Quote:Quote:[Said Maliagar]:
Don't forget that it was the Church who maintained universities, scientists, and the flame of classical philosophy during the Middle Ages. But hey, this can also be a lie.
[Said Frank:] What are you smoking? Christianity -- and the Church -- probably set science back in western civilization by 1000 years....
On the Middle Ages - This time, the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Encyclopedia Britannica on DVD :wink: : (excerpts):
"The term and its conventional meaning were
introduced by Italian humanists with invidious intent; the humanists were engaged in a revival of classical learning and culture, and
the notion of a thousand-year period of darkness and ignorance separating them from the ancient Greek and Roman world served to highlight the humanists' own work and ideals. In a sense, the humanists invented the Middle Ages in order to distinguish themselves from it. The Middle Ages nonetheless provided the foundation for the transformations of the humanists' own Renaissance. ...
The materials from which this civilization was molded were essentially threefold:
the inheritance of classical antiquity, Christian tradition, and Germanic and Scandinavian social patterns. Classical antiquity, which set the standards of learning, culture, and government by which medieval no less than Renaissance scholars measured their own achievements, passed into Europe by several routes.
The Roman Catholic church was able to play an essential role in preserving literacy and even some classical learning in its liturgy and literature, in maintaining some of the forms of public administration in its diocesan government, in perpetuating the tradition of corporate responsibility for peace and the relief of want, and perhaps most of all in creating a new universal society to replace that once provided by the fallen empire. It was ultimately the Latin church rather than the Roman imperial tradition that determined the frontiers of modern Europe.
The only schools of Europe in the 8th century, except perhaps in parts of northern Italy,
were those attached often to monasteries and more rarely to bishoprics.
The rise of the new skills in dialectic in the
11th and 12th centuries produced two phenomena: first, a
confidence in rational thought as a means of solving problems, especially those raised by the conflict of authorities, and, second, a number of teachers whose exceptional talents attracted scholars from the farthest ends of Europe. The self-confidence and European reputation of Peter Abelard reveal this movement at its most distinctive. Around such teachers grew up either religious communities such as that of Saint-Victor of Paris or the earliest universities.
In the 12th century, the lawyers of Bologna, the doctors of Salerno, and, above all, the theologians of Paris were becoming organized bodies governed by a chancellor; by the 13th century, the universities possessed their own statutes regulating the arduous courses of study toward recognized degrees. The crown of studies was the pursuit of the highest knowledge, theology. The forms of 13th-century university study gave rise to the characteristic theological achievements of the period, the summae of the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan St. Bonaventure.
The founding of universities received a new impetus at the end of the 14th and 15th centuries, when they spread into Scandinavia, Scotland, and eastern Europe. "
