Christianity's Contempt for the Sciences

Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was even odious to it, and was regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a dangerous enemy to the success of miracles: and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to swallow some physical absurdities. The triumph of Christianity was thus the signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of philosophy.

Had the art of printing been known, the sciences would have been able to preserve their ground; but the existing manuscripts of any particular book were few in number; and to procure works that might form the entire body of a science, required cares, and often journies and an expence to which the rich only were competent. It was easy for the ruling party to suppress the appearance of books which shocked its prejudices, or unmasked its impostures. An incursion of barbarians might, in one day, deprive forever a whole country of the means of knowledge. The destruction of a single manuscript was often an irreparable and universal loss. Besides, no works were copied but such as were recommended by the names of the authors. All those investigations which can acquire importance only from their assemblage, those detached observations, those improvements of detail, that serve to keep the sciences flowing in a level channel, and that prepare their future progress; all those materials which time amasses, and which await the birth of genius, were condemned to an eternal obscurity. That concert of learned men, that combination of all their forces, so advantageous, so indispensible at certain periods, had no existence. It was necessary for the same individual to begin and complete a discovery; and he was obliged to combat with his single strength all the obstacles which nature opposes to our efforts. The works which facilitate the study of the sciences, which throw light upon difficulties, which exhibit truths under more commodious and more simple forms, those details of observation, those developments which serve to detect erroneous inferences, and in which the reader frequently catches what the author himself has not perceived; such works would find neither copyists nor readers.

It was then impossible that the sciences, arrived at a point in which the progress, and even the study of them were still difficult, should be able to support themselves, and resist the current that bore them rapidly towards their decline. Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, though unable in the sequel to prevent their re-appearance in splendor, after the invention of printing, was at this period sufficiently powerful to accomplish their ruin.

It was a threat to it's authority, and if printing existed at the time, science may have survived, but instead it was abolished.