Belloc Woulda Been Proud

Hilaire Belloc often pointed out that modern Western civilization runs off the fumes of the civilization built by the Catholic Church (see, for instance, Belloc's Europe and the Faith). At least one modern scholar agrees with him.

Today is the official release date of Thomas E. Woods' How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Want to learn more? Woods himself has provided an overview: Link.

A few excerpts:

From the role of the monks (they did much more than just copy manuscripts) to art and architecture, from the university to Western law, from science to charitable work, from international law to economics, the book delves into just how indebted we are as a civilization to the Catholic Church, whether we realize it or not.

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

To say that the Church played a positive role in the development of science has now become absolutely mainstream, even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public. In fact, Stanley Jaki, over the course of an extraordinary scholarly career, has developed a compelling argument that in fact it was important aspects of the Christian worldview that accounted for why it was in the West that science enjoyed the success it did as a self-sustaining enterprise. Non-Christian cultures did not possess the same philosophical tools, and in fact were burdened by conceptual frameworks that hindered the development of science. Jaki extends this thesis to seven great cultures: Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya. In these cultures, Jaki explains, science suffered a "stillbirth." My book gives ample attention to Jaki's work.

Economic thought is another area in which more and more scholars have begun to acknowledge the previously overlooked role of Catholic thinkers. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, paid tribute to the overlooked contributions of the late Scholastics ”“ mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish theologians ”“ in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954). "[I]t is they," he wrote, "who come nearer than does any other group to having been the 'founders' of scientific economics."

We're acquainted with Woods' prolific work (is this his third book in six months?). This book sounds like a "can't miss." We'll be ordering it right after we finish this post.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Note: Amazon's price is $7.00 lower than Barnes and Noble's.