V. The Stolen Universities
The full measure of the Enlightenment’s fraud becomes clear only when one recognizes what the tradition had actually built.
The universities, those great medieval institutions the Enlightenment captured and claimed as engines of secular reason, were uniformly creations of the Church. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge wer founded under Church auspices, governed by Church authority, staffed by clerics, dedicated to the pursuit of truth understood as ultimately unified in God. The very idea of a university, a community of scholars devoted to preserving, transmitting, and extending knowledge, was a medieval Christian innovation. The Enlightenment did not create these institutions; it invaded them, subverted them, and eventually seized them.
The scientific method itself emerged from Scholastic soil. The insistence on systematic observation, the commitment to logical rigor, the belief that nature is intelligible because it is the product of a rational Creator—these were not Enlightenment innovations but medieval inheritances. Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme: the list of medieval contributors to what would become natural science is long and distinguished. The Enlightenment’s claim to have invented scientific inquiry is not merely exaggerated; it is a lie......
