How the Bible Corrupted the Soul of Western Civilization - Part 1

A Reply to The Book that Changed Your World: Humanism

In a recent Twitter exchange, my claim that Christianity has contributed nothing positive to human civilization was countered with a recommendation: “There is a book titled The Book that Made Your World where the author goes into the impact of Christianity and the Bible on the world. It would challenge that statement.”

And so it would. Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book that Made Your World is one of countless books making the case that Christianity deserves credit for everything that is good in Western Civilization. It is not the best of these books—David Bently Hart’s Atheist Delusions and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual are more thoughtful and informed. It is also not the worst—here the sewers run too deep to itemize. But it is representative and covers more or less the entire territory of apologist claims.

The core claim is familiar: the choice we face is Christianity or nihilism—or, to use Mangalwadi’s favorite symbols: it’s Bach or Kurt Cobain. (His bizarre and error-riddled treatment of Nirvana’s lead singer is worthy of its own critique.) Christianity, Mangalwadi argues, is responsible for every positive value associated with the West: humanism, learning, science, freedom, progress, morality. To abandon the Bible is not to search for a rational foundation for these values, but to reject values as such. We can have the Bible and Bach—or we can reject the Bible and numb ourselves with the meaningless noise of a suicidal Buddhist (sic) junky.

So many commentators today are beating this drum that one would think the evidence is overwhelming and the argument is airtight. In reality, it’s a castle built on sand.

In this post, we’ll start with Mangalwadi’s first major claim: that Christianity can claim credit for discovering human dignity.

Did Christianity Discover Human Dignity?

What brought about the rise of the West? According to Mangalwadi, “My secular professors taught that the secret was the West’s ‘discovery’ of human dignity during the Renaissance. That is true. But they also taught that the Renaissance humanists discovered this concept in the Greek and Latin classics. That is a myth. Although classical writers held many noble ideals, the inherent value and dignity of each human being was not among them. This unique idea came from the Bible.” (59-60)

The idea of human dignity was not tucked away in some obscure biblical passage, says Mangalwadi, but follows directly from Genesis 1 (“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’”) and from the incarnation of Christ: “the incarnation was the ultimate proof of man’s dignity: of the possibility of man’s salvation, of a man or a woman becoming a friend and child of God.” (71)

But this creates a problem for Mangalwadi. If human dignity is front and center in the Bible, one would expect Christians to have noticed in relatively short order. But Mangalwadi claims that human dignity was a Renaissance discovery. How can we possibly account for it taking Christians 1,500 years to realize that human beings are valuable? Mangalwadi has an answer. “[T]he biblical view of man was buried under Europe’s pre-Christian paganism, the Greco-Roman cosmological worldview, and Islamic fatalism.” (66)

This is an astonishing claim. This means that Tertullian, Clement, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodore, Gregory the Great, Anselm, Abelard, Lombard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and an endless string of Popes were so blinded by pagan and Islamic thought that they did not grasp the plain meaning of the first book of the Bible and the whole of the Gospels. I have many criticisms of these thinkers, but that they did not understand Christianity isn’t one of them.

Why Christians Opposed Human Dignity

A more plausible explanation of the dignity time gap is that there is something in Christianity itself that is at odds with human dignity. But to get at that we would have to do something Mangalwadi does not do at all: look at what Christian thinkers actually said prior to the Renaissance. What we find is not an appeal to pagan and Islamic ideas, but to concepts central to Christianity: the Fall, sin, and grace.

Yes, thinkers such as Augustine held, man was created in God’s image—but pride led the first man to disobey God. “That one sin,” Augustine wrote, “was itself so great that by it, in one man, the whole of the human race was originally and, so to say, radically condemned. It cannot be pardoned and washed away except through ‘the one mediator between God and men, the Christ Jesus.’” (Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 290)

Original sin has rendered human beings incapable of acting without sin absent God’s grace—and we can do nothing to earn God’s grace. It is a gift he either bestows on us or doesn’t. Hence Augustine’s doctrine of predestination: “As the one who is supremely good, he made good use of evil deeds, for the damnation of those whom he had justly predestined to punishment and for the salvation of those whom he had kindly predestined to grace,” including, it must be noted, babies who died without baptism. (Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 297)

If human beings are fallen, incapable of choosing the good through their own volition, but instead helplessly dominated by sin, what becomes of human dignity? Should we be surprised when St. Benedict declares that a good Christian monk should tell himself, “I am a worm and not a man, a shame of men and an outcast of the people”? Should we be surprised when Bernard of Clairvaux claims that “Humility is a virtue by which a man has a low opinion of himself because he knows himself well”? (Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility and Pride, 30) Is not Thomas À Kempis correct when he insists that “He who knoweth himself well is vile in his own sight”? (Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.2.1)

The point is not that this is the “correct” interpretation of Christianity. The point is that it took Christian thinkers 1,500 years to discover the value of the individual, not because they were under the influence of pagans and Muslims, but because they followed the logic of central Christian doctrines.

Why Renaissance Thinkers Embraced Human Dignity

The question, then, is why Renaissance Christians veered in a different direction. Why did they stop viewing man as essentially powerless and sinful and instead conclude, as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola put it, that man is “with complete justice, considered and called a great miracle and a being worthy of all admiration”? (Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 3-5).

The traditional answer has been that Renaissance thinkers had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman writers and artists, leading to a rebirth of humanism. But this is precisely what Mangalwadi denies. “[T]he Renaissance writers quoted classical writers (more Romans than Greeks) to garnish their treatises on man. But they could not and did not derive their high view of man from the Grecco-Roman worldview. It was the Bible’s vision of what man was created to be, and saved to become, that became the commonsense view in the West.” (72)

How does he justify this claim? Mostly by referencing Charles Trinkaus’s 1970 study, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. According to Mangalwadi, “He concluded that although Renaissance humanists read, enjoyed, quoted, and promoted Greek and Roman classics and Islamic scholarship, their peculiar view of human dignity came out of the Bible in deliberate opposition to the (sic) Greek, Roman, and Islamic thought.” (67)

Allow me to say, I find this style of argumentation annoying: your key piece of evidence really should not consist of “go read this other book.” But if that is how you wish to proceed, you at least have an obligation to accurately characterize the book you cite, and to let the reader know how representative it is of the scholarly consensus. Mangalwadi does neither.

It is true that Trinkaus sees the Renaissance view of the dignity of man as rooted primarily in the Bible, but he does not claim this view was “in deliberate opposition” to classical thought. Instead, he argues that Renaissance humanists read classical authors within a Christian framework, using them to develop ideas about human dignity that they believed ultimately came from the Bible.

It is also true that Trinkaus’s conclusion has been incredibly influential, and yet most scholars believe that he understates how much the Renaissance marked a real shift from medieval views of man, and that the recovery of classical philosophy played a far greater role in shaping the Renaissance conception of human dignity than his account allows.

A more honest account of the Renaissance would acknowledge that, whatever led to its distinctive view of man, it cannot simply be “the Bible,” which for 1,500 years had led Christians to a very different view of man. At most, it was the Bible re-interpreted by thinkers engaging with the ideas and art and the classical world that sparked a sea change in the West’s attitude toward human nature.

Human Dignity Before the Renaissance

But that re-thinking actually began far earlier than Mangalwadi imagines. The literature here is vast, but Mangalwadi demonstrates no awareness of scholarly classics such as Walter Ullmann’s The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, Colin Morris’s The Discovery of the Individual: 1050 -1200, or R.W. Southern’s Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, who all date the emergence of humanism to as early as 1100—precisely the moment when the West rediscovered the works of antiquity.

Southern is worth quoting at length. He writes:

I have said that there can be no humanism without a strong sense of dignity and intelligibility of man and nature; and if God exists, the same qualities must characterize the relations of God with his creation. These phrases could almost be taken as a description of the programme of the medieval secular schools. These terms are rare in the eleventh century, but very common in the twelfth. They meant that man’s powers of reason and will, cultivated as they can be by study, give him a splendour which survives the effects of sin and degeneration. . . .

This view of the nature of man and his hopes for the future was based on man’s apparently unlimited capacity for knowledge. It may seem strange that scholars who had so recently emerged from an extremely pessimistic view of human capacities, and who believed that man’s faculties had been grievously impaired by sin, should rush to the other extreme and proclaim that everything, or almost everything, could be known. But in intellectual affairs almost all revolutions are violence, and this was no exception. Scholars discovered that there existed a scientific basis for optimism. They learnt from their sources that man’s affinity with every part of nature gives him the power to understand everything in nature; that his elements and humorous, and the influences playing upon his birth and development, are the raw materials for the whole universe. Hence man, being the epitome of the universe, is built to understand the universe. Despite the ravages of sin, he can still intellectually trace the primitive perfection of the creation and collaborate with God in its restoration.

The instrument of this collaboration with God in the regeneration of nature is reason. With comprehensive enthusiasm, the secular masters of the early twelfth century began to let fall such dicta as these: “The dignity of our mind is its capacity to know all things”; “We who have been endowed by nature with genius must seek through philosophy the stature of our primeval nature”; “In the solitude of this life the chief solace of our minds is the study of wisdom”; “We have joined together science and letters, that from this marriage there may come forth a free nation of philosophers.” These were ancient thoughts, but for the first time in many centuries we find men confident that all those things could be done and that nature could be known. Hence the future seemed bright. (R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, 39-41)

Two things should jump out from this excerpt: first, that Southern finds the deepest sources of human dignity in the elevation of reason to understand this world—an idea that came ultimately from the Greeks; second, that Christianity was a barrier to the reemergence of the idea of human dignity because of the centrality it placed on man’s nature as a sinful being.

Renaissance thinkers certainly read human dignity into the Bible, but they were reading the Bible through a lens that had been shaped for centuries by the ideals of antiquity, and by self-conscious attempts of earlier Christians to reconcile Christianity’s vision of man as fallen with the pagan view of man as capable.

What Is Human Dignity?

The pagans, to be clear, were not consistent on this front, nor did anyone in antiquity fully grasp the implications of human dignity. But neither, then, does Mangalwadi. As with most Christians who credit Christianity with discovery of human dignity, he conflates two incompatible claims:

1. That each human being has the right to exist for his own sake

2. That we have a duty to sacrifice ourselves to other human beings

That first claim is the foundation of individual rights—it holds that human beings are not born in bondage, that they are not servants to be sacrificed to God or society, but that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was the idea that led to the creation of the United States and that fueled modern progress.

But when Mangalwadi talks about “the inherent value and dignity of each human being,” he oscillates between referring to the West’s embrace of individual rights and between the Christian ideal of selfless service to others. Example:

Traveling through Africa and Asia, and especially seeing the work of Mother Teresa, the late British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge noted that faith in Christ’s incarnation had inspired many Christians to give up their comforts and risk their lives to serve the poorest of the poor. Even though Muggeridge was an atheist at the time, he observed that atheistic humanism had not inspired anyone to devote his or her life to serve the dying destitute of Calcutta.

The West became a humane civilization because it was founded on the precepts of a teacher who insisted that man was valuable. (75)

If what it means to regard human beings as valuable is that you must set aside your own happiness in order to “serve the dying destitute of Calcutta,” then Christianity can claim credit for the idea of human dignity. But that was hardly what America’s founders had in mind when they created a government dedicated to individual rights. For them, to treat someone with dignity was to treat him as a self-ruler: as a sovereign agent who could follow his own judgment and live his own life without bending the knee to either king or pope.

Does Christianity deserve credit for that? Stay tuned for the next installment, when we’ll look at Mangalwadi’s discussion of liberty.