Was the Catholic Church really anti-intellectual?
>>347610
In a way I suppose they were, the enlightenment was parasitic to Christianity because it questioned their dogma. But honestly you could write a book on your topic OP
Given churchmen were the only carriers of culture during centuries, really not.
>>347610
Yeah they hated intellectuals.
That's why they translated all those Greek works of philosophy and science into different languages. Also funded and supported the whole Renaissance movement.
Fucking anti-intellectuals am I right?
Not really.
No. They were the scientists, thinkers, historians and preservors of it all. In fact all forms of education used to be run through the church
>>347610
Any proclivity the Church had for intellectual pursuits is based on pre-Christian European culture. Scientific and artistic advancement in the Church happened in spite of it not because of it.
Also, before anyone comes in to jerk off over Muslim science, the same can be said for Islam.
>>347627
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes
You mean overwrote them with prayers
There's two narratives: one where the Church bankrolled all scientific progress in human history including the Russian and American space programs; and one where the Church launched a Crusade against clean drinking water and had all scientists crucified and caused 1000 years of darkness.
Both are stupid as fuck. The Church was an institution that did a lot of bad things but had a few good people working within it who helped advance western civilization.
>>347610
No.
Take Galileo for instance. His research was lauded by the church and the book he was condemned for was commissioned by the pope as a debate book with some of the pope's arguments added in along with the church heads saying they would change their interpretation of scripture if he could provide ample evidence for his claim of the structure of the universe.
He couldn't refute the biggest refutations of heliocentrism in his time, his debate book was considered extremely biased and insulted the pope's arguments, and and he taught his position as true despite the church insisting for him to simply teach it as hypothesis as it would cause political conflict by conflicting with the church teaching at the time.
Now the church was in no position to try to back up the best science at the time with scripture and that did cause a hold up on scientific discourse but only a slight one as conflicting ideas could still be held as hypothesis. Hell, Galileo's book was only banned if it kept the insistence of heliocentrism as truth. (This is not to defend banning books to show what the church was focused on)
Galileo's a good example of the church. It has made mistakes, it has helped people, but there is a lot of misrepresentation and propaganda. I would give a more positive image of the church overall but in no case could it be considered anti-intellectual.
The Catholic Church:
- maintained a clergy which gave anyone who wanted to dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits the possibility to do so even in the darkest times
- collected and copied and thus preserved all the ancient texts it could find
- founded and ran the cathedral schools and then the universities
- provided a philosophy that was highly favourable to scientific progress
- kickstarted modern science with the 1277 Paris condemnation, though that was partially accidental
- provided by far the most sponsorship and subject matter for art and architecture
- did not actually ever burn or otherwise bully anyone for doing science
>>347677
"Pre-Christian European culture" is a little to broad. There wasn't a single culture. One may argue there where certain factions that preserved cultural artefacts and conducted formal intellectual training but there was just as well factions that ignored it because they where too busy just surviving.
>>347725
So they banned a guy's book because he insulted the pope. Having a book with questionable opinion is not grounds to bann a book. If it was we would need to bann your bible.
You are also forgetting how the Catholic church tried to ban fucking encyclopedias, they even jailed and tortured the guy trying to do it. In general your church has shown over and over that it hates people knowing stuff, it wants a monopoly on knowledge.
This is what Martin Luther saw. Catholism is the only religion in history that tried to kill people for teaching others to read their holy book. The Jews learn to read the Torah by age 10, the Muslims are encouraged to memorize their holy book.
>>347764
Everything in your post is utter bullshit, you Lutheran sheep actually learn that crap in school don't you.
And Galileo's book was the equivalent of pic related.
>>347627
They changed shit in the things they translated
They only funded the renaissance shit because rich as fuck merchants were commissioning things that glorified themselves left and right and become more powerful than the church.
>>347725
>>347764
Nice comeback, but gentlemen, please cite your sources.
>>347764
9gag quality post
>>347764
>the only religion in history that tried to kill people for teaching others to read their holy book.
how can your memes be real if your eyes aren't real?
>>347610
No. However knowledge was neatly compartmentalized and held exclusively by select figures of authority and professionals (monks etc). It also had to stay within the dogma, as broadly interpreted as it may be.
Galileo was prosecuted and convicted unjustly before the Roman Inquisition. In 1992, that injustice was removed with popes public apology. A gesture long overdue.
>>347815
Completely wrong, anyone could study at the cathedral schools and the universities, and outside of theology even the teachers weren't usually priests. And the only thing you had to do to "stay within the dogma" was to keep science separate from religion, and formulate your theories as theories rather than indisputable facts (which btw is the origin of two absolutely fundamental elements of the scientific method).
>>347827
Galileo was supported by Pope Urban at first, and the Copernican idea wasn't controversial, but because no stellar parallax could be observed, it couldn't be 100% proven. When Galileo wrote his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, it made Urban look like an idiot, and Urban saw this as an insult to himself and the Papacy.
>>347827
>In 1992, that injustice was removed with popes public apology.
>In 1992, that injustice was removed
You can't unconvict a dead man and the church was supportive of heliocentrism as research grew about it with Newtonian physics and the like and they unbanned any books banned for just Heliocentrism in 1757.
>>347843
>it couldn't be 100% proven
Yes, but neither could virgin births or resurrections, but the church spend plenty of money on statues of that stuff
>>347610
How edgy can one be, science and philosophy were 98% in the church during the dark ages
>>347867
>but the church spend plenty of money on statues of that stuff
not spending money on science =/= you suppress science you dolt
>>347875
The dark ages were dark because of the church and its obscurantism. If church wouldn't have done what it did i can't help but wonder how technologically evolved we would be now
SCIENCE RULES religion drools
>>347880
6/10
I could believe, given how Reddit is.
>>347867
The Bible was their proof, even if you think its bullshit, it was more than what Galileo could bring when it comes to a Stellar Parallax, Galileo had also been incorrect in the past when it comes to the tides, so its reasonable to say the Papacy couldn't trust him 100% to begin with
>>347880
The "dark ages" were dark because Rome fell and there was no centralized power to pick up the pieces, just tribes of Germans fighting each other
>This thread
They were sometimes.
Galileo, Kepler, & Co, the guys who were putting out work that clearly showed the Bible to be wrong if taken literally, were told that they must only put forward their theories if they include words to the effect of "this is just a theory and is not proven."
When Galileo refused he was given house imprisonment as a sentence; and I think Kepler's work remained on a banned books list for centuries.
>>347725
>>He couldn't refute the biggest refutations of heliocentrism in his time
He showed heliocentrism to be a better system that geocentrism.
>his debate book was considered extremely biased and insulted the pope's arguments
Yes, it was bias, on the side of heliocentrism, which turned out to be correct.
The Dialogue, in which the Pope was insulted, came out long after Galileo had been censured, anyway.
>>347681
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
>A copy of these works was made around 950 AD, again in the Byzantine Empire, by an anonymous scribe. This was a period during which the study of Archimedes flourished in Constantinople in a school founded by the mathematician, engineer, and former archbishop of Thessaloniki, Leo the Geometer, a cousin to the patriarch.
Christians overwrote with prayers a book Christians copied.
>>347677
That's Ireland became a center of intellectual activity in early Middle Ages. They had such a intellectual pre-Christian culture, that even the power of the Church couldn't oppress.
>>348041
>>348041
>the guys who were putting out work that clearly showed the Bible to be wrong if taken literally
Many of the early church fathers already did this.
>He showed heliocentrism to be a better system that geocentrism.
He poked holes in geocentrism. He could not establish his framework of heliocentrism as true. That is why he was praised by the church for his findings but told him to keep his belief of heliocentrism as hypothesis.
And yes, we was told to keep Heliocentrism as hypothesis before he wrote Dialogue. That added to the condemnation from it.
>Yes, it was bias, on the side of heliocentrism, which turned out to be correct.
Much of the arguments in the book ended up being false though. And that he ended up being correct is irrelevant. The hindsight adds nothing to this.
>>348071
>They had such a intellectual pre-Christian culture
This is sarcasm, right?
>>348071
Ireland became Christian so early that it's hard to say how intellectual their pre-Christian culture was. But they were very intellectual after Christianity no less.
>Fully developed legal system that developed entirely independent of Rome or the Franks.
>Monastic masters
>Art was so good it strongly defined mainland British art styles.
>Literally among the greatest musicians in Europe of the middle-ages
>Home of the oldest literary tradition in western Europe.
But of course the Normans ruined everything again.
>>348041
>Galileo, Kepler, & Co, the guys who were putting out work that clearly showed the Bible to be wrong if taken literally
So was st. Augustine of Hippo, one of the Fathers of the Church, in like 390 AD. The Bible, or the account in Genesis to be precise, was never meant to be taken literally in the Catholic Church, since its creations
The fact that the Bible didn't support heliocentrism was only secondary to other problems, as already shown in this thread. Also, the Platonics were really big on geocentrism, and the Church held them in high regard, so you had to prove them wrong as well.
>>348170
>The authority of these books has come down to us from the apostles through the successions of bishops and the extension of the Church, and, from a position of lofty supremacy, claims the submission of every faithful and pious mind....In the innumerable books that have been written latterly we may sometimes find the same truth as in Scripture, butthere is not the same authority. Scripture has a sacredness peculiar to itself." - Augustine (Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, 11:5)
>>348169
Nah. The Normans were fine. They did the same thing most invaders did, and joined civilization.
As a serious answer to "no, Ireland was not an intellectual culture pre-chrsistianity" everything points to Ireland suffering some fantastic clusterfuck in the 4th century.
>>347610
Nope.
See Jesuits.
>>348219
No, the Normans were dickheads and everything they touched on the British Isles turned to ash.
Ireland and and England being the worst casualties by far.
>>348244
Ireland was literally fine after the Norman "invasion".
>>348097
Geocentrism was a joke.
The geometrical shells that all the celestial bodies were supposedly travelling on would be crashing into each other, and no one knew how to resolve it.
He showed that shit was orbiting around Jupiter. He showed that Venus was orbiting the Sun.
It was already known, afaik, that the orbits were not perfect circles, which they were supposed to be according to scholastics.
Application of Ockham's razor favoured the heliocentric universe.
>>348169
>Ancient Irish legal system
My boy
It was far more intellectual than socialist governments. Faith or lack of faith does not imply freedom of speech at all.
>>347764
>catholics didn't let me read the bible!!
And that was a smart thing to do. Scripture is shit compared to scholasticism and church theology.
>>347764
>Having a book with questionable opinion is not grounds to ban a book.
You do understand anon that every fucking ruler in Europe did this right?
>>347610
>Was the Catholic Church really anti-intellectual?
>The Inquisition
>Torquemada
>Galileo
>Giordano Bruno
>The Index
>Organization based on faith rather than logic
>Controlled basically all of the western knowledge until Gutemberg and censured or altered whatever they wanted to
Gee, I wonder.
Not like /his/ can really be a place to talk about it since according to it now the whole of renaissance was supported by the Church who were such nice guys they hoarded all the written sources of information for the sole pure, charitable purpose to trasmit culture to everyone despite keeping the mass in Latin for centuries and only giving education to nobles who payed loadsa money, very intellectual amirite?
And what about completely blocking the gears of society by cockblocking everyone who wanted to become something more than a farmer by forcing him to take the vows, I mean, sure, Tasso just wanted to write cool fanfic about the Crusades and Da Ponte just wanted to be a poet and write some shit for Mozart eventually, they HAD to pass through the church for that right? Not to mention all those neat musicians who just wanted to play some shit and have some fun, no sir, the church just gave you the books you needed without any problem I swear.
And I almost forgot, teachers and professors? Oh man, I'm sorry, you wanted to teach your theories in a renowned university? Well, the church will see about it, don't forget to take your vows while you wait eh? I sure hope you didn't write anything that went against what the church says, I've heard strange things about a lot of people who were killed or imprisoned when they didn't withdraw their thesis.
But then again, for /his/, control=support.
Just to let you have a giggle since some of you might be too young to know, but Life of Brian was not only censured but downright banned in countries like Italy because the church couldn't handle the banter, if that doesn't look anti intellectual to you I don't know what does.
>>347725
Aristotle was a retarded in sciences, he got so many things wrong one of them being geocentric model. People were like okay this guy wrote so many good books on logic and ethics so he must be right in astronomy as well, right? People were holding on to Aristotle like a dogma. He was far more destructive in setting back sciences than the Church.
Also, one of the first heliocentric models came from a Greek astronomer by the name of Aristarchus, so they were Greeks back then that thought the sun was the center of the universe. Guess whose theory was accepted? Ptolemy came up with a stupidly complex model to explain why some planets looked like they moved backwards in a geocentric model. Here is the thing: the farther away the planet is from the sun the longer their orbital period (time to go around the sun) so at some points it LOOKED like Mars was moving backwards when you observed it from the Earth, this does not make sense in a geocentric model and the Greeks knew this back then so Ptolemy in order to stay true to Aristotle he came up with this idea that each planet moved in a loop at some points when they are going around the sun to explain why some planets like Mars looked like it moved backwards. His calculations were messy complex and didn't make sense but it was accepted because lol Aristotle
>>348256
Not the same anon.
I'll grant that things did settle down relatively well following the initial invasion and they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves" as the saying goes, the problem stemmed from their Norman overlord i.e. Henry II, who used the now settled Norman lords here as an excuse for invasion, given Papal sanction by an English pope.
>>349018
>Aristotle was retarded because everyone after him didn't want to do the work for a thousand years
yeah fuck you, Aristotle was a genius
>>349277
you must not be a scientist then
Thanks to Aristotle we didn't figure out that force is F = ma not F = mv until fucking Newton.
>>347610
It was anti-intellectual in terms of "as soon as Aristotle was called into question the subject in question was disregarded". It didn't like when new knowledge contradicted old knowledge.
But no, it was not all run by the book burning oppressive puritans that they're portrayed as.
>>349018
Didn't Aristotle also claim that women had less teeth than men just because it fit his ideas? Even though he could have just counted them?
>>349018
Aristotle's physics was largely denied early on by the pre-medieval scholars. Only his metaphysics remained intact.
Things like the lack of a visible stellar parallax were strong rejections of heliocentrism at the time.
>>348404
Geocentrism had known holes in its conception but there wasn't enough evidence to point out that heliocentrism was the actual model of reality. Galileo's evidence could be applied to other systems and it wasn't until Newtonian physics that Heliocentrism had a strong argument for why its layout must exist as it does.
>>348978
>Bruno
Giordana Bruno was never a martyr for science, that was Protestant propaganda. Great job getting tricked like Cosmos did.
>>349764
No, YOU must not be a scientist.
Aristotle being wrong doesn't excuse anyone in the intervening centuries for simply not bothering and taking his word for it rather than actually testing it for themselves.
Curiosity is the foundation of scientific inquiry. Aristotle may have been wrong but you cannot blame him for no one else caring enough to check his work. This is why peer-review exists.
Christianity promoted literacy which certainly supported a population of educated people, but that doesn't lend any credibility to christianity and the dogma itself in terms of progress.
>>347681
>>348066
Actually this was the best possible way of preserving Archimedies texts.
Every single other copy was destroyed or lost. Making them valuable inadvertently preserved them perfectly for us to scan and view them.
Sure it took a particle collider for us to read under the gold leaf but... still we know have the knowledge of his square and stuff
>>350419
>taking religious atheists seriously
>allowing heretics to voice their opinions
>>350475
>heretic
spooky
Jesus Christ all this butthurt historical revisionism.
Of course it was anti-intellectual at its core. No authoritarian conservative hierarchical organization could help but be anything but. It might have had intellectuals in the organization naturally trying to push it in a different direction, but that's a given when you have a monopoly on the literate.
The Church by nature had to hate full uncontrolled discourse and intellectualism for the same reason Qin burned books. When you're an organization interested in maintaining your authority and derive power from control of narrative you naturally have to come in conflict with unrestrained ideas sooner or later. While some in the organization might be willing to sacrifice power/prestige/legitimacy in the name of truth when a contrary or dangerous idea becomes known and potentially popular by nature in hierarchical organizations there are always others pushing against the abnormalities willing to endanger the whole.
A cleric getting a reputation for saying "lmao just document all the pagan works. They might have something to teach us. Actual some heretics are quite admirable and have ideas worth listening to. The Pope doesn't know everything you know" will eventually get replaced in the hierarchy. Blame is also distributed among the hierarchy so no one person has to feel the totality of guilt at book burning or inquisitions against contrary voices. But, again, the standing nail willing to speak out against the level of close mindedness of the hive mind must feel the full weight of being a "bad guy" alone.
>>350475
>religious atheists
>le church was so dum xD they all thought the world was le flat!
>>347610
Yes, they house arrest people just for studying science. Academic freedom is a huge part of being pro-intellectual
>>349999
>Only his metaphysics remained intact.
His metaphysics, as with anyone's metaphysics, is directly derived from his physics though. Hell, that's why they call it META physics, meaning "after physics"
>>349999
>Giordana Bruno was never a martyr for science
He was still a good scientist, but the Catholic Church didn't care. They just kill him for believing the wrong religious bullshit
>>350529
Do you know what the word religious means?
>>350550
Proofs?
>>348978
>Just to let you have a giggle since some of you might be too young to know, but Life of Brian was not only censured but downright banned in countries like Italy because the church couldn't handle the banter, if that doesn't look anti intellectual to you I don't know what does.
'The Church' didn't ban anything because this isn't the Middle Ages and it doesn't have any legal power. If it was censored it was because of the cultural climate at the time where many people would probably be offended by its content. Not that it's a justification for censorship, because fucking religious sensibilities, but don't act like the Catholic Church had the fucking power or authority to ban a movie in a country. Stir up a ruckus and influence people not to see it? Sure.
Also Italy has had far more blasphemous and morally offensive films pass through its cinemas than Life of Brian.
>>351078
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viridiana#Reception
>1961
>Spanish Film
>All good, makes it to film festival, then the church declares it to be blasphemy
>Film gets banned in spain, head of spanish film institute gets fired
>Literally nobody in spain gave a fuck till the catholic church declared it blasphemy
The catholic church doesnt have the direct authority, just like the US doesnt have the direct authority to invade iraq. But look where we are today.
>>347610
They were selectively anti-intellectual.
4chan being a counter-culture site, many people will point out that it conserved a lot of material, and was the primary supplier of education. But we should not forget that they opposed, and suffered from the renaissance and the enlightenment.
>>351293
>suffered from the renaissance
And St Peter's basilica is proof of this suffering
>>348219
>The Normans were fine
Can you imagine a people being so evil that even a medieval propaganda book has to call them out of their acts?
Because that's what the Normans were.
>The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty. This made a real change. To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation. I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.
Orderic Vitalis
>>350568
Saying the Catholic Church was anti-intellectual because it killed Giordano Bruno for religious reasons is like saying the philosophers behind the French Revolution were anti-intellectual because they killed Lavoisier for political reasons, or the Soviet Union, the greatest monument of the political power of the intelligentsia, was anti-intellectuals because they persecuted Nikolai Vavilov.
>>351311
Suffered from the intellectual ramifications, obviously the arts rejoiced under their suggar daddies.
>>347610
It was precisely the Catholic Church's intellectualism that lead to science and the death of God.
>>351325
That dog wants to fuck
>>348169
Most of the Irish legal system was pre-christian but the monks added the important element of literacy.
>>350925
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
>>347699
they preserved what knowledge they could but they also burned a bunch of stuff that challenged its authority
>>347764
>Ban encyclopedias!
Then why did they preserve Pliny's Naturalis Historia?
>>351930
Lmfao.
This has been addressed multiple times.
The cunt deserved it.
>>352392
>Catholic hand waving intensifies
>>347610
No.
#Scholasticism
>>348071
Preach.
>>347681
Do you know why palimpsests were made, you idiotic mongloid?
>>352401
Sorry, he was a total cunt and nothing but propaganda.
Sure he was "kinda sorta right", but by no means fully explained it.
It also doesn't help to slander people, especially the source of athority.
>>350524
It's incredible how much nonsense some people can write about shit they clearly know absolutely nothing about.
>>352413
That graph is the best bait I've ever seen. It just enrages people of ever persuasion and background, because it's so ridiculous someone unironically made that.
The early 2000s will be remembered as the unironic dogmatic atheism years.
>>352551
The man has defended it to this day on his blog.
It's fucking hilarious to read.
>>352551
>The early 2000s will be remembered as the unironic dogmatic atheism years.
>tfw going through puberty during this period
I have no idea which side to believe, desu.
Both look like bait.
