals are aspirational rather than descriptive: they guide us as we seek to improve the society in which we live.

The philosophy underlying and connecting these ideals was originally called “liberalism” because it championed the liberty of the individual against the power of the state. As new ideas on liberty developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the original set of ideals became known as “classical liberalism,” and the later ideals became known as “modern liberalism.”

If the six classical liberal ideals listed above sound familiar, that is because so much of our contemporary thought on government, human rights, and politics reflects the ideas of the first modern political thinkers—all Christian scholars inspired by biblical teachings and writing within a Christian intellectual milieu rooted in the universities, churches, and salons of early modern Europe.

Although classical liberal ideas sound commonplace today, they were revolutionary when they were first proposed and debated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Classical liberal ideas were anathema to kings possessing nearly absolute power and their defenders.

Political and Social Reform Movements

As Richard Weaver noted, ideas have consequences. Motivated by classical liberal ideas—with a heavy emphasis on the doctrine of the imago Dei—Christian activists launched programs of political and social reform, including efforts to make governments more accountable to the people, programs to aid the poor and marginalized, the world’s first antislavery crusade, and the first movements for the rights of workers, women, and children. Some of the first modern political thinkers even stated the first moral critique of the actions of some of the sixteenth century European conquistadors and colonizers in the New World.

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The World’s First Antislavery Crusade

Slavery was a worldwide institution, existing and accepted as natural on every continent, when Christian writers and activists in Europe and the American colonies launched the world’s first antislavery movements during the seventeenth century. For example, as early as 1644, the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland condemned slavery on biblical and philosophical grounds. Faith Martin writes this of the Reformed Presbyterians, known as “Covenanters”:

Most remarkable was their fearless and relentless condemnation of slavery . . . In 1644, the formidable Covenanter theologian Samuel Rutherford had declared that all men were made in the image of God and as such could not be bought or sold. “A man being created according to God’s image, he is res sacra, a sacred thing, and can no more, by nature's law, be sold or bought than a religious and sacred thing dedicated to God. . . . Every man by nature is a freeman born, that is, by nature no man comes out of the womb under any civil subjection to King, Prince, or Judge to master, captain, conqueror, teacher.”

Furthermore:

Covenanters in America honed and expanded the case against slavery. Slavery is shown to be sinful by direct scripture testimony and by conclusions justly derived from the great principles of Christian equity laid down in the sacred volume. . . . God, the creator, has given to man certain rights of which he cannot be lawfully deprived, except as a punishment for crime . . . The Creator has not bestowed on one class the chartered privilege of lordship over another . . . “God has made of one blood all men to dwell upon the earth.” . . . The national disgrace of slave-holding must be wiped off by letting the oppressed go free. Sin must be forsaken or the avenging justice of God shall overtake us.

Faith Martin’s research is worth quoting at further length:

Reformed Presbyterian ministers published articles and pamphlets, had their anti-slavery sermons printed in the New York Times, and were sought after as speakers at abolitionist rallies. They were “mobbed, stoned, egged and burned in effigy.” . . . In 1800, when other Christian churches were merely passing resolutions condemning slavery, Reformed Presbyterians ruled that no member of the church who owned a slave could take communion . . . Two Reformed Presbyterian ministers met with Abraham Lincoln in the weeks leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, encouraging him to take the step . . . Reformed Presbyterian homes were important stops on the Underground Railroad.

We consider it painfully obvious today that slavery is morally wrong. However, the anti-slavery movement appears remarkable when you consider that it formed at a time in world history when human slavery was entrenched and considered right on every continent.

….

A survey of world history, I believe, reveals that most revolutionary changes begin with transformative ideas in the minds of human beings. Many more transformative ideas and whole fields of thought arose out of the intellectual culture that was born within the academic institutions of medieval and early modern European Christianity. In addition to the ideas and subjects already noted, a partial list includes the social sciences, modern medicine, modern public health, modern machine technology, the first modern hospitals, the first schools of social work, the first international humanitarian agencies, and the first private institutions serving the poor and the marginalized, such as the settlement houses that opened across America during the nineteenth century.

Ironically, the modern academic world, as secular as it has become, has its roots in an intellectually inclined monastic culture where humble monks, priests, and spiritual seekers searched for God and deep knowledge in harmony with faith, love, hope, and charity. 

Note: Footnotes have been omitted in this excerpt.

— Paul Herrick is professor of philosophy at Shoreline Community College. He is the author of multiple textbooks in formal logic, critical thinking, and philosophy, including The Many Worlds of Logic, Think with Socrates, and Philosophy, Reasoned Belief, and Faith.   

Image by 🌼Christel🌼 from Pixabay

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Excerpted from Christian Apologetics and Philosophy: An Introduction by Paul Herrick (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024). Used by permission.

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