[Perun]

“….how did the dominance of Christianity affect the knowledge of, and attitudes towards nature? The standard answer, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and widely propagated in the twentieth, maintains that Christianity presented serious obstacles to the advancement of science and, indeed, sent the scientific enterprise into a tailspin from which it did not recover for more than a thousand years. The truth, as we shall see, is far different and much more complicated.



One charge frequently leveled against the Church is that it was groadly anti-intellectual – that the leaders of the church preferred faith to reason and ignorance to education. In fact, this is a considerable distortion…Christians quickly recognized that if the Bible was to be read, literacy would have to be encouraged; and in the long run Christianity became the major patron of European education and a major borrower from the Classical intellectual tradition. Naturally enough, the kind and level of education and intellectual effort favored by the Church Fathers that which supported the mission of the Church as they perceived it….whether this represents a blow against the scientific enterprise or modest, but welcome, support for it depends largely on the attitudes and expectations that one brings to the question. If we compare the early church with a modern research university or the National Science Foundation, the church will prove to have failed abysmally as a supporter of science and natural philosophy. But such a comparison is obviously unfair. If, instead, we compare the support given to the study of nature by the early church with support available from any other contemporary social institution, it will become clear that the church was one of the major patrons – perhaps the major patron – of scientific learning. Its patronage may have been limited and selective, but limited and selected patronage is better than no patronage at all. But a critic to view the early church as an obstacle to scientific progress might argue that the handmaiden status accorded natural philosophy is inconsistent with the existence of genuine science. True science, this critic would maintain, cannot be the handmaiden of anything, but must process total autonomy; consequently, the “disciplined” science that Augustine sought is no science at all. The appropriate response is that totally autonomous science is an attractive ideal, but we do not live in an ideal world. Many of the most important developments in the history of science have been produced by people committed not to autonomous science, but to science in the service of some ideology, social program, or practical end; for much of its history, the question has not been whether science will function as handmaiden, but which mistress it will serve.”

--David C. Lindberg The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 BC to AD 1450 pg.149-51



“The contribution of the religious culture of the early Middle Ages to the scientific movement was thus one of preservation and transmission. The monasteries served as the transmitters of literacy and a thin version of the Classical tradition(including science or natural philosophy) through a period when literacy and scholarship were severely threatened. Without them, Western Europe would not have more science, but less.”

--inbid. pg.157