PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
DID CHRISTIANITY BEGIN BEFORE CHRIST?
Production along population curves includes the widest range of human
endeavors. The cases of oil and gold presented above have been relatively
recent activities. A process that reaches much further back into the
past is the canonization of Christian saints. The church offers rich and
fairly accurate records of these events, accumulated and maintained by
people who were in general educated and who adhered to a continuous
tradition lasting almost two thousand years.
The influence of the church and the importance of religion have not
been constant over the years. It was Cesare Marchetti’s supposition that
the rate of canonization might be used as an indicator of society’s involvement
with religion throughout the centuries. He claims to have
found two broad peaks in the rate of canonization across the history of
Christianity. When I myself located a reliable and complete list of saints,
I wanted to check his result. 9 I tabulated the number of saints per century
and indeed observed two peaks. In Figure 3.3 we see centennial points
representing the cumulative number of saints as a function of time. I was
able to fit two S-curves that together seem to describe well most of the
historical data points.
The two waves have comparable lengths, around one thousand years
each. Such a double structure may reflect the well-established notions
of the patristic and Thomistic ecclesiastical waves, which correspond
roughly with these chronological periods. The former represents the influence
of the early fathers of Christianity, while the latter is attributed
to Thomas Aquinas, who was born in 1224 and died in 1274.
The two curves do not cascade in a continuous way. The first wave
ends around the eleventh century, but the next wave does not start until
the thirteenth century. During the time interval between them, canonization
proceeds at a flat rate—constant number of saints per century—as if
this period belongs to neither group. It is easy to offer explanations a
posteriori, and therefore they should not carry much weight, but it is interesting
to notice that this time of ill-defined sainthood identity
coincides with a rather unfitting—brutal and militaristic—religious expression,
the Crusades.
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