Ironically, the modern academic world, as secular as it has become, has its roots in an intellectually inclined monastic culture where humble monks, priests, and spiritual seekers searched for God and deep knowledge in harmony with faith, love, hope, and charity. 

It is seldom noted today, but both [experimental science and modern mathematics] were born in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within institutions of higher education that had been founded by the Catholic Church and that were staffed with faculty who were all believing Christians.

Modern Science

Turning to modern science first, the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark (1934–2022) constructed a list of every working scientist active during the birth of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Next, he researched the religious beliefs of this group of fifty-two, each a pioneer in his field. Fifty of the fifty-two were either devout or conventional Christians; only two were skeptics. Both skeptics, however, like the others, had been educated at Christian universities and had conducted their research within institutions reflecting Christian  theological beliefs.

Indeed, the pioneers in nearly every branch of modern experimental science as it emerged were actually monks and priests who combined scientific research with their religious duties. The historian Thomas Woods writes:

For example, Father Nicolaus Steno…is often identified as the father of geology. The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was yet another priest, Father Giambattista Riccioli. Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory. Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as “the Jesuit science.” Even though some thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians, the Church’s contributions to astronomy are all but unknown to the average educated American.

Thus, “the Catholic contribution to science,” writes Woods, “went well beyond ideas— including theological ideas—to accomplished practicing scientists, many of whom were priests.”

The size of the church’s contribution to science is also seldom noted today. The historian Charles Homer Hoskins wrote the following in his now classic work, The Rise of Universities: “Between 1200 and 1500 at least 80 universities were founded in Europe, many starting out on church property.”

The Christian origin of modern science is hard to deny. The first modern scientific laboratories, scientific research institutes, scientific societies, scientific libraries, and science journals were all founded by churchmen and Christian scholars educated in and associated with church institutions. Stark argues that there is a conceptual link between (a) the Christian conception of a rational God who created an intelligible universe fit to be probed by the human mind and (b) the birth of modern experimental science in Europe. Other scholars have argued the same point, including the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a founder of modern symbolic logic. In a famous lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1925, Whitehead argued that medieval Christianity and the Christian conception of God and God’s relation to the world provided “the soil, the climate, the seeds” for the birth of modern science. This is a deep subject that I will not enter into here.

From the Monastery to the Laboratory

The eighty or more universities of medieval Europe that gave the world modern experimental science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew out of monasteries and cathedral schools scattered across the continent from Ireland to Italy. Each of these institutions was originally a small Christian community of monks, students, and spiritual individuals seeking God in communion with others through a life of physical labor, private and communal prayer, charity, humility, study, and spiritual meditation.

Going further back, the French historian Pierre Hadot has shown that the spiritual exercises practiced in the early monasteries of medieval Europe were influenced by modes of spirituality taught in the Stoic schools of ancient Rome and ultimately trace back to spiritual practices associated with Plato and Socrates. A continuous line of development can therefore be traced from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy to Christian spirituality to the birth of modern experimental science.

The monastic institutions of early medieval Europe are often looked down on by modern secular scholars who consider them centers of crude thought and superstition. To the contrary, most were centers of learning where knowledge was valued both for its own sake and because true learning, it was believed, elevates the soul toward the source of all truth, God. The point deserves a moment of attention.

The intellectual milieu in the medieval monasteries of Europe has been described as a “theocentric humanism” in which truth is sought in all areas of thought and all knowledge is unified by being related ultimately to God, the source of all truth. Scholars were encouraged to explore and apply logical reasoning to every aspect of the natural world. Learning was actually considered a form of worship, for the study of the natural world was thought to be the study of God’s handiwork and, as such, expressed respect and reverence for the Creator. Within this cultural matrix, all knowledge was valued, and disciplined logic and rational debate were prized.

The spirit of medieval scholarship is exemplified in the work of Saint Albert the Great (ca. 1200–80), the teacher of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Albert taught his students that no topic is off limits to the Christian scholar; all truth is to be sought, in every area, for God is to be sought, and since God is the source of all truth, the search for truth in any area ultimately leads us to God.

Albert was so interested in the natural world and observational science that he once had himself lowered over the edge of a cliff in a rickety basket just to watch eagle eggs hatching. Contrary to the way they are sometimes portrayed by their modern critics, medieval scholars such as Albert and Thomas Aquinas were not all ivory tower dreamers wasting time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The philosopher and historian Steven Marrone writes that in the medieval monasteries can be seen “the birth of a society in which the learned were free to turn their efforts to analysis and speculation for their own sakes, and eventually to that use of pure reason on which philosophy prides itself today.” New “habits of mind” were giving birth to a new “literate culture.” The monastic scholars, he argues, were the intellectual pioneers of the rationalist movement that paved the way for the birth of the modern university system. Thus, in the monastic system,

the major disciplines of high medieval learning started to take shape, crystalizing around the seed of newly composed and soon universally adopted textbooks that were structured as collections of debating points touching on all significant aspects of the subject field. At the heart of all stood logic, now the paradigm for investigation and summary in all fields.

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