JOSH TREVINO:
"How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," by Thomas Woods, PhD, is a book masquerading as a necessary corrective that reveals itself as an inadequate one; and a serious work of history marred by some deeply unserious historiography. By which I mean that I disagree with it theologically. The author’s stated intent is to counter much of the calumny which has befallen the institution of Catholicism in the modern era — specifically the calumny that it is and has always been an anti-modernist, anti-science, anti-humanist force — and in this, his approach makes the fatal errors of answering the critics on their own terms, and adopting Catholic historical prejudice to a degree that weakens his broader argument. Allow me to smear Catholics up front by referring univocally to "Catholic historical prejudice." I’m still an unbiased arbiter of history, myself, though.
It is the latter flaw that we turn to first. Those familiar with Church history know that <scare quotes>"Catholicism"</scare quotes> as we understand it was a concept that emerged in nascent form only with the progressive divergence of the Greek and Latin Churches between the 11th and 15th centuries; the Catholic Church as we know it in the modern era did not emerge until roughly the 16th century.
When I refer to Catholicism as "we" know it, the "we" in question is, of course, myself and my cat, Tibbles. Tibbles is an expert on such matters and assures me that the word "Catholic" wasn’t even used until roughly the sixteenth century. There was no consciousness of the Catholic Church as a distinct institution prior to that time. In fact, Tibbles’ papyrological studies have revealed that the quotations attributed to St. Augustine in the fourth century displaying a clear institutional awareness of the Catholic Church in contrast to other churches are, in fact, forgeries salted into the historical record by tricky papists.
The same goes for all the other evidence for the existence of the institution today called "the Catholic Church" prior to the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers may have thought that they were protesting against an institution known as "the Catholic Church" that had been around for centuries, but in fact it had only been in existence for a few weeks, following an extensive salting campaign undertaken as part of a hoax stemming from a college fraternity’s hazing rite. Please see Tibbles’ doctoral disseration for the references.
This latter Church development, mostly codified in the Council of Trent, came about as the Church defined itself against a Protestant Reformation. When I say "codified," I mean "made up out of thin air" rather than "confirming what was already in existence, against which Protestants were protesting." which Protestantism emerged as something rather different from, and more lasting than, previous anti-hierarchical rebellions such as Arianism, Donatism, and the Cathar and Hussite movements. By "anti-hierarchical" I don’t mean "against hierarchy," for each of these groups had bishops.
So, when we–Tibbles and I–speak of Catholicism as understood as that Christian church led by the Pope in Rome and governed by his clerical and bureaucratic apparatus, we are certainly not speaking of the historical Church from the time of St Peter to the modern day. For there were no popes in Rome prior to roughly the sixteenth century, nor did they have any clerics associated with them nor any bureaucratic apparatus. Tibbles has shown that all the alleged "records" of such individuals are fake.
NSurprisingly, none of this seems to matter to Wood. It is as if he is completely unaware of Tibbles’ brilliant work in this area. The great accomplishments of the fourth through eleventh centuries, when the Church — and specifically the monastic communities — essentially alone preserved the civilizational heritage of antiquity, are presented as specifically Catholic accomplishments. The nerve! It is as if Woods really believes the records purporting to show that the monastic communities of the fourth through the eleventh centuries regarded themselves as Catholic institutions!
This is fundamentally inaccurate on several counts, most notably in that much of the preservation of the Roman and Greek corpus took place in imperial Constantinople, certainly never a location within the orbit of the Bishop of Rome. Yes, Constantinople was never within the "orbit" of the Bishop of Rome. Not even before the East-West Schism, when the Rome and Constantinople were in communion and councils like the First Council of Constantinople (A.D. 381) were saying things like: "The Bishop of Constantinople, however, shall have the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome; because Constantinople is New Rome" (canon 3).
(Excepting, of course, a rather regrettable sixty years or so beginning 1204, which Woods sensibly omits as an accomplishment of the Catholic Church since it would harm my case.) Indeed, following the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453, the arrival of these preserved manuscripts in the baggage of Greek refugees was a major spur to the Renaissance in Italy. See! The fact that post-schism Byzantines preserved manuscripts important to Western civilization ipso facto disproves the idea that the Catholic Church had anything to do with it!
The reality is that the preservation of civilization in Europe during the Dark Ages and medieval era, while creditable to Christianity at large, was not exclusively, nor even mostly, the doing of the Pope or a Catholicism that did not then exist. By way of parallel, it is wrong to credit to the United States the spread of democracy in the world during an age of monarchy, beginning with the American Revolution. The U.S. as Tibbles and I know it today did not exist in 1776 for there were only thirteen states at the time, its people spoke a now archaic form of English, and they were far less democratic than we are. It was only with the Warren Court that what we now call "America" became truly democratic, and thus it is a category mistake to attribute any democratizing influence in the world to an America that did not then exist.
When "we" speak of America, we mean America since the Warren Court, just as when "we" speak of the Catholic Church, we mean the Catholic Church since the sixteenth century. Tibbles and I are entitled to do this since, as Humpy Dumpty told Alice, "When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less."
In certain tea parties that Tibbles and I frequent in modern-day Christian Orthodoxy there is a certain (misguided, to my mind) nostalgia for "Western Orthodoxy," which is defined as the Latin or "Western" rites as they existed prior to the late-medieval split between Constantinople and Rome. According to this thesis, prior to that, all Christendom was "Orthodox," and hence we can discuss St Patrick of Ireland, for example, as an Orthodox saint. While there is theological validity to this, it is a dishonest reading of history. Historical dishonesty thus can be theologically valid. — St Patrick almost certainly never looked to the Constantinopolitan Patriarch for guidance, for example — and it is also an misleading interpretation of cultural heritage, for nobody should be allowed to take pride in anything that the West has ever done. Westerners must only execrate their ancestors and laud the glories of Byzantium.
The consequent establishment of "Western Orthodox" parishes in the United States and Britain, which utilize various forms of liturgy extant in the churches of the era of the Venerable Bede, is based upon this false appropriation. Westerners must repudiate all of their own liturgical heritage and adhere strictly to the one, true form of liturgy as practiced in Constantinople, "where also their Lord was crucified."
Woods is guilty of precisely this same error from the Catholic side: his interpretation of history, and specifically his presentation of Catholicism through the medieval era, leads inevitably — though he shrinks from making this point explicit — to the concept of a pre-split "Catholic Greece," among other things. I mean, just because both East and West regarded themselves as being part of one Church prior to the split, and just because that Church was commonly called the "Catholic" Church in that age, and just because it had the bishop of Rome as its foremost bishop according to the First Council of Constantinople (among others), that in no way allows a Catholic to lay any kind of claim to the heritage of this age!
It ill-befits any person from any Christian tradition to posit such a <adjectival meltdown>thinly-defensible, revisionist, and ahistorically exclusionist</adjectival meltdown> interpretation of Church history. By which I mean: I disagree with Woods theologically. I hold it as a theological truth that the Church before the split was Orthodox rather than Catholic. Woods therefore must be wrong historically. If the evidence is against me, so be it. As I’ve already established, historical dishonesty can be theologically valid.
Now, let me be up-front and state that I am coming at this from an Orthodox perspective. Yes! Disclosing one’s point of view half-way through a piece is being "up front" about it! I hope, though, that the reader finds that the argument against this manner of historiography stands on its own.
The second major flaw in Woods’ book stems from the first. <syntactical meltdown>In claiming all things for Catholicism, and in concurrently expanding Catholicism to claim those things he wishes to claim, he of necessity does so according to that which he wishes to refute.</syntactical meltdown> Woods finds the charge that the Church is a retarding force in the development of modern civilization — specifically modern science, which seizes his attention, and hence his book, to a great degree — to be one that eminently deserves answering. All of which is just to say: He wants to show that the Catholic Church isn’t anti-science.
His implicit acceptance of the equating of science with civilization (I have to say "implicit" acceptance because if I didn’t then he’d protest that he hasn’t equated science with civilization and that I am setting up a straw man), and his explicit acceptance that the Church may be justified on these terms (whatever that means), are both profoundly wrong.
This is not the place to examine in full the contention that science is an independent, self-justifying value (since Woods presumably didn’t claim this), or the contention that science is itself an independent, self-justifying indicator of civilization (which Woods presumably also didn’t claim). It is enough to say that the Catholic Church and Christianity at large reject both these views. They are thus irrelevant to the matter at hand. I only mention them so I can dazzle the reader with my sparkling philosophical prose.
Modern Catholicism quite laudably espouses the position that, as a Catholic priest from my own childhood explained, "Good science and good faith do not conflict." This begs the question of what constitutes "good science." Certainly there is quite a lot of bad science: the Dachau hypothermia experiments, the eugenics movement, and the Tuskegee experiments are only the tip of that iceberg. Particularly in an era where science is pushing the frontiers of human control — although not human wisdom — ever further, it is the Church that has frequently been the loudest voice in reminding society that knowledge is not an end in itself, and that its application is not inherently useful, wise or right. In a faith the holy text of which begins with an allegory of unwise knowledge and its consequences, this is in keeping with its most ancient intellectual traditions. That they are still applicable and cautionary thousands of years after that allegory’s first telling is a testament to the enduring nature of man and his folly.
One searches in vain for this recognition in Woods’ book. Instead, we are treated to a proud catalogue of mostly monastic and Jesuit accomplishments in science and technology. How dare Woods try to prove that the Church isn’t anti-science without mentioning my personal hobby-horse on the subject! Tibbles is outraged and spitting up hairballs!
These in themselves are good things inasmuch as they demonstrate that the Church is not a wholly malign force in the temporal world, pace the attacks of its critics. But Woods appears to forget that the Church is not justified by those things. This is a subtle point. When I first read Woods, I missed it, thinking that he was merely conducting a negative apologia–showing that the charge of the Church being anti-science is false. But Tibbles’ careful reading of the text revealed that Woods was actually doing a positive apologia, claiming that people ought to be Catholic because of how much good science the Church has done! He thus forgets that the Church is not justified by how much good science it’s done!
iIndeed, from the standpoint of the believer, the Church in the world is justified by the simple act of belief and the promulgation of the worship of Christ. All those miracles and fulfilled prophecies that Jesus and St. Paul so keen about were just a waste of time. To justify it on any other terms — say, a clever tenth-century Benedictine integration of waterwheels and trip-hammers, or a useful seventeenth-century Jesuit advance in lens-grinding — is to implicitly accede to the secularist contention that it is material betterment that is the bellwether of human progress, and the moral justifier of institutions. In this, the Church in the modern era will lose, and lose badly: no local parish is the equal of the supermarket in the provision of bread to the masses; no bishop alive has utilized waterpower so well as does the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Why, then, does Woods keep telling us that we ought to be Catholic because it will give us technological doo-dads and material prosperity? I mean, I haven’t seen this kind of pro-technology apologetic for Catholicism since John Paul II wrote his most recent encyclical on the virtues of consumerism and the sacramental character of shopping at Best Buy!
Useful social advancement based upon the rational satisfaction of material needs is, of course, the basis of the domestication of dogs, just as the law of gravitation operating between bodies that have mass in the Einsteinan space-time continuum is, of course, the basis of why a domesticated dog will drop to the ground if you suddently disintegrate his legs. It is not what distinguishes nor what "built Western Civilization," nor, one hopes, is it the purpose of man on earth. Not that Woods said it was those things. I’m just showing off my sparklingly intellectual prose again.
It is that transcendent need to define and achieve that purpose–i.e., the purpose of man on earth–that the Church, and religion in general, presumably seeks to fulfill; and if it is to be justified, it must be on those terms. It is the task of the Church’s apologists to do so, and to argue that that transcendence has not lost an iota of its relevance in our era. Tibbles therefore decrees that it is superfluous and counter-productive for a person to write a book on the Catholic Church’s role in the building of Western Civilization. The only books that should be written are those showing the value of transcendence in the world today!
Thomas Woods shows how well the Catholic Church, as defined by him and most of mankind, has delivered on those material needs for millennia. Fine, say the critics he attempts to refute: can we not accomplish this today by means of a government program without this Jesus baggage? There is no good answer to this question in this book since it was not a book about proposed government programs. Since it is the crucial question of the modern age, it is an omission that reduces Woods’ work from a serious apologia to a collection of trivia–a charge that can be equally leveled against any book published today that is not an apologia based on the value of transcendance in modern society contra irreligious government programs. That’s the only kind of book that counts!
I therefore fault the book because the author chose to write on a theme not to my liking.
Tibbles, feeling generous, gives it one hairball out of a possible five.
My wife has always been drawn to a particular genre of non-fiction in which people struggle against great difficulties, especially physical or mental disabilities. She has read dozens of books in which the main character wrestles with something like autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, blindness or some other malady (though disasters, abuse and hard pioneer life count also).
