The Cultural Context of Western Technology: Early Christian Attitudes toward Manual Labor

Abstract

In seeking to understand why the West has been so receptive to the initiation and adaptation of technological change, the historian needs to consider the effects of the first great period of technological innovation-the Middle Ages. That the Middle Ages is the place to begin to search for the causes of this receptivity has not always been acknowledged. Beginning in the late 17th century, writers took an interest in the history of progress in the mechanical arts and the sciences. Yet they did not associate the first advances with what they saw as the sterile Aristotelianism of the Scholastics but rather with the prodigious scientific advances of their own age. Thus, when Thomas Sprat wrote his History of the Royal Society (1667), he noted that the period of domination by the Roman Catholic Church saw a quiet as the dark of the night descend on learning and the useful arts and saw the sorry philosophy of the schole-men take their place.' William Wotton wrote in 1694 that the moderns had outstripped the ancients in all fields of useful learning, and he wondered why the human race had been at a full stop for 1500 years in all areas of human enterprise except ethics.' In the 18th century, scholars were capable of forming a more balanced view of the Middle Ages, but the typical view was expressed by Turgot in his Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (1750). Turgot argued that from the coming of the barbarians to the cultural crescendo of the Century of