Earlier, we established what an institution is: a repository to safeguard, preserve, and promote a culture. The features of a culture may include science, art, language, economics, math, and more. The most fundamental institutions—nearly universal in human history—are family, language, and religion.
History shows that institutions do not necessarily transcend cultures. Roman institutions of knowledge never approached the mathematics cultures of Egypt or Greece. From A History of Mathematics by Florian Cajori:
Nowhere is the contrast between the Greek and Roman mind shown forth more distinctly than in their attitude toward the mathematical science. The sway of the Greek was a flowering time for mathematics, but that of the Roman a period of sterility. In philosophy, poetry, and art the Roman was an imitator. But in mathematics he [the Roman] did not even rise to the desire for imitation. The mathematical fruits of Greek genius lay before him untasted. In him a science which had no direct bearing on practical life could awake no interest. As a consequence, not only the higher geometry of Archimedes and Apollonius, but even the Elements of Euclid, were entirely neglected. What little mathematics the Romans possessed did not come from the Greeks, but from more ancient sources. Exactly where and how it originated is a matter of doubt. It seems most probable that the "Roman notation," as well as the practical geometry of the Romans, came from the old Etruscans, who, at the earliest period to which our knowledge of them extends, inhabited the district between the Arno and Tiber.
In fact, it was only the fall of the Western Roman Empire that preserved the western world’s collective intelligence ,thanks to monasticism. Jean Sorabella of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes how Christian monasteries preserved and advanced charity, medicine, art, language, and science beginning in the 4th century anno Domini.
Monks and nuns performed many practical services in the Middle Ages, for they housed travelers, nursed the sick, and assisted the poor; abbots and abbesses dispensed advice to secular rulers. But monasticism also offered society a spiritual outlet and ideal with important consequences for medieval culture as a whole. Monasteries encouraged literacy, promoted learning, and preserved the classics of ancient literature, including the works of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle. To beautify the celebration of the liturgy, monastic composers enriched the scope and sophistication of choral music, and to create the best environment for devotion, monasticism developed a close and fruitful partnership with the visual arts. The need for books and buildings made religious houses active patrons of the arts, and the monastic obligation to perform manual work allowed many monks and nuns to serve God as creative artists.
Thus, religion—the Catholic Church, to be precise—was a fundamental necessity to preservation and promotion of western thought. Monasteries were and are, then, institutions in the most technical sense of the term.
From the fall of Rome to the mid-twentieth century, “Western Civilization” was synonymous with “Christendom.” All Western institutions were expressions of Christianity which had subsumed both Judaic scripture and the Roman Empire itself. But Christianity subsumed more than those cultures. It left nothing of Greek culture behind, as Rome had, for example. It studied all of creation, weighed every molecule against God’s Will, as it could be known, and categorized the entirety of human knowledge according that divine scale. As scientific knowledge grew in the middle and late Middle Ages, the Church, again, measured this new discipline against God’s Will.
As Christendom moved west to bring the Gospel to the New World, it established institutions on new continents to preserve and promote the Kingdom of God, as we saw previously in the logs of Christopher Columbus. The impetus for these institutions was uniformly charitable in nature. Institutional founders sought bring the world to Christ, to fulfill Jesus’ mandate to preach the Gospel in the four corners, and His Great Commission, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) In so doing, Columbus and those who followed in his footsteps trusted Jesus would be with them “to the very end of the age.”
As Christendom advanced, the institutions it created specialized. Early monasteries did many things. As the cradles of knowledge, they advanced plant biology and animal husbandry to feed the people, practiced and improved medicine, housed travelers, preserved knowledge in books, experimented with natural science, charted the stars in their courses, and more. But in the New World, institutions focused on one or a few activities. And even if these new institutions—whether universities, orphanages, hospitals, or administrative offices—were founded for purely secular purposes, they were staffed and directed by men of firm Christian faith who measured their own decisions against the Will of God as known and taught by the Church or by their Christian denomination’s prevailing philosophy.
This inherent Christianity of institutions was clearly expressed by John Adams who simultaneously held that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” but that “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” One might expand that to say, our government depends on a wise electorate, and “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10) In other words, the institution does not need to declare its Christian purpose because it is of, by, and for Christians. Institutions, after all, are downstream of culture. They are the culture in a specific domain. They do not need to explain themselves, for “you will know them by their fruit” (Matthew 7:16).
Christ’s discourse here is worth exploring further as it serves as the litmus test for my assertion that we have no institutions today.
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–20).
If we focus on our country’s institutions, we find to many to list. Even the categories of institutions are too numerous to mention. But we do know why and how these institutions arose. We know their founding purposes which were simply to preserve and promote a flourishing culture.
What happens, though, when the institutions that arose to preserve and promote the culture turn against the culture?
In the next two articles of this series, we will explore this questions so pertinent to our times.