How the West Was One
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Regnery Publishing, 2005
(280 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Paul Cella III
The strength of this book is in its character as a competent and readable survey of neglected history; its weakness is its assumptions. Much of the history surveyed here is indeed neglected, sometimes innocently, sometimes studiously, and Woods, a professor of history at Suffolk County Community College in New York, deserves credit for bringing it to the attention of his readers. (He is also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and The Church Confronts Modernity.)
The object of the book is implied (somewhat heavy-handedly, in that peculiar modern style) by its title, and in a certain broad sense the rightness of the thesis is almost self-evident. Ask yourself this question: What is the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church of 1500 to Western Civilization?
As Lawrence Brown put it in his monumental The Might of the West, the relationship is one of absolute identity. The Roman Church of 1500 was Western Civilization. That the West subsequently diverged from the church is both indisputable and irrelevant, for the great bulk of the groundwork had been accomplished, and even what had not yet been was quite inconceivable without what had.
Popular Injustice
Woods’s wide-ranging surveys, from science to art, from law to economics, should be enough to give even a hostile reader pause. For example, the injustice done in popular history (and thus popular imagination) to the work of the great medieval scientific polymaths like Buridan and Oresme is severe, and results in a substantial distortion of our history as a civilization.
The usual story is that the theoretical foundations of modern mechanics and physical science developed as men began a decisive break with the narrow theology of Rome and returned with new eyes to the wisdom of classical civilization during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The truth is that these foundations were laid before any break with Rome was even contemplated; were laid, oftentimes, by churchmen themselves; and were laid, in fact, as men began a decisive break with the intellectual authority of classical antiquity.
The West had to cast off the causality (borrowing the term from Lawrence Brown) of classical science (mainly Aristotle) before our science could freely develop, and Christian theology did little to hinder this and in many ways aided in its achievement. The truth is, in short, that no other civilization save our own has ever come to believe in the kind of universal metaphysics of cause-and-effect that we take almost wholly for granted.
The civilizations of the Near East, whatever their religion, have usually settled on the idea of an infinite, instantaneous divine will: that all events hinge on the immediate providence (or caprice) of God and no predictive causality is possible short of knowing the divine will. It is only the men of the West who have conceived of causality separate from will, a causality that issues in universal laws discernible by man.
Woods does not even really enter into this tremendous topic, probably for good reason, but he does an able job of demonstrating that Western science as a distinctive idea emerged under the medieval church. Western science, with its own causal assumptions, was already a unique discipline long before the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, and the church never set herself emphatically against its development. Science has now become the patrimony of mankind, but it emerged only in the West, and only among men reared up by the Catholic Church.
Paul J. Cella III is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia, and editor of the website Cella's Review ( www.cellasreview.blogspot.com).
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