While reading F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (about which I blogged a few weeks ago), I came across a familiar, mid-twentieth-century American intellectual trope: the notion that then present-day Catholicism represented an expression of medieval values. This idea was common among a very wide range of thinkers, including (relatively high-minded) anti-Catholics, Catholics themselves, and non-Catholics sympathetic to Catholicism. For his part, Northrop (who was not Catholic) devotes a chapter to “Roman Catholic Culture and Greek Science.”  Northrup sees “the philosophical foundations of Roman Catholic culture,” which he associates with Aquinas and Aristotle, as being “exceedingly important at Read more