The New Atheist Denial of History by Borden W. Painter Jr

Author:Borden W. Painter, Jr. [Painter, Jr., Borden W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
ISBN: 9781137477682
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Issues

I recall giving a lecture in the 1970s in a survey on medieval Europe explaining the sacramental system of the church and in particular the meaning of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine in the Mass became the body and blood of Christ. Afterward an undergraduate approached me with some questions that seemed to express disapproval of what she had just heard. As we talked, it struck me that she may have thought I was proselytizing or teaching religion rather than history. I concluded that she would have preferred the history of the Middle Ages with the religion left out.

The New Atheists want a version of medieval Europe that takes the opposite approach: They present medieval Europe with only the religion left in—at least the parts they think will demonstrate the depravity and moral bankruptcy of Christianity. The omission of significant chunks of Europe’s past mars the New Atheist portrayal of all historical periods, but it reaches a particularly egregious level in dealing with the Middle Ages. They betray little knowledge or interest in the economic, intellectual, cultural, and political aspects of medieval Europe.

In economic developments, medieval people proved more clever and innovative than the New Atheists’ depiction of ignorant boobs living in squalor and quite incapable of inventing anything useful like penicillin to fight plague, pestilence, and disease. Historians of medieval technology point to a number of devices that increased agricultural efficiency, such as improved designs for ploughs and windmills or innovations like the horse collar. The increased production allowed markets to develop that funneled food to cities as the population began to increase in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Some historians talk of an “agricultural revolution” that could sustain the growing urban population. Urban centers in Italy and the Low Countries spurred international trade that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean in an arc up to northwest Europe and England. These developments mark a dynamic, not a static, society.46

The universities of Europe and the United States today descend directly from the medieval prototypes in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, and elsewhere. Students flocked to them to prepare for careers in theology, law, and medicine. Although the church played a central role and clergy dominated many of them, the universities maintained a degree of independence that allowed for intellectual innovation and disputation. Hitchens admits the scholastics achieved something intellectually, although he manages to do so in his usual condescending and dismissive language. He grants that their methods just might gain his approval: “We have nothing much to learn from what they thought, but a great deal to learn from how they thought.”47

When Thomas Aquinas taught at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, he labored to construct a philosophical and theological system that incorporated Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology. His work frightened more conservative theologians, who accused him of heresy. Nevertheless, Aquinas and his work survived, albeit with considerable opposition. Only later, after the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, did Thomism become officially supported as the main system of

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