It is an interesting thought exercise–how would western civilization have developed without Christianity?

As to the specific question:

The intellectual and artistic traditions, as well as, in some cases, the institutions, they were working in had been built by Christianity.

Look at western music. “High” western music (as opposed to folk western music) had really been developed in an explicitly ecclesiastical setting. It was in the 12th and 13th centuries, especially at Notre Dame (consider Perotin), that Parisian polyphony developed. In the 16th and 17th centuries polyphony was perfected under figures like Byrd and Palestrina. How would we have had a Bach, or a Beethoven, or a Mozart without those centuries of musical development?

You can see the same thing happen with the visual arts and architecture.

Fun aside here: this was not so much a Christian thing as a specifically Latin Christian thing. The Eastern Church was much more traditional, more stylized, and less open to experimentation in its ecclesiastical arts. The same holds true of their theology. Once we get through the early period, eastern theology is very conservative and traditional, and nothing like scholasticism develops.

Something similar is going on in philosophy: throughout the middle ages, the best philosophy was being done by theologians (and there was serious philosophy being done, including the recovery of Aristotle), usually by clerics of one sort or another, either in monastery schools, or cathedral schools, or later at universities.

There is a deep-seated liberalism in Western Christianity that positively encouraged, fostered, and financed rational inquiry and free development of art. There is a humanism–albeit partly bridled by orthodoxy–that runs through it. I don’t know quite how to say where it came from, but it appears clear as day in the record across centuries and disciplines. Would humanism have manifested itself in the West without the influence of Christianity? Is this a case where that liberal humanistic streak is a function of the underlying culture that survived despite the religion? It is impossible to say for sure, but we can say that as things actually played out the Latin Church was critical in developing, encouraging, and incubating this intellectual and artistic tradition. I think the most we can do is compare Latin Christendom against Greek Christendom, and then compare both against Islam (which did started out with such liberalism, in the early centuries, but then the philosophers and humanists lost the battle with the scholars of the law).

The fact that it developed within a Christian framework does not logically entail that Christianity caused it. The necessary cause argument is an application of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, in my opinion. The claim is also unverifiable. We cannot rerun 2000 years of history to see what would have happened without Christianity.

Absolutely. We can’t answer the question definitively. But we can compare what happened under Christianity to what had been happening before it showed up, and we can compare it to what happened elsewhere. I do think that the culture that flourished in western Europe between, lets say, 1100 and 1500, was unusual, and that the institutional Church was a key and direct supporter of much of the unusual stuff that was happening.

There is no question that there would still have been creative people, the question has more to do with how their creativity was supported or suppressed.

we conveniently forget the academies founded by Plato and Aristotle
The academies themselves came out of a specific and unusual cultural period, and were short-lived. They also don’t appear to have enjoyed a lot of broader institutional support. As impressive as it was, you can’t really compare the Lyceum to the Universities of Paris or Oxford.

I do think it is more than just Christianity in general that led to the cultural accomplishments in question. I don’t know quite what that extra factor is, but the fact we don’t see anything comparable happening in Byzantium suggests that there is some other factor.

I also think there is something special about Latin Christianity, in that it not only permitted but positively supported and fostered what we might call humanistic endeavors (yes, with caveats about orthodoxy).

Secular liberalism has flourished uniquely in the west. The roots of that go deep into the middle ages. I don’t think we can acknowledge the triumph of secular liberalism in the West, and ignore that its foundations were formed (ironically) while the culture was dominated by Latin Christianity.

(I’d typed up a carefully constructed post, but my session timed out before I hit “submit” and it was lost forever. This is my hasty reconstruction.)

A quick methodological point addressing THorne’s last paragraph.

History, as a field, is never directly testable. It exists on the fringe of the sciences. But I’m not ready to give up assertions of historical causality on that basis.

Take, for example, the claim that Arabian polytheism died out because of the rise of Islam. Someone might counter that actually polytheism was already dying off and Islam itself was just an effect of a prior, cultural trend that would have killed off polytheism of its own power anyway.

I don’t know enough about pre-Islamic Arabia to comment, but I think that is an argument that could be intelligently had and that could proceed on evidence, carefully considered, to reach a reasonable conclusion.

Such conclusions will be less certain that the best conclusions from other branches of scientific inquiry (where theses can be directly tested and disproven), but I don’t think that makes them meaningless.

Bart is working on a book exploring public charity as a development of Christian ideals.

Yeah as a good modern secularist I am automatically skeptical at such notions.

I’m also skeptical of the claim that Christians are actually more charitable than non-Christians (though I’m open to seeing evidence).

I am more interested in Christianities contributions to the humanities.

Here is an idea that I find compelling: What was special about Christianity in the west was the prevalence of the religious life: celibate people living with modest material expectations who devoted their lives to doing things simply because they were thought to be worth doing (whether that was running hospitals, or studying philosophy, or painting pretty pictures, or waging war to protect pilgrims in the holy land).

You have philosophers in other cultures, but do you have entire, mainstream societies of celibates vowed to poverty and devoted to lives of “contemplation”?

You have monks in other societies, but is that choice as popular and mainstream as it was in medieval Europe?

The comparison with the eastern church is interesting and I don’t know enough to draw any conclusions, but it is interesting that the east relatively early–from a medieval perspective–abandoned the norm of celibate clerics and left celibacy to the monks. Though monasticism started in the east, I don’t know how popular it remained there moving into the medieval period.

I’m intrigued by this idea that it was really monasticism (broadly construed) that made the West special. It was mainstream and very popular in the west during the medieval period, to devote your life, fully and formally, to something bigger than yourself, and very often that ended up including something broadly humanistic: the arts, philosophy, care of the less fortunate.

Goaded by curiosity and THorne, I poked at this idea a bit.

I can’t find any evidence that monasticism was more popular in the West in the medieval period, but western monasticism did have a markedly different relationship to the world than eastern monasticism.

In the east, monks sought a more complete retreat from the world–thus the number of eastern monasteries build on mountains. Eastern monasticism, even in its cenobitic form, was ultimately animated by the spirit of the cenobites. Their work was entirely prayer; they tended to engage in other work little more than was necessary.

In the west, monasteries tended to be in the countryside–not in urban centers but still more integrated into the world than a monastery on a remote mountain top. (This integration into the world took a huge leap forward with the founding of the mendicant orders–a late development, but one in continuity with the prior trend in the west of religious being more involved in the secular world than their eastern counterparts) And they tended to devote themselves, not only to prayer, but to other good work–like running schools or hospitals.

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The second special development in Roman Catholicism consists of the functional characteristics of its many orders. The individual orders aid the church in its various areas of activity—e.g., missions, education, care for the sick and needy, and combating heresy. . . . . To the degree that special missionary, pedagogical, scholarly-theological, and ecclesiastically political tasks of the orders increased in the West, the character of ancient monasticism—originally focused completely on prayer, meditation, and contemplation—receded more and more in importance.

So perhaps the thesis could be fine-tuned a bit: Western monasticism looked out to the world and engaged it in a way Eastern monasticism didn’t. This holds up, I think, pretty well in something like philosophy: among western monks you finds some devoted to education and running schools, and in that context, development of something like scholasticism (which is very concerned with answering obscure philosophical questions) makes sense. In the East, monks are interested more totally in their own spiritual development, so the theology they develop is more mystical, and answering obscure philosophical questions simply so you can have a complete system that answers all the obscure questions is not a priority; after all, how will answering this obscure question aid my contemplation and spiritual development?

And from that example, I give a wave of the hand, mutter “mutatis mutandis,” and extrapolate to other fields like music and art. Of course we get Fra Angelico in the West and not the East: Western religious life was inherently outward-looking and active while Eastern religious life was inward-looking and purely contemplative: Both Fra Angelico and an eastern iconographer view their respective art as a spiritual exercise, but Fra Angelico looks to engage his audience through his art as an essential element of his exercise in a way the eastern iconographer doesn’t. For the icon painter, the principal value of painting is advancing on his spiritual path precisely by following in the footsteps of the masters who have gone before him. For Fra Angelico, he advances spiritually by performing a service to those who will view his art–reaching and inspiring them. Broad brushstrokes, I know.

This of course raises the further question, why did western monasticism become more functional? If I had to guess I’d attribute it to the reality of western monasticism developing as the (western) Roman empire crumbled; there was a vacuum they felt the need to fill, a pressure that the monks in Byzantium would not have been subjected to. E.g., even in Cassiodurus we see a conscious effort of monks to step in and preserve the learning that was in danger of being lost, and this work was seen as an important element of the monastery’s active life. The attitude is not, I’m retreating from the world while civilization crumbles around me, but the collapse of civilization is not my problem anymore. Perhaps there is something similar at work in Benedict’s making hospitality to travelers a hallmark of his monasticism.