The Story of Christianity

by David Bentley Hart

Had it not been for the monastic institutions established by Benedict and others, with their libraries and scriptoria, the cultural devastation of Western Europe consequent upon the decline of the Western empire would have been complete. As the West was progressively sealed off from the high civilization of the Eastern Christian world, and knowledge of Greek became scarce in the West, the only institution that could boast any continuity with the culture of antiquity was the Church. In the sixth century, the Christian philosopher Boethius (c.475–524) undertook to shore up such fragments as he could against the darkness by producing translations of all of Plato and Aristotle, as well as commentaries upon them, and by preparing manuals of music, mathematics, geometry and astronomy. His grand project, however, was only partially complete when it was rather abruptly curtailed by his execution at the hands of the Ostrogoth king of Italy, Theodoric (d.526), on spurious charges. Thereafter, it was almost exclusively the labour of monks that preserved anything of classical Western literature and learning from the general ruin.