PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MONOTHEISM BEHIND THE CURTAIN:

The Medical Profession in Patristic Times (Sr. Mary Emily, S.C.N., January 1943, The Catholic World)

From a merely cursory glance at the publishers' lists one gathers that contemporary interest in medicine is widespread. Never has an age been so prolific in books on the subject. It is, however, only in the extent of its interest that our age is unique, for in every era, as students of literature are aware, the medical profession has received not a little attention. Particularly is this true of the early Christian centuries, a fact to which the writings of the Fathers of the Church testify. Their works abound in allusions to medicine.

Various reasons may be adduced to account for this interest on the part of the Fathers. In the first place, there has ever been a close bond between the healers of physical and of spiritual ills. Then, it was to the medical art that patristic writers turned for illustrations in defending and clarifying Christian teachings. Some of the Fathers had themselves studied medicine, and all of them numbered physicians among their friends and acquaintances.

Despite this fact, standard histories of medicine give but brief consideration to patristic writings. The history of medicine, it is true, has only in recent years attained its academic majority, and contemporary investigation in the field has not as yet made many notable advances beyond the realm of scientific medical writings properly so called. The chief reason, nevertheless, that the works of the Fathers have been ignored, or when consulted, treated with disdain, is the persistence of certain misconceptions of the nineteenth century relative to the Fathers of the Church and science. Foremost among these misconceptions is the notion that not only were the Fathers themselves woefully ignorant of things scientific, but that they sought to prevent by all means in their power both the acquisition and dissemination of any such knowledge. It was particularly in the field of medicine that they were considered hopelessly obscurantist. Belief in miracles and in the curative power of prayer was held accountable for this obscurantism. Miracles, it was objected, could not and did not exist, and belief in them was incompatible with interest in or devotion to scientific and practical medicine. [...]

The medical allusions found in the patristic writings do not, it is true, constitute anything like a systematic treatment of medicine. They do, however, afford some notion of the contemporary practitioner's professional knowledge and ideals, and they reflect rather clearly many of the popular medical theories of the times. They are interesting because of the light they throw on the careers of the outstanding physicians, and more important still, they add to our all too meager knowledge concerning St. Basil's great hygienic contribution in the establishment of his hospital at Caesarea. It is, furthermore, significant that the Fathers could write of the medical profession as they did. They reveal, albeit indirectly, that its weaknesses were the weaknesses of their times, but they likewise reveal, and quite clearly, its strength. That strength was the strength of a vigorous Christianity which was not only salvaging for future ages what was best in the ancient medical tradition, but was at the same time elevating and ennobling that tradition by the application of the teachings of its Divine Founder.

I know how absurd and melodramatic this will sound, but I beg your credulity: when I was a kid I was terrified of the Dark Ages. The idea that all we knew could somehow be lost to us and that we would labor in a dark and stagnant ignorance for generations seemed more frightening than any horror film. Exacerbating the fears were science fiction novels like A Canticle for Liebowitz, and movies like Planet of the Apes and any number of other post-nuclear apocalypse tales, where reprimitivized men groped futiley for dimly remembered wisdom.

It was only years later that I realized that the entire notion of a Dark Age was little more than the mindless anti-religious prejudice of the Enlightment partisans, extended and played up by liberal academics and intellectuals. For what happened during the supposedly Dark time was that, even though barbarian tribes and Muslim invaders destroyed the old Roman Empire, Christianity spread throughout all of Europe and became the basis--along with the Greek and Roman cultural inheritance that clerics preserved and which was later added to from collections that Islam had garnered in its conquests--of the very Western Civilization that we enjoy today. The universal ideas that undergird the American experiment come down to us because Europe was lucky enough to enjoy a Dark Age.

Today, Paul Cella sent along an essay by Whittaker Chambers that touches on these ideas, St. Benedict
:

The Dark Ages were inexcusable and rather disreputable -- a bad time when the machine of civilization in its matchless climb to the twentieth century had sheared a whole rank of king-pins and landed mankind in a centuries-long ditch. At best, it was a time when monks sat in unsanitary cells with a human skull before them, and copied and recopied, for lack of more fruitful employment, the tattered records of a dead antiquity. That was the Dark Ages at best, which, as anybody could see, was not far from the worst.

If a bright boy, leafing through history, asked: "How did the Dark Ages come about?" he might be told that "Rome fell!" -- as if a curtain simply dropped. Boys of ten or twelve, even if bright, are seldom bright enough to say to themselves: "Surely, Rome did not fall in a day." If a boy had asked: "But were there no great figures in the Dark Ages, like Teddy Roosevelt, King Edward, and the Kaiser?" he might well have been suspected of something like an unhealthy interest in the habits and habitats of spiders. If he had persisted and asked: "But isn't it clear that the Dark Ages are of a piece with our age of light, that our civilization is by origin Catholic, that, in fact, we cannot understand what we have become without under standing what we came from?" he would have been suspected of something much worse than priggery -- a distressing turn to popery.

I was no such bright boy (or youth). I reached young man hood serene in the knowledge that, between the failed light of antiquity and the buzzing incandescence of our own time, there had intervened a thousand years of darkness from which the spirit of man had begun to liberate itself (intellectually) first in the riotous luminosity of the Renaissance, in Human ism, in the eighteenth century, and at last (politically) in the French Revolution. For the dividing line between the Dark Ages is not fast, and they were easily lumped together.

To be sure, even before Queen Victoria died, the pre Raphaelites had popularized certain stage properties of the Middle Ages. And on the Continent there had been Novalis, to mention only one name (but no one in my boyhood mentioned Novalis). There had been Huysmans (we knew Huys mans, but his name was touched with decadence). There was a fad of the Gothic and figures like Viollet-le-Duc: while an obscure American, Henry Adams, was even then composing Mont St. Michel and Chartres, and inditing certain thoughts on the Virgin and the Dynamo that would echo briefly above the clink of their swizzle sticks in the patter of my generation.

I was in my twenties, a young intellectual savage in college with thousands of others, before the fact slowly dawned upon me that, for a youth always under the spell of history, the history I knew was practically no history at all. It consisted of two disjointed parts -- the history of Greece and Rome, with side trips to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent: and a history of the last four hundred years of Europe and America. Of what lay in between, what joined the parts and gave them continuity, and the pulse of life and breath of spirit, my ignorance was darker than any Dark Age. Less by intelligence than by the kind of sixth sense which makes us aware of objects ahead in the dark, I divined that a main land mass of the history of Western civilization loomed hidden beyond my sight.

I turned to medieval history. But the distinguished teachers who first guided me into the Dark Ages seemed, even to my blindness, not too sure of their own way. They knew facts, more facts than I would ever know. Yet in their understanding of the facts something was missing, something that would enable them to feel that the life of the times they were exploring was of one tissue with the life of ours, that neither could be divided from the other, without an arterial tearing, that neither could be understood without the other. Their exposition, even of so obvious a problem as the causes for the fall of the Roman West left me with a sense of climbing railless stairs above a chasm at night. Rome fell, I learned, because of the barbarian hordes and a series of great barbarian leaders. H. G. Wells would presently startle me with the information that the hordes had been comparative handfuls among the populations they conquered, while, somewhat later, I would come to believe that the barbarian leaders were scarcely more barbarian than the Romans, that many of them were disaffected officials of the Roman state and their conduct was not so much that of invaders as what we should now call Fifth Columnists.

Or I was taught that Rome's collapse was due in part to the disrepair of the Roman roads and the breakdown of communications. Or the resurgence of the Pontine marshes and the high incidence of malaria at Rome. Or that the conquest of the East had introduced alien and indigestible masses into the Empire, and corrupted Rome, and so it fell. But even a collegiate savage could scarcely fail to note that it was precisely the corrupt Eastern half of the Empire that survived as a political unit, and, for another eight hundred years, stood against the vigorous East, and was the bulwark of the fallen West.

There were other facts and factors. My ignorance could question them only so far, and then not their reality for the most part, but their power to explain by themselves an event so complex and so thunderous as the crash of a civilization. Some more subtle dissolvent, I sensed, must also have been, undivined, at work. I thought I had caught a hint of it in Salvianus' moritur et ridet: "The Roman Empire is luxurious, but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughsómoritur et ridet." -But Salvian, we learned with a deflecting smile, was an extremist, though, in the hindsight of disaster, his foresight would scarcely seem overstated. What interested me was that men had smiled complacently at Salvian's words when he spoke them, and men still smiled at them complacently a thousand years later -- the same kind of men, I was beginning to suspect, upon, I also suspected, a similar turning point of history.

In any case, for me it was too late. What the missing some thing was in the crisis of Rome I was not to learn in classrooms. The crisis of civilization in my own time had caught me in its undertow and soon swept me far beyond that earlier Dark Ages. Not until it had cast me back upon its rocks, by grace a defeated fugitive from its forces, would I again find peace or pause to seek to determine what, if anything, that mortal experience had taught me about the history of our own time, or any other.

This century was half gone, and with it more than half my life, that at that moment seemed all but to have ended in an ordeal with which my name is linked, when someone, seeking only to comfort me, once more directed my eyes to that point in the past from which, some thirty years before, I had abruptly taken them. Anne Ford, my friend of many years standing, sent me from the Monastery of Gethsemani a little silver medal, blessed in my family's name and mine, by Father Louis -- Thomas Merton of The Seven-Storey Mountain, who, as a later student, had sat in the same college classrooms, listening to some of the same instructors I had known. On the medal was an image of St. Benedict.

I found myself asking who St. Benedict had been. I knew that he had founded a monastic order, which bore his name, and that for it he had written a famous Rule. I knew that he had uttered a precept that I had taken for my own: Laborare est orareóto labor is to pray. I had once written a little news story about plans for the restoration of his monastery of Monte Cassino after its destruction in the World War of 1939. What I had written had presumably been read at least by one hundred thousand people (so much for journalism in our time). But a seeker after knowledge at any age, certainly one fifty years old, must begin by confessing that he probably knew less about St. Benedict than many a pupil in parochial school. Nor, had I asked a dozen friends, regarded as highly intelligent by themselves and the world, could one of them have told me much more about St. Benedict than I knew myself. The fact that such ignorance could exist, could be taken as a matter of course, was more stunning than the abyss of ignorance itself.

For the briefest prying must reveal that, simply in terms of history, leaving aside for a moment his sanctity, St. Benedict was a colossal figure on a scale of importance in shaping the civilization of the West against which few subsequent figures could measure. And of those who might measure in terms of historic force, almost none could measure in terms of good achieved.

Nor was St. Benedict an isolated peak. He was only one among ranges of human height that reached away from him in time in both directions, past and future, but of which, with one or two obvious exceptions, one was as ignorant as of Benedict: St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, Pope St. Leo the Great, Pope St. Gregory the Great, St. Francis of Assisi, Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII).

Clearly, a cleft cut across the body of Christendom itself, and raised an overwhelming question: What, in fact, was the civilization of the West?

Yes, what is the civilization of the West? For those who wish to write Christianity out of the West's history and civilization, the Middle Ages--between pagan Rome and the "Age of Reason"--must be kept as dark as possible. But for those of a more curious bent and a more balanced view of the West it becomes obvious that the version of history we're often told by the humanists is like a Top Secret report from the government with those sections redacted that might prove embarrassing. And, God knows, those centuries when Judeo-Christianity established dominance over the hearts and minds of men in the West are pretty humiliating. Best to deny it ever happened...

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2003 1:13 PM