Scholar Jared Staudt joins us for a conversation about the social value of Christianity. Does it do any good for anyone? Does it have a good record as a movement?
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. We’re going to talk a little bit about whether Christianity has been good for the world or bad for the world, but try to guess which side we’re going to come down on. Maybe share some ideas with you about how Christianity has actually been quite good for the world.
You might even be surprised to find that this is controversial, but it is quite controversial. As a matter of fact, important figures have debated this all across the world and we see it in some media. I’ll share a little bit of that media in a minute. To help us discuss this is the author of How the Eucharist Can Save Civilization and a bunch of other books, including The Primacy of God, Restoring Humanity, and The Beer Option. Dr. Jared Staudt, thank you very much for being here with us.
Jared Staudt:
It’s a pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
You do a lot of these interviews. I wonder if you’ve ever started with a sound clip from The Family Guy?
Jared Staudt:
I don’t think I have yet.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, well, this will be a first. Are you familiar with the television program, The Family Guy?
Jared Staudt:
Unfortunately, yes.
Cy Kellett:
It’s hard not to be. I mean, pop culture, it’s hard to miss some of these things. They had an episode where Stewie, the little boy, took Brian the dog to another universe. Here’s how it sounds.
Stewie:
Now in each of these alternate universes, the reality is different than our own. Sometimes only slightly, sometimes quite radically. The point is every possible eventuality exists.
Brian:
And that’s where got the pig in a parallel universe.
Stewie:
Prepare yourself, Brian, and I’ll show you.
Brian:
Where are we?
Stewie:
This is Quahog, Brian. Same year, same time. But in this universe, Christianity never existed, which means the dark ages of scientific repression never occurred, and thus humanity is 1,000 years more advanced.
Cy Kellett:
You can see then why I started with a bit from The Family Guy. The dark ages of scientific repression never happened and society is 1,000 years more advanced in a world where Christianity never happened. Does that seem at all likely to you?
Jared Staudt:
It seems likely that people would make that claim. But without Christianity, the things that we value today, even in our secular culture, would not exist. If you want evidence for that, you simply look around and compare the legacy of Western culture to other cultures such as China. Whether it’s under communism or before communism, you do not see the same sense of the dignity of the human person, valuing individuality and creativity in the same kind of way.
Of course, if you look at it from the perspective of science, the irony is there’s a whole bunch of books that have come out in recent years showing that the foundation of science was laid in the Middle Ages themselves.
Cy Kellett:
One of them I remember begins with a reference to I think it’s Principia Mathematica. It could be another of Isaac Newton’s books. He begins by saying, “I can see far because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants,” meaning medieval scientists.
Jared Staudt:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people are shocked when I tell them that the scientific method was developed by a Catholic bishop and then one of his students, a Catholic priest. You had Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who was teaching at the University of Oxford where Father Roger Bacon was studying with him, and then went to teach at the University of Paris. We can actually say that those two figures, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, were the first ones to actually lay out how to do a scientific experiment in a way that follows the modern scientific method.
Cy Kellett:
About what time would this have been?
Jared Staudt:
That was in the 13th century.
Cy Kellett:
Where did these universities come from? You mentioned Oxford and the University of Paris. I assume they were left over from the Roman Empire. Who established these universities?
Jared Staudt:
Well, in the ancient world, there were centers of learning. I mean, you could go to Athens and you could study with a philosopher, and you did have students gathering together. Alexandria was another ancient center of learning. But the term university, that essentially means like a guild. A modern university is established as a group of faculty with certain standards and rights who teach students who are also organized with certain standards and rights and they’re granting degrees.
The universities were founded by the church in the Middle Ages. The oldest is the University of Bologna from the 11th century. And then in the next century, some people even say back to the 10th century, and the following century, you have the University of Paris, and following shortly behind it, the University of Oxford. But they grew out of the monastery and cathedral schools. Those schools were really… It was the first school system. When we think of school systems, that is one of the things we could add to the list of coming out of the Catholic tradition.
The fact that there were schools established basically in every locality. Charlemagne in the 9th century actually passed a law that every cathedral and every monastery had to have a school. You might think, yeah, for rich kids. And true, yeah, rich kids did come to study there, but they were open to other children as well, especially those who would be coming into the monastery. There were poor children who did go into the monasteries. They studied the seven liberal arts. You have the trivium, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and those are the arts that are based on the word.
But then you also had the quadrivium, which are the four arts based upon number, arithmetic, geometry, music actually because there is a mathematical quality of music, and astronomy. It was at these cathedral and monastery schools that you did see the foundation for teaching science out of the quadrivium. And then it rolled right into the medieval universities because the organization of those universities were literally out of the faculties of the cathedral and monastery schools, as you see at the University of Paris and the University of Oxford, for instance.
Cy Kellett:
Well, it’s striking that in nowhere did modern science develop, nowhere, even when there were great empires in India and Persia and in the Roman and Greek empire, in nowhere did we get anything resembling modern science until you had Christian society. And yet if you turn on the TV and watch Fox Television, you will see this joke, which is actually… I mean, the joke is actually offensive. I’m not feeling offensive to it, but it is. In fact, it’s an offense against people who built the world that we live in. It’s really an act of ingratitude to make a joke like this.
Jared Staudt:
How many people would be offended? I mean, very few, because we’ve been told this lie for a long time. It goes along with a lot of other lies. Where does modern democracy come from? Oh, guess what? That’s the Middle Ages too. I mean, the parliaments are from the 13th century.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, like the Magna Carta.
Jared Staudt:
The British Parliament, the French Parliament, the Magna Carta, all of this. Even the Founding Fathers look to the Magna Carta and actually to even some other religious constitutions like that of the Dominicans for inspiration. The European Union even said that Europe is a conjunction of classical and enlightenment sources, which is a complete joke, because the term Europe that we even use today to mean Western Europe arose during the time of Charlemagne.
To say that Europe today grew out of the classical world and the enlightened world is literally a lie. We’re lying to ourselves, and we’re basically saying that there’s 1,000 years that didn’t happen, even though everything we value came out of those thousand years.
Cy Kellett:
Well, two things, and maybe you can decide for yourself which direction you want to go. It’s a choose your own interview type of thing we’re doing today. But one thing is how might we respond to the kid, the teenager, or the preteen who watches that? Because I think more and more information we’re getting is that they’re losing their faith at a young age. I think it’s media like this, which is essentially adults making jokes that are meant to destroy the faith of young people.
That’s the intention here. There’s no other reason to do this. How might we help that kid? Because that kid doesn’t trust you and me. We’re Christians who are trying to defend Christianity. The other thing is, if this whole dark ages of scientific repression idea is in fact false, where did it come from? All right, so you pick which one of those you want to.
Jared Staudt:
Well, I want to do both.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, do both. Go ahead. You’re in charge now.
Jared Staudt:
You mentioned that modern science grew out of the West and not any other culture. The reason for that is actually faith. Faith is what gave us certainty that the natural world is intelligible. Why would you spend all of this time studying the world if it didn’t have meaning? Christians believe that the world was created by the logos. Jesus, the eternal word, spoke creation into being, and he was actually expressing even the truth of God’s own life into the world. We are made as beings in the image and likeness of God who have a logos, a mind, within ourselves that can understand this message.
It was actually Christians saying, we should study the world because it comes from God, and our faith gives us certainty that the created world is actually worth studying. It was actually Christians in the Middle Ages disagreeing with Aristotle even at an early stage, if you look at the Cathedral School of Chartres in France, where they said Aristotle said that the heavens were eternally in motion. He said that they were made of a different substance than the matter of earth.
Christians, even early on in the Middle Ages, began rejecting that claim to say, “Well, no, that can’t be because God created the heavens and the earth, and that means that the heavens had a beginning. He created them alongside of the earth. They are made of things like the earth that we can understand.” Actually the whole theory of impetus and motion that was underlying modern physics grew out of this attempt to understand the motion of the stars because they were created by God. It’s a beautiful expression of the conjunction of faith and reason.
There was a very important scientist in the early part of the Middle Ages, what we even call the Dark Ages today, Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II, who laid the foundation for a whole number of things, but including the use of Arabic numerals. He set in motion a lot of important pieces for astronomy, the measurement of the stars, et cetera. We see all these pieces there that will be taken up in the medieval universities, not in the 17th century, in the 13th century, to put together the scientific method.
Cy Kellett:
Because you have six kids, how might we address young people? I’m sure there’s young people coming into and out of your home who are not Christian kids or may not have a strong formation. They see adults making TV for them like The Family Guy. How might we counteract that false impression that is just hammered home mercilessly to them?
Jared Staudt:
Something that I share with teachers often is just the number of scientists who were priests. There’s a great textbook for high schoolers, Faith, Science, and Reason by Christopher Baglow, and there’s a section of the book that just lists all of the priests who were scientists. Now, when I say all of them, I should say a number of them because there’s even more than are included in that book. We’re talking about major contributions to science, not just some priest at his rectory who pulled out a telescope.
Cy Kellett:
Like Gregor Mendel, those kinds of contributions.
Jared Staudt:
I mean like Gregor Mendel laying the foundation for modern genetics. But we see that even with Blessed Nicolas Steno, who was a convert from Lutheranism and he became a bishop, and he laid the foundation of modern geology. The list goes on and on and on in so many different areas. Word on Fire even created a kid’s book that goes through Catholic scientists and mathematicians.
I think that’s an important way to say we have saints who literally we’re laying the foundation for science. To be a Catholic is to be one who is open to the truth, all truth. I think it’s important just to open up this tradition for them. It’s right there. I mean, even if you just Google it, who invented the scientific method, I mean, you can find that it was a Catholic bishop and a Catholic priest who were working together.
Cy Kellett:
Or who gave us the Big Bang Theory or genetics or geology?
Jared Staudt:
Father Georges Lemaître, all of these things. I mean, it’s just hiding in plain sight, the answer to all of these things. I would say that it’s very important for young people to know that faith and science cannot contradict because they are told all the time, and even just something like The Family Guy that’s saying the Christian era of history prevented the rise of science.
What they’re essentially saying is something we hear all the time, faith and science are incompatible. When you go into all of these Catholic scientists, you’re basically proving to kids that that is a lie that you can be not only a Catholic, you could be a saint and have been a scientist like Saint John Kanty helped to further develop the theory of impetus as well. That’s just one example of a saint.
Cy Kellett:
It’s funny you mentioned Gerbert because I remember I gave a talk up in San Francisco to a bunch of technical people and I described him. I said, “He’s the guy that introduced the Abacus into Europe and started using Arabic numbers.” I said, “What do you think the church did to him?” These are PhDs in technical fields.
Well, they probably burned him at the stake. I said, “How about this? They made him Pope. He was Pope Sylvester II.” There’s an audible gasp of like, “What?” That has nothing to do with how we thought Medieval people responded. This is very well-educated people. This is not just people taking a couple puffs and watching Family Guy.
Jared Staudt:
Now, we also have to say that he was accused of black magic because there were people who were suspicious of learning. There’s always that side of the equation as well.
Cy Kellett:
The idea of the Dark Ages then, most historians would never use the term Dark Ages anymore. It’s more or less disappeared from the professional vocabulary of historians, but it’s deeply, deeply embedded. Where does it come from? What are the origins of thinking about Dark Ages?
Jared Staudt:
The term the Dark Ages came from Petrarca in the 14th century. He was from Florence, but he was writing in modern day South of France. I mean, he essentially was saying something akin to the European Union today, that we need to go back to the glory days of classical civilization. This was the whole idea of the Renaissance. We’re going to have a rebirth of culture, because he was looking at even the way people were writing Latin in the Middle Ages like St. Thomas Aquinas. I love St. Thomas Aquinas’ Latin because it’s simple and easy to understand.
But Petrarca was saying, “No, we need to write like Cicero,” this glorious Latin prose where one sentence is a paragraph, et cetera. And also when it comes to politics as well, you had Florentines who were looking back to the glory days of the ancient republics, and they wanted to push for forms of government that would recapture those ideals. Really this idea of the Dark Ages goes back a pretty long ways, but it was taken out by others in the Enlightenment and really expanded.
Because the scientific revolution was in the 17th century and figures in that time were seeing opposition from leaders in the church, but especially leaders in governments who were suspicious of these advances. Really this whole idea of the opposition between faith and science is an early modern phenomenon. It was used to try to make a break with the political system of the union of throne and altar, where you had Christian kings using the church to create conformity in society.
If you look at Louis XIV, the Sun King, is a great example of this. And then you had the French philosophers who were in exile from Holland who were writing missives against him. They were trying to paint Catholics as backwards, as opposed to modern progress, whether it was democratic progress or scientific progress. They really painted a thousand years of history as standing in their way.
Cy Kellett:
Fair enough. Okay, fair enough. That’s actually very, very helpful because it’s a long and complex history. Not everybody’s a villain in it. You wouldn’t say Petrarca’s a villain, but he did come up with that. He did coin that term. If someone were to say to you then, “I’ll tell you what, just give me some evidence that the world is better because Christianity is in it,” what do you got in that regard?
Jared Staudt:
I would say that the number one thing that stood out to Christians in the ancient world and then, of course, to their neighbors was the dignity of the human person. The fact that children should be cared for and protected as children, that women had equal dignity to men, that slaves, even if they were in a subordinate economic position, had equal dignity as human beings. That was revolutionary in the ancient world. Then if you look even in the Middle Ages, these war-like Germanic barbarian tribes had to be tamed even in their warfare.
Ideas of just warfare, of non-combatants having certain protections, that came out of the peace of God and the truce of God sponsored by the monastery of Cluny. Christianity has had a long battle with slavery, for instance, and I would say it’s still going on today because there’s still a lot of slavery in the world. But slavery was slowly gotten rid of during the so-called Dark Ages. And then of course, it had a whole new wave and Christians had to rise up and fight it again. I would say there’s even a third wave we’re fighting right now.
The fact that everyone deserves an education is a Christian idea. Saint Joseph Calasanz, for instance, a Portuguese saint who founded the Piarists, was the first one to open up a free public school for anyone to attend. And that’s what public school means, that it’s free for the public. That’s a Christian invention. The fact that people across the world can even communicate and share knowledge and ideas with one another, that distinct cultures have dignity and should be respected, this is an ancient Christian idea.
I know a lot of people think the opposite, but this whole idea of enculturation has been important to the church from the beginning, sanctifying cultures through the gospel, and the fact that the church actually is the largest international community in the world today. Catholics are united across every continent. It’s an amazing thing, a beautiful thing. Healthcare, monasteries founded the first network of hospitals throughout Europe. It’s a fact that everyone because they have dignity deserves to be cared for in sickness.
I would say art is maybe one of the most tangible things. The greatest art in human history was created by Catholics because we believe so strongly in the incarnation, that God has taken on flesh and he sanctified matter in the world, and we can express that through beauty. I’ll just end with one last major one that you might not be expecting, the way that we calculate time. Who invented clocks? It was actually the monks because they wanted to keep track of time for their prayer.
And also the way that we regulate time throughout the week. Where did we get this two day holiday every weekend? It’s because we have the Lord’s Day on Sunday, and then the old Jewish Sabbath became a day of preparation for the Lord’s Day in which we could take care of all of our other business. But then, of course, also how we calculate time throughout the world. Because when we shaped the year, it was originally for calculating Easter. We wanted to get really precise on the date of Easter, and so we began fine-tuning the calendar and getting it really precise.
That’s where we got the Gregorian calendar. But I would say also our wonderful feast days. I mean, even non-Christians love celebrating Christmas. We’ve punctuated that calendar throughout the year with wonderful festivities throughout Christian history that we need to really preserve and even recover somewhat today. There’s so many ways. Those are just some big ones.
Cy Kellett:
That’s a wonderful list. I’m so happy that you gave us that wonderful list. Many of them are counterintuitive if you’re really embedded in pop culture, that is pop culture will say the opposite about many of those things and is demonstrably wrong, as you said. You just look up the number of priests who founded whole sciences and changed the scientific landscape and you’ll see that that one is wrong. But I want to end with one because… Oh, you wanted to say something there?
Jared Staudt:
Just really briefly. I mean, if you asked people how did Europe become Christian, they would probably say because everyone was forced to become Christian. They would say it was oppressive. But people in the ancient world saw Christianity as liberating and they flocked to it. It was a very popular religion that rose from the ground up.
Cy Kellett:
Indeed. The monasteries were missionary, so to speak, that is monks went out into the wild where people were living hand to mouth in many places and established these monasteries that would provide, as you said, schools and healthcare.
Jared Staudt:
And beer.
Cy Kellett:
And beer. They invented beer, as the writer of The Beer Option knows very, very well. I’ve read about stories of monks go out, they build a monastery. They drain the local swamp so that it can become farmland. They teach people to farm for themselves and to do other things that raises the standard of living. And before long, you have a monastery and a town in that place, which is a different way of life than the hunter-gatherer tribal way of life that was often experienced in much of Northern Europe.
Jared Staudt:
It was the foundation and stability for Western civilization. I mean, it’s not a stretch to say Western civilization was built out of the monastery.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, all right. Here’s the one that I actually think sticks in the craw of many, many people. You said that Christianity enhanced the dignity of women. I think there is a very broadly accepted story that Christianity is repressive of women.
Jared Staudt:
When you look at the popularity of Christianity in the ancient world, it was hugely popular among women. Well, let’s think about that. Why is it? I mean, Paul said that in Christ, there’s no longer Gentile or Jew, or woman or man. Now did he mean we were getting rid of the sexes? Absolutely not. But what he meant is when you come to church, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman because you are beloved of God and you have equal dignity in Christ, whether you’re a man or a woman.
But it also meant that you could not simply be divorced. If you look at in the ancient cultures, women could simply be cast off. But according to, once again, St. Paul, the two become one flesh, as was the teaching of Jesus. St. Paul in Ephesians 5 says that the husband is like Christ in giving his life completely for the wife. He doesn’t say, “Oh, the wife should come and just serve all the husband’s needs and be his slave and do whatever he says.” He says, “No, the husband lays his life down for his wife.”
That was revolutionary in the ancient world. Christianity strengthened the family and that strengthened the life of children who had more stability and more love and affection. It also really did enhance the dignity of women. Even if you look at the monastery, the monastery was the first place that was self-governed by women as well.
Cy Kellett:
What a wonderful conversation. Thanks for having it with us. Family Guy’s worth it if it occasions conversations like this. Dr. Jared Staudt, thank you very much.
Jared Staudt:
Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you to all of our listeners as well. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want to contact us, you can always send us an email, focus@catholic.com is the email address. Focus@catholic.com. We’ve got a whole bunch of these podcasts now here at Catholic Answers and in the Catholic Answers Family. You can check out Shameless Joe. His podcast Shameless Popery is available over at shamelessjoe.com.
You can check out the Trent Horn Podcast or maybe check out what Karlo Broussard is doing and Bible studies each week, apologetics finding the apologetic meaning in the Bible readings for each Sunday. You can find that at sundaycatholicword.com. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.