How Christianity Contributed to Civilization
Christianity has had an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices embedded within western civilization, and no one with even a rudimentary awareness of history can credibly deny this. Even the atheist Nietzsche recognized that it spawned the growth of science and technology.
Kenneth Clark, in his well-regarded BBC series Civilisation, argued that for civilization to develop, there had to be intellectual energy, freedom of thought, social mobility, and leisure, all of which Christianity helped facilitate. He added that it could be credibly argued that western civilization was the creation of the church.
Feudalism during the Middle Ages was aligned with the church and fostered a growing code of civility in medieval society. So did the emergence of cities, which grew up around monasteries. For centuries, monks administered villages and provided food to large numbers of people, and monasteries were also centers of intellectual activity. Large cities built cathedrals, which were commanded to take care of people, physically and spiritually, throughout their lives. These cathedrals shared the teachings of Jesus, with revolved around loving God and one’s neighbor as oneself.
Cities advanced civilization because they became centers of trade, and sponsors of the economic freedom that went along with it. They allowed trade guilds that paved the way for modern free-trade economies.
Most people living in the West believe in human dignity, personal freedom, and the right of individuals to own private property. None of this came about spontaneously. These beliefs and practices emerged as products of Christianity and were reinforced by documents like the Magna Carta (1215), which expressly opposed arbitrary rule. They have come down to us in such modern documents as the English Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution.
Not only were these beliefs, practices, and values promoted by Christian cathedrals and monasteries, but they became institutionalized within medieval universities. A key feature of these universities, which were church sponsored, was protection of professors from coercion by clergy, which promoted freedom of thought. This allowed science and technology to advance rapidly in the West.
By far the majority of those who turned their minds and hands to science believed that, through their discoveries, they were discerning the mind of God. Among such scientists were Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday, Kelvin, Mendel, Volta, and many others.
Christians led the way in education and the preservation of the written word. Literacy was greatly advanced by monks who protected writings that might otherwise have been lost, and by Christians who made the Bible more accessible by translating it into everyday languages.
They also launched Sunday schools before the start of compulsory education, and they founded schools for the blind and hearing impaired. These acts, reflecting a social conscience and care for the disadvantaged, were rooted in a culture that had internalized the value of the human person.
Christians were also instrumental in putting an end to the horrors of slavery, a tradition that until modern times in the West had characterized most if not all societies. And, it continues in many regions of the world today.
Christians pioneered advances in western medicine, one small example of which was demonstrating the value of chloroform for anesthesia during surgery. Long before this, however, the Church led the way in the care of the sick and dying.
Christian contributions to architecture have a long history that includes the Hagia Sophia in Turkey, first established as a Greek Orthodox church in the fourth century and built into its present structure by Justinian I in the sixth, and only later became a mosque. These contributions also include the Gothic cathedrals in Europe and both the Florentine Duomo and St. Peter’s in Italy.
Christianity had an enormous impact on painting and sculpture, as even a brief scan of any history of art will attest. Its impact on painting can be seen, first in medieval icon-focused works. As appreciation of people as individuals grew, so did representational art that attempted to portray people and events as they realistically were. It is also important to recognize Christianity’s impact on mosaics and metalwork, not to mention that high level of art reflected in illuminated manuscripts of the Bible.
Religious devotion inspired and laid the foundations for melody and harmony in its music. Nearly all western music, whether performed in the concert hall or on a rock stage, is constructed on the twelve tones between octaves, for example keys on a piano. Even music written for instruments like violins and trombones that lack such keys is written for the western twelve-tone scale. Although music in the early medieval period was monophonic, meaning everyone sang the same notes at the same time, out of this eventually came harmonies, two or more different tones sang or played at the same time, and from this sequences of these combinations that prove pleasing to the western ear.
The basic social structure of the western world was build, directly or indirectly, on and around Christianity and what it represented. Clearly, western society has it faults, some of them grievous, and there is no question that there are gross inequities. These faults and inequities have proven to be necessary evils because no better alternative has come along. Certainly it does not exist within communism. Although it exists in different forms, and there is no single form of communism, all are based on the doctrine that society as a whole owns most if not all property. In Russia, it has led to massive corruption and widespread inefficiency. In China, where communism is more nuanced, there is still a far larger gap between rich and poor than exists anywhere in the United States or Europe.