"The History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom" is a surprise to those of us who consider ourselves reasonably familiar with the sweep of Western history. It tells the story of the extent and intensity of the rule of Christian theology through the end of the 19th century, and it describes how the grip of that rule was finally loosened. This history, while not actually hidden, is almost never discussed. No scholarly survey of the topic has yet superseded this book, although it was written over a hundred years ago.
Popular histories, and even serious histories, almost always gloss over the centuries-long role of the Christian church in suppressing evidence-based examination of the natural world. Some writings even claim that the medieval Christian churches preserved and supported scientific thought, except in a few unusual cases like the trial of Galileo.
In the United States, this reluctance to discuss actual Church history stems from the desire to avoid embarrassing modern-day Christians. Many conservative Christians consider the exposure of their past theological errors as an attack on the reliability of their current theological claims.
Because of this omission, the history of Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the end of the 19th century is difficult to understand. What kept the people of the Dark Ages so uniformly in the dark in so many countries and for so many centuries? Were they just less intelligent than modern humans?
This work answers that question by giving us the histories of a number of controversies in which budding scientific thought clashed with then-current theology. Rather than just describing one or two events of a particular controversy, though, White describes the centuries-long working out of those clashes.
Galileo's persecution by the Catholic church, and the Protestant attacks on his teachings, were just part of a long chain of events in the struggle to base astronomy on observed, experimentally proven facts rather than theological dogma. Learning what came before Galileo's time, and learning in more detail how his work threatened the theological underpinnings of the church, gives us a very different understanding of what Galileo was doing, what he accomplished and what he suffered.
The history of the battle for scientifically based astronomy is only one of the histories here; others have been mainly forgotten, like the fight against personal and public cleanliness, the battle over the nature of comets, or the theological outrage in response to Franklin's invention of the lightning rod.
As White describes the evolving theology of previous ages, as he gives example after example of the the vast amount of secular power that churchmen wielded, as the different controversies weave together into a coherent cultural context, we begin to see that the power of theology in western history was much more pervasive and controlling than usual histories admit. We also see just how dangerous it has been during most of the last two thousand years to disagree with the theological descriptions of the natural world, and how, in the darkest centuries, only the bravest or most naive people tried to go against the current of theological thought.
This history exposes the roots of many of the controversies that affect our lives today - many current attitudes and figures of speech are echos of ancient theologies, and many current political battles are continuations of clashes which have been going on for centuries.
We are living once again in a world where theology is fighting on many fronts and in many cultures to suppress a factual understanding of the world and a rational ordering of our social fabric. Knowing the long history of our own struggle with the dark forces of dogmatic theology can help us understand the struggles of other cultures, the resurgent forces of anti-rationalism in our own culture, and the complexity of our own times.
White was a kind man, a devout Christian, a professional historian, a diplomat, and an educator. His writing style was not as stilted as that of many of his contemporaries, but this book will still sound old-fashioned to a modern reader. It's language is more formal than it's modern equivalent would be, and there are repetitions and quirks in the book that a modern editor would have removed. In spite of this, it is often a gripping read, and sometimes an amusing one.
One of the differences in the language of the 1890's is White's refreshing use of the word 'race' - he uses it in the older meaning of the word, when it could be used about any grouping of people or about us all, rather than in the modern pseudo-scientific sense. He talks about "the new race of Christian theologians", and about apparent physical differences between races as an indication of the age of humans on earth, but his usual use of 'race' is to describe good things men have done as being "ornaments to our race" or "advances for our race", and from the different contexts where he does so it's clear that he means the human race, not any particular subdivision of it.
This history was written from the viewpoint of an educated man in the America of the 1890s, and his science and history reflect that. His chronology of man's time on earth, his understanding of astronomy and biology, even his view of history as primarily the realm of men (there are very few women mentioned here), are all very much those of the last years of the nineteenth century. The great differences in scientific theory and knowledge today, however, don't affect the basic value of his work; it remains the most complete and well-researched history of the struggle of science and theology in the West. The revolutions in human knowledge that have occurred since his time have only made it more clear that our world and our universe are vastly more splendid and mysterious than the theology of the past would have had us believe.
The HTML of this book is intentionally simple. It will use your browser's default background color, font and font size, and does not restrict your ability to resize and change the font with your browser's settings. It may not be as pretty as a more heavily formatted version, but it is more user friendly for those who have poor vision.
This version of "The History Of The Warfare Of Science With Theology In Christendom" began as public domain, plain ASCII etext downloaded from the website of a well-known etext Project which makes free texts available to the public.
That Project requires anyone who modifies one of their published etexts to remove the name of the Project from the modified version, and I have done so. I am extremely grateful to them for providing the original scanned text, which must have taken a great deal of work to prepare.
I have corrected a few mis-numbered footnotes and a few typographical errors in the original, have moved footnotes to the end of each HTML page and linked the footnotes to the text. I have also gathered all of the footnotes into an additional page at the end of the book, and the original verbose chapter descriptions into a separate, expanded table of contents. The original index was rendered useless when the book was scanned and pagination was lost, but the chapter descriptions in the expanded table of contents can be useful in finding specific information.
Footnotes can be accessed in a couple of ways - if you click on the footnote number, you will be linked to the footnote at the bottom of the page. Use your 'back' button to return to your place in the page. If you click on the W next to the footnote number, the footnote will be displayed in a separate, re-sizable background window. Subsequent selected footnotes will be displayed in the same footnote window.
This book remains in the public domain. You may distribute this version of it if you:
1. Distribute it for free
2. Retain this page as part of the etext
Edgar Carpenter
New York City
March 08, 2004