Christian culture

From practices of personal hygiene to philosophy and ethics, the Bible has directly and indirectly influenced politics and law, war and peace, sexual morals, marriage and family life, toilet etiquette, letters and learning, the arts, economics, social justice, medical care and more.

[42][43] Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic Church is "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization.

[45] The Oriental Orthodox Churches have played a prominent role in the history and culture of Armenia, Egypt, Turkey, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and parts of the Middle East and India.

These included Bulgaria, Serbia, and Kievan Rus', as well as some non-Orthodox states like the Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of Sicily, which had close ties to the Byzantine Empire despite being in other respects part of western European culture.

Certain artistic traditions that originated in the Byzantine Empire, particularly in regard to icon painting and church architecture, are maintained in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Russia and other Eastern Orthodox countries to the present day.

Renaissance artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, and Titian, were among a multitude of innovative virtuosos sponsored by the Church.

From 1100, he wrote, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were constructed and decorated with sculptures, hangings, mosaics and works belonging one of the greatest epochs of art and providing stark contrast to the monotonous and cramped conditions of ordinary living during the period.

Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis is considered an influential early patron of Gothic architecture and believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God: "The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material".

[98] Later, during The Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, Catholic artists produced many of the unsurpassed masterpieces of Western art – often inspired by biblical themes: from Michelangelo's Moses and David and Pietà sculptures, to Da Vinci's Last Supper and Raphael's various Madonna paintings.

This conformism was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his life.The Protestant Reformation during the 16th century in Europe almost entirely rejected the existing tradition of Catholic art, and very often destroyed as much of it as it could reach.

According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, the universities benefitted from the use of Latin, the common language of the Church, and its internationalist reach, and their role was to "teach, argue and reason within a Christian framework".

With a literary tradition spanning two millennia, the Bible and Papal Encyclicals have been constants of the Catholic canon but countless other historical works may be listed as noteworthy in terms of their influence on Western society.

From late Antiquity, St Augustine's book Confessions, which outlines his sinful youth and conversion to Christianity, is widely considered to be the first autobiography of ever written in the canon of Western Literature.

Catholics have also given greater value to the world through literary works by Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Pope, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Merton, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, J.R.R.

And the legacy of this early period was, in the words of Porter, that "Christianity planted the hospital: the well-endowed establishments of the Levant and the scattered houses of the West shared a common religious ethos of charity."

The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought,[143] in which the recovery of classical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism.

Though the theologians of the Protestant Reformation showed little direct interest in philosophy, their destruction of the traditional foundations of theological and intellectual authority harmonized with a revival of fideism and skepticism in thinkers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Francisco Sanches.

[151][152] Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas[153] held that scriptures can have multiple interpretations on certain areas where the matters were far beyond their reach, therefore one should leave room for future findings to shed light on the meanings.

Heilbron,[156] Alistair Cameron Crombie, David Lindberg,[157] Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein,[158] and Ted Davis have reviewed the popular notion that medieval Christianity was a negative influence in the development of civilization and science.

[165] Christian Scholars and Scientists have made noted contributions to science and technology fields,[9][10][11] as well as Medicine,[14] Many well-known historical figures who influenced Western science considered themselves Christian such as Nicolaus Copernicus,[166] Galileo Galilei,[167] Johannes Kepler,[168] Isaac Newton[169] Robert Boyle,[170] Francis Bacon,[171] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,[172] Carl Friedrich Gauss,[173][174] Emanuel Swedenborg,[175] Alessandro Volta,[176] Antoine Lavoisier,[177] André-Marie Ampère, John Dalton,[178] James Clerk Maxwell,[179][180] William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin,[181] Louis Pasteur,[182] Michael Faraday,[183] and J. J.

In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."

Therefore, the monastic scriptoria expended most of their efforts upon the transcription of ecclesiastical manuscripts, while ancient-pagan literature was transcribed, summarized, excerpted, and annotated by laymen or clergy like Photios, Arethas of Caesarea, Eustathius of Thessalonica, and Basilius Bessarion.

[215] The English science historian James Burke examines the impact of Cistercian waterpower, derived from Roman watermill technology such as that of Barbegal aqueduct and mill near Arles in the fourth of his ten-part Connections TV series, called "Faith in Numbers".

Examples include important churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study of genetics), Roger Bacon (a Franciscan friar who was one of the early advocates of the scientific method), and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (the first to propose the Big Bang theory).

[218] According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the 18th century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity.

Whether the activities of the Knights Templar (12th century), Mounts of Piety (appeared in 1462) or the Apostolic Chamber attached directly to the Vatican, a number of operations of a banking nature (money loan, guarantee, etc.)

Some mainline Protestant denominations such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians and congregationalist tend to be considerably wealthier[235] and better educated (having high proportion of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita) than most other religious groups in America,[236] and are disproportionately represented in the upper reaches of American business,[237] law and politics, especially the Republican Party.

During the early period of capitalism, the rise of a large, commercial middle class, mainly in the Protestant countries of the Netherlands and England, brought about a new family ideology centred around the upbringing of children.

[302] And prior to the 20th century, three major branches of Christianity—Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism[303]—as well as leading Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin generally held a critical perspective of birth control.

[396] Some scholars criticize the concept Eurocentrism as a "Christianophile myth" because it has favored the components (mainly Christianity) of European civilization and allowed eurocentrists to brand diverging societies and cultures as "uncivilized".