How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (27 page)

Because chimneys work best in relatively small rooms, soon the great rooms were abandoned or used only in summer. Medieval buildings became subdivided into small rooms, each with its own fireplace and chimney. With many small rooms came a degree of privacy previously unknown and with it a new sense of modesty. “The bedroom, in particular, became one of the most cherished rooms in the later Middle Ages,” concluded LeRoy Dresbeck in his study of the medieval winter climate, “and the chimney helped to alter sexual customs of this period.”
⁶⁰
That is, sex became a private rather than a semipublic activity.
⁶¹

Misreading History

Generations of historians and social scientists embraced Thomas Malthus’s claim that the famine of 1315–18, the devastation by the Black Death, and other such catastrophes were “positive checks” on population, triggered (seemingly automatically) to keep the populace proportionate to the food supply. That is, famines and plagues are the normal results of their being too many people. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Malthusian theory of population reigned supreme in academia, as every sociology textbook (including early editions of mine) warned that we could expect tragedy to strike at any moment. Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich pontificated in his bestseller
The Population Bomb
(1968): “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions are going to starve to death.” Also in the late 1960s, the celebrated scientist C. P. Snow told the
New York Times
, “Perhaps in ten years millions of people in the poor countries are going to
starve to death before our very eyes.… We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.”
⁶²

Nothing of the sort happened, of course. And it has slowly dawned on historians and social scientists that Malthusian theory tells us nothing about the disasters of the fourteenth century either. The famine of 1315–18 was caused by weather, not overpopulation. Prior to the sudden, nearly total destruction of crops, the food supply was quite sufficient. As for the Black Death, it was caused by bubonic plague, and it struck as hard or harder in sparsely settled places such as Iceland as it did in crowded London and Paris.

In any event, for good and for ill, both the climatic changes and the Black Death had significant influences on the course of Western civilization.

8

The Pursuit of Knowledge

T
he most fundamental key to the rise of Western civilization has been the dedication of so many of its most brilliant minds to the pursuit of knowledge. Not to illumination. Not to enlightenment. Not to wisdom. But to
knowledge
. And the basis for this commitment to knowledge was the Christian commitment to
theology
.
¹

Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passé form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So, too,
Scholasticism
. According to most dictionaries, the word
scholastic
often means “pedantic and dogmatic,” denoting the sterility of medieval church scholarship. John Locke, the eighteenth-century British philosopher, dismissed the Scholastics as “the great mintmasters” of useless terms meant “to cover their ignorance.”
²
In the twentieth century, Sir William Dampier spoke for most conventional academics when he complained that scientific thought was “quite foreign to the prevailing mental outlook” of the Scholastics, who were enmeshed in a “tangle of astrology, alchemy, magic and theosophy” and were absolutely hostile to experimentalism.
³

Not so! The Scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe’s great universities, formulated and taught the experimental method, and launched Western science.

As for theology, it has little in common with most religious thinking, being a sophisticated, highly
rational
discipline that has its roots in Judaism and in Greek philosophy but is fully developed only in Christianity.
The pursuit of knowledge was inherent in theology, as efforts to more fully understand God were extended to include God’s creation—thus inaugurating an academic enterprise known as
natural philosophy
, defined as the study of nature and of natural phenomena. During medieval times, a long line of brilliant Scholastic natural philosophers advanced Western knowledge in ways leading directly to the Copernican “Revolution” and the extraordinary scientific achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Theology and Natural Philosophy

Sometimes described as “the science of faith,”
⁴
theology consists of formal reasoning about God. The emphasis is on
discovering
God’s nature, intentions, and demands, and on understanding how these define the relationship between human beings and God. Theology necessitates an image of God (one God, not many gods) as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope.

That is why there are no theologians in the East: those who might otherwise take up such an intellectual pursuit reject this first premise of theology. Consider Taoism. The Tao is conceived of as a supernatural essence, an underlying mystical force or principle governing life, but one that is impersonal, remote, lacking consciousness, and definitely not a being. It is the eternal way, the cosmic force that produces harmony and balance. According to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, the Tao is “always nonexistent” yet “always existent,” “unnamable” and the “name that can be named,” both “soundless and formless” and “always without desires.”
⁵
One might meditate forever on such an essence, but it offers little to
reason
about. The same applies to Buddhism and Confucianism. Although the popular versions of these faiths are polytheistic and involve an immense array of small gods (as is true of popular Taoism), the “pure” forms of these faiths, as pursued by the intellectual elite, are godless and postulate only a vague divine essence. Buddha specifically denied the existence of a conscious God, and, in the words of the scholar Bradley Clough, “Buddhists have even gone so far as to say that belief in such a God often leads to ethical degradation.”
⁶

But even the first premise of a conscious, all-powerful God is not enough to sustain theology; it is also necessary to think it is legitimate
to apply human reason to questions about God. That is why there are no Muslim theologians. Just as Muslim clerics have rejected science as heretical because they believe that natural laws imply limits on Allah’s freedom to act, so too do they deny the legitimacy of relying on reason to expand their understanding of Allah. All that needs to be understood about Allah is written in the Qur’an. The proper role for Muslim thinkers is to interpret scripture—that is, to ensure that the people follow Allah’s commands.

In contrast, Christian theologians have devoted centuries to reasoning—about God’s nature and about the very meaning of God’s teachings. Over time some theological interpretations have evolved dramatically. For example, although the Bible does not condemn astrology—and the story of the Wise Men following the star might even seem to suggest that it is valid—in the fifth century Saint Augustine
reasoned
that astrology is sinful because to believe that one’s fate is predestined in the stars stands in opposition to God’s gift of free will.
⁷
This was not a mere amplification of scripture; it was an example of careful deductive reasoning leading to a
new doctrine
: the Church prohibited astrology. Similarly, as outlined in chapter 6, medieval Christian theologians deduced that previous doctrines that accommodated slavery were wrong—that slavery was in fact against divine law. As these examples demonstrate, great minds could, and often did, alter or even reverse church doctrines—on the basis of nothing more than persuasive reasoning.

Leading Christian theologians such as Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were not what today might be called strict constructionists. They celebrated reason as the means to gain greater insight into divine intentions. Recall from chapter 6 how they reworked doctrines concerning commerce. Recall, too, Tertullian’s instruction from the second century: “Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.”
⁸
Or consider again the passage from
The Recognitions
: “Do not think that we say that these things [Christian doctrines] are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.” In fact, the statement stands as perhaps the most compelling and influential linkage of faith and reason. It goes on:

And therefore he who has received these things fortified by reason, can never lose them; whereas he who receives them without proofs, by an assent to a simple statement of them, can neither keep them safely, nor is certain if they are true; because he who easily believes, also easily yields. But he who has sought reason for those things which he has believed and received, as though bound by the chains of reason itself, can never be torn away or separated from those things he hath believed. And therefore, according as any one is more anxious in demanding a reason, by so much will he be the firmer in preserving his faith.
⁹

Such views prompted the noted British historian R. W. Southern to reflect that Scholastic theologians tended “to make man appear more rational, human nature more noble, the divine ordering of the universe more open to human inspection, and the whole complex of man, nature and God more fully intelligible, than we now can believe to be plausible.” But, Southern concluded, “regarded simply as an effort to comprehend the structure of the universe and … to demonstrate the dignity of the human mind by showing that it can know all things—this body of thought is one of the most ambitious displays of scientific humanism ever attempted.”
¹⁰

Given this commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, Christian theology and natural philosophy were closely linked during medieval times. As the distinguished historian Edward Grant noted, “Within Western Christianity in the late Middle Ages … almost all professional theologians were also natural philosophers. The structure of medieval university education also made it likely that most theologians had early in their careers actually taught natural philosophy.”
¹¹
In contrast, natural philosophy was highly controversial within Islam, something to be “taught privately and quietly” at some risk, and it was never taught by prominent Muslim religious thinkers. But in the West, Grant explained, “natural philosophy could attract talented individuals who believed that they were free to present their opinions publicly on a host of problems that formed the basis of the discipline.”
¹²

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the bond between theology and natural philosophy for the rise of Western civilization. As a result of this bond, the pursuit of knowledge about the natural world became central to the medieval university curriculum and led, ultimately, to the rise of Western science.
¹³

Inventing Universities

Perhaps in deference to the political correctness of our times, or perhaps because of ignorance, there have been many recent efforts to place the first universities in China, India, or Persia. Of course, many of the ancient empires had schools devoted to teaching religious culture as well as institutions that sheltered those devoted to contemplation and meditation. But just as there are no theologians in the East, none of these ancient institutions was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. Rather, as the prolific Harvard scholar Charles Homer Haskins put it, “Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages.”
¹⁴
More specifically, they were the product of the medieval Church.

The word
university
is a shortened version of the Latin
universitas magistrorum et scholarium
, which can be translated as “community of teachers and scholars.” Most of what became medieval universities had been schools imparting religious culture, maintained by cathedrals and monasteries, many dating from the sixth century. The first universities were created specifically to go beyond such instruction. They were devoted to “higher learning,” to the active pursuit of knowledge.