I’ll clearify my concept. If you could possibly take a midle age theologist and teleport him to the current age, they’d be total nerds and not priests.
Clergy back then was studying, and studying and studying and exploring reality in a framework that gave for granted that God exixts. You can call it whatever you want but I think it’s a bit silly to reduct it to “those dumb fucks belong to the mines”, while in reality it through their efforts that, unwillingly (?), we pursued knowledge to the point of refining modern science methodology.
If it’s reductive to say they were all morons, it’s fabulist to say they could step into the modern era and be nerds.
I get your point that curious people had no other outlet then, and that the clergy was just where they went. But there is one problem with that: science did in fact develop as a discipline. We did crawl out of the dark ages. We did discover we are not the center of the universe. And mostly it wasn’t the clergy who did that. There are notable exceptions like Gregor Mendel and Pope Gregory 13. But not enough to characterize the whole institution by. And in fact that same institution was a force for anti-curiosity quite a bit, as when they imprisoned Galileo, which is hardly the only example of them quashing open questioning as heresy.
If perhaps we focused only on theologians who were not part of the clergy, that could turn up slightly differently. I don’t know enough there to guess.
I’ll clearify my concept. If you could possibly take a midle age theologist and teleport him to the current age, they’d be total nerds and not priests.
Clergy back then was studying, and studying and studying and exploring reality in a framework that gave for granted that God exixts. You can call it whatever you want but I think it’s a bit silly to reduct it to “those dumb fucks belong to the mines”, while in reality it through their efforts that, unwillingly (?), we pursued knowledge to the point of refining modern science methodology.
If it’s reductive to say they were all morons, it’s fabulist to say they could step into the modern era and be nerds.
I get your point that curious people had no other outlet then, and that the clergy was just where they went. But there is one problem with that: science did in fact develop as a discipline. We did crawl out of the dark ages. We did discover we are not the center of the universe. And mostly it wasn’t the clergy who did that. There are notable exceptions like Gregor Mendel and Pope Gregory 13. But not enough to characterize the whole institution by. And in fact that same institution was a force for anti-curiosity quite a bit, as when they imprisoned Galileo, which is hardly the only example of them quashing open questioning as heresy.
If perhaps we focused only on theologians who were not part of the clergy, that could turn up slightly differently. I don’t know enough there to guess.