How Christianity shaped the modern world

Saturday, January 28, 2012

RELIGION plays a very important part in our everyday lives as Filipinos. Being host to the largest Catholic community in Asia is a great honor, as well as a great advantage.

Due to the fact that we are Catholics, we were given access to quality Catholic educational institutions such as La Salle, Ateneo, UST and countless others. Numerous Catholic welfare programs are working for the benefit of our nation’s poor, and being Catholic has also made us what we are today – a nation that’s united, for the most part, not by language, not by ethnicity, not even by road networks linking up the provinces – but by religion.

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The church’s influence has extended far and wide, and has influenced everything from the rise and fall of empires to the invention of new technologies such as the printing press.

And none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for the Catholic Church.

Allow me to retrace the steps of our country’s number one religion, which has its origins in the Middle East approximately 2,000 years ago.

Peter, Christ’s Apostle, was chosen to be the first Pope, or as Christ put it, the “rock” on which he would build his church. Peter spread the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire, then the single most powerful political and military power entity on the planet, with the help of the other Apostles and disciples, who grew in number each day.

The vast number of Christians soon made the Roman Emperors worry, so they began persecuting them and executing them by the thousands. However, there were simply too many of them.

After the division of the Roman Empire into East and West, the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine, who claimed to have heard the voice of God telling him that he would conquer in the sign of the cross, adopted the symbol for his Roman troops at the battle of Milvian Bridge and Constantine emerged victorious against his enemies (who were also Romans) and later made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Rich and poor Romans alike became attracted to the new religion, and the faith was propagated to all the corners of the empire, most importantly to the lands of the Goths, the Bretons and the Gauls, in what was later to become modern Europe.

By the time the middle ages had come full circle, Christianity had become the driving force of the medieval world. The Bible was the book that everyone wanted, and since the monks at the time copied everything by hand, the supply was barely meeting the demand. The German smith Johann Gutenberg found a solution to this problem when he invented the printing press, which would soon produce encyclopedias as well as magazines in addition to Bibles.

We can also attribute banking to the church, as the first bankers were the Knights Templar – a religious crusading order of knights that pledged to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to the holy land. Kings and nobles gave them so much money, and since all the knights adhered to monastic vows of poverty, they set up a bank to offer depositing and loaning services.

As the power of the church spread, it attracted many great people to work for it. The Renaissance and the developments in art and architecture associated with it would have not been possible if it weren’t for the funding and influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

The architectural principles used to construct many modern buildings were first perfected by architects working to construct the great cathedrals and churches of Europe, and if we didn’t have Christianity, then we wouldn’t have any reason to make large, intimidating structures (the reason why churches were so big was that they were meant to showcase God’s magnificence, and make unbelievers feel uneasy).

Also, several contributions to art and science can be attributed to the church and people who worked for it. The medieval church had a near monopoly in Europe on the studies of biology and mathematics, and any self-respecting monarch-to-be had a tutor who was associated with the religious life.

Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar, discovered genetics because of his experiments with peas in his monastery, and we have him and his order to thank for the advances made in medicine due to genetics.

All of the great Renaissance artists, at one point or another, worked for the church, and the techniques they developed such as perspective, shading and lighting were used in works of art in churches.

And then you can’t deny the fact that this country wouldn’t have come to the attention of the world if it wasn’t for the Church. The Pope himself decreed that Spain should explore our little part of the world while the Portuguese explored the other half of the world in the Treaty of Tordesillas.

If there was no church, there would be no great, powerful Europe, there would be no banking, no exploration of the non-Christian world, and no discovery of the Philippines.