Christian culture

• 1. Introduction

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  Christian culture is not a single tradition but a vast, layered inheritance that has shaped how billions of people read, build, heal, learn, and think. The Bible alone has been estimated to have sold over 5 billion copies and spawns approximately 100 million new purchases every year. David Crystal has calculated that the King James Version of 1611 seeded at least 257 distinct idioms in the English language, from "feet of clay" to "reap the whirlwind". Richard Dawkins, no friend of institutional religion, called that translation "a great work of literature" and warned that any native English speaker who has never read a word of it is "verging on the barbarian". What happens when a faith tradition becomes so deeply woven into a civilization that pulling it out would leave more gaps than fabric? That is the question at the heart of this documentary. How did a movement that began in the Levant come to govern the calendar, the university curriculum, the hospital ward, the banking hall, and the concert hall of most of the world? And what happens in the regions where its Eastern branch charted a different course?

• 2. One Faith, Many Worlds

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  From the moment Christianity spread outward from the Levant during the early Roman Empire, it split along a pre-existing geographical seam. The Greek East and the Latin West had different languages, different philosophical habits, and different political centers, and out of that divide grew distinct Christian cultures with their own rites and practices. Rome and Carthage anchored what became Western or Latin Christendom. Constantinople became the capital of Eastern Christianity, joined by Antioch as the seat of Syriac Christianity, Alexandria as a home of intellectual synthesis, and Kerala as the cradle of Indian Christianity. The Byzantine Empire was described by historians as one of the peaks in Christian history and civilization, a place where Greek learning never stopped being cultivated. It was in Alexandria, the source notes, that Graeco-Oriental Christianity had its birth, where the Septuagint translation was made and where a fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion took place that culminated in the work of Philo. Origen, Athanasius, Arius, Cyril, and Synesius were all born or worked in Alexandria alongside pagan rhetoricians. That city's intellectual energy radiated outward, while Antioch held its own prestige as the home of St. John Chrysostom and the tradition of Christian universal chronicles. The Oriental Orthodox Churches carved out a third path, playing a prominent role in the history of Armenia, Egypt, Turkey, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and parts of India. Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University described the Catholic Church as standing "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization," a claim that sets the stage for everything that followed.

• 3. Stone, Glass, and Light

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  The Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in Europe using movable type, was a product of literacy. But before the printing press, Christian culture expressed itself most visibly in stone. The architecture of cathedrals, basilicas, and abbey churches traces a lineage back to the Constantinian period, when Constantine dedicated Constantinople as his new capital in 330 AD and ordered the original foundations of Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Apostles. Hagia Sophia was described as an architectural and cultural icon of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox civilization; in early Byzantium, its construction required the architect-mathematicians Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles to use complex mathematical formulas that represented a technological breakthrough for centuries afterward. From the 11th to the 13th centuries, Latin Christendom produced a wave of construction that British art historian Kenneth Clark dated as beginning around the year 1000. From 1100 onward, he wrote, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were built and decorated with sculptures, hangings, and mosaics belonging to one of the greatest epochs of art. Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis, considered an early patron of Gothic architecture, believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God and wrote that "the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material." The styles proceeded in sequence: Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, various revival styles, and eventually Modern, each spreading through a particular mechanism. Monastic orders carried new fashions across regions, bishops transferred from one diocese to another brought their aesthetic preferences, and master stonemasons traveled as architects. Today the incomplete Sagrada Familia designed by Gaudí stands alongside Hagia Sophia, which is now a museum, as markers of how wide that tradition eventually stretched.

• 4. The Image and the Icon

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  Christian art began, about two centuries after Christ, by borrowing motifs from Roman Imperial imagery and classical Greek and Roman religion. The stone sarcophagi of Roman Christians preserve the earliest surviving carved statuary of Jesus, Mary, and other biblical figures. When Christianity was legalized, artists adopted richer forms: mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, and the architecture that housed them. The earliest surviving substantive illuminated manuscripts date from the period AD 400 to 600, primarily produced in Ireland, Constantinople, and Italy, written on vellum, a high-quality parchment traditionally made from unsplit calfskin. In the Eastern Church, a crisis called Iconoclasm convulsed the Byzantine Empire between 726 and 843, driven by controversy over graven images and the proper interpretation of the Second Commandment. Its resolution produced a strict standardization of religious imagery. Byzantine art grew increasingly conservative; images many believed to have been painted by Saint Luke himself were held to carry an authority close to scripture, and monumental religious sculpture was effectively banned. That ban did not travel west. In the West, Romanesque and Gothic art moved in an increasingly naturalistic direction. The Protestant Reformation then nearly dismantled what centuries of Catholic patronage had built, with reformers destroying as much religious imagery as they could reach. Catholic artists responded with the Baroque and Rococo styles, dramatic and emotionally stirring, intended to stimulate religious fervor. Renaissance artists sponsored by the Church included Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and Titian. Michelangelo's Moses, David, and Pieta; Da Vinci's Last Supper; and Raphael's various Madonna paintings are among the works the source identifies as unsurpassed masterpieces of Western art. Protestant painters, meanwhile, redirected their energies toward secular forms: history painting, landscape, portrait, and still life. Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh all came from Protestant backgrounds.

• 5. Universities, Hospitals, Welfare

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  Medieval Christianity created the first modern universities. Prior to their formal establishment, European higher education had taken place for hundreds of years in cathedral schools and monastic schools, with evidence of these forerunners dating back to the 6th century AD. Universities began in Italian towns: Salerno became a leading medical school translating Greek and Arabic physicians into Latin, and Bologna University, which first specialized in canon law and civil law, became the most influential of the early institutions. Paris University, supervised by Notre Dame Cathedral, came to rival Bologna in theology. Oxford later rivaled Paris in theology, and Salamanca University was founded in Spain in 1243. Historian Geoffrey Blainey noted that these universities benefitted from Latin as a common language and from the Church's internationalist reach. Robert Grosseteste of the University of Oxford was recognized as an early expositor of a systematic method of scientific experimentation, and Saint Albert the Great was identified as a pioneer of biological field research. The Puritans who established Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628 founded Harvard College only eight years later. Yale University followed in 1701. The medical infrastructure the Church built was equally distinctive. The Catholic Church established a hospital system in medieval Europe that historian Guenter Risse said was designed to cater to social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age. The first hospital was erected by Leontius of Antioch between 344 and 358 as a refuge for strangers and migrants. St. Basil of Caesarea later developed an expanded refuge for the sick and homeless. Geoffrey Blainey described the medieval Catholic Church as an early version of a welfare state: it ran hospitals for the elderly, orphanages for the young, hospices for the sick, places for lepers, and hostels for pilgrims, and distributed food during famines. Today the Roman Catholic Church remains the largest non-governmental provider of health care services in the world, operating around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly, and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent located in developing countries.

• 6. Science, Technology, and the Monks

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  Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430, held that scripture can have multiple interpretations in areas far beyond human reach, and that one should leave room for future findings to shed new light. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, argued that reason is in harmony with faith and that reason can even contribute to understanding revelation. That posture allowed a tradition of inquiry to develop inside the Church that some scholars argue was crucial to the emergence of modern science. A review of Nobel Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000 found that 65.4 percent of laureates identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Among those categories, Christians won 72.5 percent of chemistry prizes, 65.3 percent in physics, 62 percent in medicine, and 54 percent in economics. The Cistercian monasteries offer a concrete illustration of what that tradition looked like in practice. According to medievalist Jean Gimpel, every Cistercian monastery had a model factory, often as large as the church itself, using waterpower to crush wheat, sieve flour, full cloth, and tan leather. The English science historian James Burke examined the impact of Cistercian waterpower, derived from Roman watermill technology such as that of the Barbegal aqueduct and mill near Arles, in his television series Connections. The Jesuits carried a particular reputation in experimental physics. According to Jonathan Wright's book God's Soldiers, by the 18th century the Jesuits had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes; they observed the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings before many others. Among priest-scientists, Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian abbot, pioneered the study of genetics; Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, was one of the early advocates of the scientific method; and Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre was the first to propose the Big Bang theory.

• 7. Word, Work, and Capital

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  The Protestant Reformation produced consequences its architects never planned. When reformers insisted that all church members should be able to read the Bible, compulsory education for both boys and girls followed, and literacy spread through populations that had been largely excluded from learning. A 2016 Pew Center study on religion and education found that Christians ranked as the second most educated religious group in the world after Jews, with an average of 9.3 years of schooling. Germany topped the Christian list at 13.6 years, followed by New Zealand at 13.5 and Estonia at 13.1. Christians also held the second highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita while ranking first in absolute numbers at 220 million. John Calvin's rejection of luxury had an indirect economic consequence the Pew researchers did not study but that economists have long debated. Craftsmen, industrialists, and businessmen operating under Calvinist principles could reinvest the greater part of their profits into efficient machinery and modern production methods rather than spending them on display. This recycling of profit into technology is what the source identifies as the mechanism behind the Protestant work ethic, the unplanned force behind the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. In Northern Europe, Protestant merchant families moved into banking in the late 18th century; the source names Barings in the United Kingdom, Schroders and Berenbergs in Germany, and Hope and Co. in the Netherlands. Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic disciple of Thomas Aquinas who studied the human rights of colonized peoples, is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law. And Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th-century economist, wrote that the Scholastics come nearer than any other group to having been the founders of scientific economics. The Morgan family, an American Episcopal Church banking dynasty, became prominent in the United States and throughout the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a concrete emblem of how deeply Protestant culture had woven itself into the structures of American commercial power.