Friday, March 10, 2017

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization: The Book Review

Prominent speaker and writer Tom E. Woods Jr. writes from a historic perspective the themes that developed the West.  Woods holds an A.B. from Harvard University and a Ph.D from Columbia University in History. Woods is a Catholic Libertarian who has written New York Times bestsellers such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and a book on the economic crash of 2007, Meltdown. He has a track record to review history from the secular perspective and correct mistakes in thought. With a fluid writing style Woods paints a picture of how monastic universities, inquisition trials, and canon law from the middle ages all attributed to building the West’s ideas of justice, education, and rights. He divides the book in chapters per their respective topics: Monasteries, Universities, Science, Law, Economics, and Morality (to name just a few). The book is just 285 pages and can be read over a weekend.

[1]
Many times, the inventions of former centuries are wrongly associated with secular values and traditions rather than the Catholic Church, which prominently developed them. For example, in the case of the development of Newton’s laws, Woods shows the work of Jean Buridan, a fourteenth century catholic professor.[2] Buridan, via rejecting Aristotle and the divinity of the planetary bodies, theorized that God had begun the movement of the planets; because there was no friction in space the planets had kept that trajectory henceforth. Isaac Newton would come after and father the first law of motion, “Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.”[3] Nasa’s website shows the common American historic perspective that Newton himself came up with the idea of gravity and inertia with no credit due to Buridan or any past teachers.
Woods also reminds us that in a pagan world, scientific methodoly couldn’t have developed. When the universe was controlled by fickle personalized goddesses who might trick your scientific research and gods who would arbitrarily make lightning strike you because your sacrifice was unworthy, it is no surprise that with the dawn of Christendom the rise of Science came too. In Christianity, the universe was viewed as something other than God that could be enjoyed and studied. Through the universities, created by the Church, a community was available to ask questions and understand the world using philosophy, math, and other sciences.
Opening this book and studying it will allow you to appreciate your Catholic faith in a new way. It will also give you the chance to defend the faith when it is attacked on historic grounds for hampering the growth of science. Far from that claim in fact, “Economic thought, international law, science, university life, charity, religious ideas, art, morality-these are the very foundations of a civilization, and in the West every single one of them emerged from the heart of the Catholic Church.” [4]  I believe that Woods does an excellent job on proving his thesis: the Catholic Church built western civilization.




[2] Woods, Tom E., Jr. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., 2005, 82. Kindle.
[3] Ed. Nancy Hall, Newton’s Laws of Motion, NASA Official. Accessed at https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/K-12/airplane/newton.html on March 11 2017.
[4] Woods, Tom E., Jr. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., 2005, 220. Kindle.

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