How the Bible Corrupted the Soul of Western Civilization - Part 5
Did Christianity Create Science?
This is the final installment in a series. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 3 here. Part 4 here.
Heretofore I’ve been concerned with refuting the claim made by Vishal Mangalwadi in The Book that Made Your World that “the Bible created the soul of Western civilization.” I’ve in effect granted (rather generously) that Mangalwadi values human dignity, individual liberty, learning, and progress but shown how he has utterly failed to demonstrate that those values came from and depend on Christianity.
So let me be clear: it’s not just Mangalwadi’s claim that Christianity is the source of science that’s false—Mangalwadi doesn’t genuinely value science. You can see that in his whole approach, which is to cite experts who agree with him without acknowledging (let alone refuting) experts who don’t. And you can see it most of all in the fact that in the course of portraying Christianity as a friend to science, he champions the anti-science dogma of “Intelligent Design,” declaring that natural selection is an “unproved theory.” (231-232)
I’m tempted to say, “Case closed.” A worldview that places faith and authority above reason cannot possibly ground a scientific worldview, and a thinker who treats “Intelligent Design” as scientific does not actually value science.
Nevertheless, it is true that modern science developed in the Christian West and that most of the thinkers who pioneered it—Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Boyle—were sincere if not always orthodox Christians who generally thought about their scientific work in religious terms. So while I will not concede for a moment that Mangalwadi is an honest commentator who gives a damn about science, I nevertheless think there are real arguments in Christianity’s favor that need to be examined.
How the Pagans Invented Science
From the first stirrings of rational inquiry in the sixth century BCE to the flourishing of Hellenistic scholarship, the Greeks transformed humanity’s approach to nature from myth and tradition to observation, reason, and systematic explanation. Thales and the early Ionian philosophers sought natural causes for cosmic order; Pythagoras and his followers revealed the mathematical harmony underlying number, music, and geometry; Hippocrates and his school advanced medicine as a rational art grounded in diagnosis and prognosis rather than superstition. In the Classical age, figures such as Aristotle laid the philosophical and methodological foundations for science, while the mathematicians of the Academy and Lyceum extended geometry, logic, and biology. By 200 BCE, the torch had passed to the Hellenistic world: in Alexandria, Euclid codified the axioms of geometry, Archimedes unified pure theory with ingenious engineering, and astronomers like Aristarchus and Eratosthenes measured the heavens and the Earth with a precision that would not be surpassed for centuries.
Given the scale of these pagan achievements, it would seem hard to defend the claim that “The West’s passion for science began” with the Bible, and that “the scientific outlook is a peculiar way of observing the world—an objective (‘secular’) method molded by a biblical worldview.” (221-223) But according to Mangalwadi, while the ancients had some “impressive achievements,” they fell short earning the title of “scientific.” In his view, they “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” of natural phenomena. (227) He goes on:
When ancients tried to explain the world, they used intuition, logic, mythmaking, mysticism, or rationalism—detached from empirical observation. For example, Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) intuition-based logic posited that if you drop two stones from a cliff, then a twice-as-heavy stone would fall twice as fast as the lighter stone. No Aristotelian scholar—Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Christian, or Muslim—ever actually tested Aristotle’s theory by dropping two stones. (227)
To the extent Mangalwadi’s claims are true, they are anachronistic. He is criticizing the ancients for not operating according to the methods of modern science, which is no more reasonable than criticizing heart surgeons in the 1960s for not using coronary stents. But the basic claim, that Greek thinkers like Aristotle “made no effort to empirically verify their explanations” but “proceeded abstractly and deductively” (241) is not even true.
Aristotle’s biology, for instance, reveals him to be a scientist whose work was deeply rooted in observation. Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthelf explains that “the full Aristotelian scientific inquiry must be thought of as having three stages: the collection of data, the organization of data, and the explanation of data.” (Allan Gotthelf, Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology, 383) In seeking to explain data—to arrive at the causes of natural phenomena—observation was always the final court of appeal. Reflecting on his account of the generation of bees, for instance, Aristotle writes:
Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts. (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 760b)
What is true is that “observation” for the Greeks was understood in a wider and looser sense than it is for modern scientists. They often took what was “common knowledge,” such that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, for granted, which unquestionably led them down wrong roads. But to take this to mean that they did nothing but build abstract castles in the sky is false.
Nor is it even true that experimental science was unknown. Historian of science Marshall Clagett notes that the Greeks resorted to experiment both “for the purpose of uncovering new facts about nature” and “for the purpose of confirming scientific theory.”
Even at the earliest stages of Greek science, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., there was experimentation by Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans. Thus Pythagoras or his followers clearly established by experiment the relationship between lengths of vibrating strings and the pitch of the notes emitted by the strings. It is true that the equally famous experiment of Emedocles (490-435 B.C.) with a water vessel to prove the corporality of air was more a notion of common experience than a deliberately planned and controlled test to confirm theory. But numerous controlled experiments are recorded in the Hippocratic medical treatises, which date from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and when we examine the famous Lyceum, Strato the Physicist, we are confronted with activity deliberately experimental for purposes of scientific investigation. (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 43)
Aristotle himself, discussing the question of why sea water is salty, notes that “When it turns into vapour it becomes sweet [fresh], and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment.” (Aristotle, Meteorology, 358 b 16-17)
Similarly, pagan science could also leverage mathematical techniques in areas such as optics and astronomy. (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 45)
I am in no way making the claim that ancient pagan science was identical to modern science, nor am I even trying to minimize how revolutionary the Scientific Revolution was. It is Mangalwadi who is trying to minimize the achievements of pagan science in order to support his facile claim that Christians were the first to grasp that the path to knowledge of reality is to study reality through observation.
Christianity vs. Science
In a previous installment, we saw how early Christians were divided in their attitude toward pagan learning. Some embraced it (while subordinating it to faith), others were essentially hostile. But even those who embraced pagan learning embraced it selectively. Augustine, who championed reason insofar as it was a handmaiden to faith, was hardly an enthusiastic champion of natural science.
When it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things, after the manner of those whom the Greeks called “physicists.” Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these “physicists” have come to understand, or think they have. . . . For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. (Quoted in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 51)
The essence of the Christian approach was to prioritize the supernatural over the natural, and authority above argument. This was hardly fertile soil for science to grow, and so it is unsurprising that for centuries it didn’t. Western science virtually vanished for the first five hundred years of Christianity’s rule, and it took another five hundred years before the Scientific Revolution arose.
That is a sorry track record, and if the fact that the Scientific Revolution did occur in the Christian West gives us some reason to suspect that Christianity might have been an inducement, then the thousand year failure to produce a Scientific Revolution gives us even stronger reason to discount Christianity as an explanation. (Indeed, what should we make of the fact that the Christian East never produced a Scientific Revolution?)
What does Mangalwaldi have to say about all this? He completely evades it. Or, rather, he pulls the same stunt we’ve seen him pull earlier: he contends that it took Christians a millennium to read the Bible the right way.
Such ad hoc justifications paper over the fact that this thousand-year gap was not some accident of history, but reflects Christian values and policies, which led Christians to deprioritize natural science and persecute scientific innovators.
In terms of deprioritization, I’ve noted that most learning in the early medieval period, such as it was, was channeled into religious themes. “Of the 264 surviving manuscripts we have from between 550 and 750 CE, all but 26 deal with religious subjects.” It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, while a few thinkers preserved ancient science, no one studied science.
Historian Peter Heather, for example, goes out of his way to celebrate the “intellectual achievements of some individual Churchmen, such as Braulio—and, perhaps, above all, his teacher Isidore of Seville,” which he counts as “prodigious.” (Peter Heather, Christendom, 333-4) But Isadore was mainly cataloging Greek and Roman knowledge, and not always to great effect. Isidore, Clagett writes, “seems to have had but a superficial knowledge of Greek learning; and his understanding of the subtleties of Greek science is either elementary or completely lacking.” (Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity, 193)
Isidore is no outlier. Jacques Le Goff notes that early medieval Christian thinkers displayed “very tiresome intellectual habits” when dealing with classical thinkers: “the systemic deformation of the authors’ thoughts, perpetual anachronism, and thinking through quotations taken out of context. Ancient thought only survived the middle ages in a fragmented form. It was pushed out of shape and humiliated by Christian thought.” (Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization: 400-1500, 115)
It was only when the West rediscovered the ancients that genuine interest in science reemerged, and allowed Europeans to start raising the questions and developing the skillsets necessary for the Scientific Revolution.
As for persecution, I do not want to make too much of it. The notion that there was a sustained Christian assault on science is not true. But I do not want to make too little of it, either. Even Mangalwadi is forced to admit that “The Church persecuted some individuals, like Galileo, who were scientists.” (228) To challenge tradition was fraught, and scientific innovation requires challenging tradition.
When twelfth-century thinkers such as Willaim of Conches attempted to revive interest in scientific questions, for instance, they encountered virulent opposition by conservative Christians. Abbot Willaim of Saint-Thierry howled that William of Conches, in seeking to understand humanity’s origins in natural terms, “holds the authority of sacred history in contempt . . . ; by interpreting that history from the point of view of physical science, he arrogantly prefers the ideas he invents to the truth the history contains, and in so doing makes light of a great mystery.” William of Conches was unapologetic, railing against the anti-science dogmatists of his day:
Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance, they don’t want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like peasants and not to ask the reason behind things. . . . But we say that the reason behind everything should be sought out. . . . If they learn that anyone is so inquiring, they shout that he is a heretic, placing more reliance on their monkish garb than on their wisdom. (M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 16, 11)
More striking is how the Scientific Revolution itself could have easily been strangled in its infancy, thanks to the Church’s opposition to heliocentrism, which led to Galileo’s Inquisition sentence in 1633 and to Descartes burying his own work on heliocentrism.
There has been an attempt in recent years to rewrite the story of Galileo in order to whitewash the Church’s actions, and while the story is more complicated than “Pope say science bad,” the apologists can’t get around the fact that the Church did ban the teaching of heliocentrism and that this did cripple science in Italy and much of the Catholic world. In How Modern Science Came into the World, H. Floris Cohen argues that this could have easily ended the burgeoning Scientific Revolution:
For all the absence of capital punishment or captivity, and for all the remaining possibilities for publication elsewhere, little innovative pursuit of nature-knowledge remained after 1633 in countries where the Inquisition held sway. . . . The 1633 ban led not only to an Italy where Galileo’s disciples no longer dared pursue the possibly contentious issue of the void but also to a good deal of self-censorship all over the Continent, affecting Descartes, Gassendi, van Helmont, and many another here left unmentioned. Precisely this effect might smoothly yet surely have led to a loss of momentum such as might then have become the first step in a process of decay, petrifaction, and ultimate extinction. (H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, 438-439; italics in original)
Lest this be seen as solely a Catholic issue, it’s important to note that Protestants were by no means uniformly pro-science. Historian Charles Webster notes that:
In the seventeenth century, as in later periods, every sectarian group contained an influential party convinced that the values of religion and science were essentially incompatible. There existed very real antagonism to scientific and philosophical innovation among Anglicans, Puritans, and Separatists, induced by fear of distraction from the central religious goals of life, through the dangers of vain curiosity. Calvinism, like its rivals, could be associated with a rejection of the new science in favor of obsolete knowledge drawn from a body of Scholastically oriented dogmatic theology. (David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 289)
Christians were not uniformly hostile towards science. Again, that is not the point. The point is that you cannot treat Christianity per se as pro-science. At most you can argue that certain Christians were pro-science, and that they drew on Christian ideas in ways that promoted the Scientific Revolution.
But how solid is that argument?
Did Christianity Make the Scientific Revolution Possible?
In his influential book, The Invention of Science, David Wootton notes that the claim that religion is responsible for modern science is prima facie dubious. If belief in a single creator God is what leads to science, then why was there no Scientific Revolution in the Christian East or the Islamic world? If it was only Protestant Christianity that unleashed the scientific endeavor, then what are we to make of Galileo?
The idea of laws of nature represents a crucial test case, and theological questions do not prove to be fundamental: indeed, the key source for the concept appears to be Lucretius; and, as for the religious convictions of the first scientists, the only safe conclusion is that generalization is impossible. There are Jesuits and Jansenists, Calvinists and Lutherans, and some who have little or no belief. (David Wootton, The Invention of Science, 733)
None of this is definitive, however. We might imagine that there were ideas buried in Christianity that were crucial for the development of science, which only emerged and became influential in the West. And this is precisely what Mangalwadi argues.
Ignoring the reality that the Greeks did practice observational science and that Aristotle did treat observation as the final court of appeal for science, Mangalwadi claims that whereas the Greeks practiced deductive science, it was Christianity that taught the West the importance of induction. The Greeks were stuck in abstract theorizing divorced from reality; the Bible taught Europeans to look at reality and use experiment and mathematics to arrive at precise, quantitative data and formulate precise, quantitative laws.
How on Earth does Mangalwadi justify these claims? Would you believe he credits the anti-Aristotelian Condemnation of 1277? The Condemnation, says Mangalwadi, “formally rejected the Greco-Islamic idea that logic dictated what God could or could not do. They learned from the Bible that God was free. Therefore, neither the cosmos nor human logic could bind him. This was one cornerstone of the scientific principle: we need to empirically observe what God has done, not presume what he could or could not do based on our intuition and logic.” (238)
He goes on to quote from Willis B. Glover’s Biblical Origins of Modern Secular Culture:
The complete freedom of God with respect to the whole creation was a fundamental influence on late medieval thought. Since God’s creative acts are subject to no eternal truths, knowledge of the world could not be derived deductively from philosophy but must come through actual observation. It could not, moreover, be certain knowledge because no one could know for sure what God might do next. (239)
That last sentence is revealing. What Mangalwadi is arguing is that by removing logic from science, Christian thought police opened the door to observation and experiment. But this came at a price: far from laying the groundwork for the discovery of laws of nature it implied that there are no laws of nature. A law of nature would be a limitation on God’s freedom.
When genuine scholars look at the impact of the Condemnation of 1277, what they find is that it “adversely affected scientific development. In emphasizing God’s inscrutable will and his absolute power to do as He pleased, the conservative theologians encouraged a philosophical trend in which confidence in demonstrative certainty, and ultimately confidence in the ability of science to acquire certain truth about the physical world, was weakened.”
Led by William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349), many theologians concluded that neither reason nor experience could provide certain knowledge of any necessary connection between causes and their alleged effects. Both reason and experience were consequently deemed inadequate to demonstrate fundamental truths about God and his physical creation, both of which were generally perceived as less knowable during the fourteenth century than in the thirteenth. . . . While the latter were hardly skeptics, their attitude toward nature, when compared with that of thirteenth-century Scholastics, appears to mark a loss of confidence in human ability to acquire certain knowledge—apart from faith and revelation—about the true nature of God and the world. . . . In marked contrast, the key figures in the later Scientific Revolution—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton, to name only the greatest—were confident, perhaps naively, that nature’s essential structure and operation were knowable. (David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), God and Nature, 87-90)
In other words, whatever unleashed the Scientific Revolution, it was not Church authoritarianism or the idea that there is no natural order because God can do whatever he wants.
What, then, did unleash the Scientific Revolution? Why did modern science arise in seventeenth-century Western Europe and not some other time or place? There is no consensus among historians of science, and far be it from me to offer a definitive answer where they haven’t. But I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that, while all of the ingredients were present in latent form in pagan science, it was only a self-conscious conviction that new knowledge could be discovered through active experimentation that could give rise to modern science.
The most important figure here was Francis Bacon, who formulated the idea of “conquering nature by obeying her.” For Bacon, knowledge is not something to be passively contemplated or deduced from first principles, but something to be actively won—by systematically interrogating nature through observation, controlled experiment, and inductive reasoning. He urged investigators to vary conditions, isolate causes, and force phenomena to reveal their underlying laws. His vision helped legitimize and inspire a new experimental approach that would shape the emerging scientific culture of early modern Europe and influence generations of thinkers committed to the systematic discovery of new knowledge.
Cohen argues that while one could imagine a Galileo-like figure arising in Islamic civilization during its scientific Golden Age, the same cannot be said of a Bacon-like figure. And that does have something to do with Western European Christianity: namely, that by 1600, it had become remarkably this-worldly.
Islam and other world religions, as well as early, Eastern, and medieval Christianity, were all essentially other-worldly. The religious ideal consisted of renunciation and a turning away from earthly concerns, as embodied most fully by monastics. But by the time we reach the Renaissance, Western Christianity had evolved to make ample room for this-worldly ideals. Indeed, salvation itself could be attained through engagement with the world and even the pursuit of wealth (so long as it was “conducted without ostentation”). “In short,” Cohen concludes, “the empiricist/experimental approach to nature’s phenomena represents, in ways that the recovery of Greek learning did not, certain developmental features uniquely Europe’s own—-its outward-bound dynamism and its attendant, likewise extraverted, religious values. It is for all these reasons that, unlike with Galileo, a hypothetical, Bacon-like figure could not possibly have come forward in the civilization of Islam.” (H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, 261-266)
Are we then to credit Christianity with modern science after all? Absolutely not. This has been my point all along. Christianity has always been an other-worldly ideology that made concessions to this world. Every advance civilization has made since Christianity’s rise has happened precisely because of these concessions. The more ground Christians cede to this world, the more civilization moves forward—the more Christianity’s other-worldly ideals dominate, the more civilization falters.
Christians have made tremendous contributions to civilization, and they have often put their advances in religious terms, and even credited Christianity with their achievements. But the reality is that their achievements were only made possible by breaking away from Christianity’s other-worldly essence and instead leveraging the power of earthly ideals.
Christianity vs. Civilization
What is Christianity? Christian philosopher Robert Kraynak argues that “the claims of the Christian religion can be reduced to three doctrines: the Creation, Fall, and the Redemption through Christ.” (Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, 38) Christianity divides reality into two worlds—God’s perfect, eternal kingdom and an inferior, created realm—and traces mankind’s fall to Adam and Eve succumbing to the temptations of this world. Tainted by original sin, human beings need to be redeemed, which can only be achieved through submission to Christ and subordinating the concerns of this life to the next.
Lurking behind each of these doctrines is a basic attitude toward the world that shapes Christian thinking on every issue: Christianity is essentially other-worldly. Christians, wrote one early apologist, “pass their days on Earth, but they are citizens of heaven.”
To sum up all in one word—what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world. . . . The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. . . . The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens.
What most distinguished early Christians from their pagan contemporaries was that Christians deprioritized our means of knowing this world, placing faith and revelation above reason, and they deprioritized our enjoyment of this world, placing happiness in the next life above happiness in this life. In this they saw themselves as putting into practice Christ’s central message: this world will soon end and so your focus should be on making yourself fit for the imminent Kingdom of God. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus proclaims in his first saying in the earliest Gospel, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15 NRSV) The Kingdom of God “does not belong to this world,” and yet it is so valuable that you should be willing to give up all that you have in this world to obtain it. (John 18:36) “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and reburied; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matt. 13:44) Indeed, you should “hate . . . life itself” and be willing to throw it away altogether. (Luke 14:26) “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” (Mark 8:35) For early Christians, to be a Christian was to sacrifice your earthly concerns and earthly happiness for an infinitely greater happiness to come.
Christianity’s other-worldly doctrine was not a wholly new viewpoint. Plato originated it and the Greek and Roman Stoics built on it. But it was Christianity that made other-worldliness the dominant ideal of an entire civilization, embedding renunciation, faith, humility, and the primacy of the next life into the foundations of Western thought.
While other-worldliness was front and center in early Christian thought, it did not vanish as Christianity matured. Thomas À Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, written in the early fifteenth century, was arguably the most widely read devotional work in Europe after the Bible. Its core message? “Our life upon the earth is verily wretchedness,” says Thomas. “[W]oe to those who know not their own misery, and yet greater woe to those who love this miserable and corruptible life.” In Thomas’s view, it is “foolish and unstable men” who exalt human beings, human reason, human prosperity, and human achievement. “[A]ll these worldly things are nothing.” The “highest wisdom,” by contrast, is “to cast the world behind us, and reach forward to the heavenly kingdom” by withdrawing ourselves “altogether from earthly desires.” Our rightful models are the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Virgins: “For they hated their souls in this world that they might keep them unto life eternal.” Indeed, “The saints of God and all loyal friends of Christ held as nothing the things which pleased the flesh, or those which flourished in this life, but their whole hope and affection aspired to the things which are above.” (Thomas À Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.22.2, 1.13, 1.61, 1.223, 1.18.2, 1.22.4.)
Kempis was a monk who held withdrawal from the world as an ideal. A century later, Martin Luther would explain how to remain other-worldly while living in the world. Every human being, Luther held, has a “double nature”: he is a spiritual being and a physical being. The good Christian prioritizes the spiritual, even when he attends to physical concerns, “as Christ did when He washed the disciples’ feet, and Peter when he sailed his boat and fished.” The “fleshly” man, by contrast, is one “who lives and works inwardly and outwardly to benefit the flesh and in the service of his present life.” But flourishing in this world is of no importance—what matters is the state of your soul, which is threatened, not by imprisonment, or sickness, or hunger, or suffering, but only by a will that “wants to serve the world and seeks only what pleases it.” Yet Christians must live and act in the world. How, then, should they act? By sacrificing their earthly lives and values for others. “[I]n all his works, his thoughts should be free and directed only so that he thereby serves and benefits other people. He should conceive of nothing else than what is necessary for the other. . . . For whichever work is not directed toward serving another or suffering under his will (insofar as he does not force one to act contrary to God) is not a good Christian work.” A Christian, in short, is defined not by the pursuit of happiness in this world, but by faith in God and the systematic subordination of earthly life to selfless service. (Martin Luther, The Essential Luther, 76, 106-107, 76-94)
Nor did Christian other-worldliness vanish after the medieval period. Jonathan Edwards, the most important figure of the first Great Awakening, explained that “we ought not to rest in the world and its enjoyments, but should desire heaven.” To be sure, we may find happiness in “outward enjoyments,” such as our friends and family, but we must be ready “to quit them, whenever we are called to it, and to change them willingly and cheerfully for heaven.” Rather than work to achieve earthly joy, we should cultivate the virtues of “self-denial, mortification, obedience to all the commands of God,” and even “if we could go to heaven with the gratification of our lusts, we should prefer a way of holiness and conformity to the spiritual self-denying rules of the gospel.” Our model is Christ, and we should follow his example, take up our cross, and “wholly to subordinate all our other business, and all our temporal enjoyments, to this affair of traveling to heaven.”
Even in modern times, leading Christian thinkers have continued to emphasize Christianity’s other-worldly message. Consider one of the most influential Christian works of the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was disturbed by what he called “cheap grace”—the notion that because grace is the result of faith, not works, it makes no demands on how Christians live in the world. “The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world.” On this approach to grace, “my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.” True grace, he counters, is costly grace. It comes from a willingness to give up everything this world has to offer in order to follow Christ: “It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” The only true life, of course, is the life that comes after death. As for a human being’s earthly existence, it should be defined by faith, which is not mere belief, but an active process of obedience to Christ rooted in self-denial. “Only when we have become completely oblivious of self are we ready to bear the cross for his sake.” To become disciples of Christ, we must abandon our attachments to this world, abandon our own will, take on the burden of others’ sins, and accept a life of suffering and rejection. Yes, we have a worldly calling, but “the Christian’s worldly calling is sanctified only in so far as that calling registers the final, radical protest against the world.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 51, 45, 88, 86-91, 49.)
Many Christians today de-emphasize Christianity’s other-worldliness and try to carve out room for worldly values. But this has always been true: from the start, Christians differed in how consistently other-worldly they were. Some early Christians, such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom spurned reason altogether, while others held that reason could play a supplementary role. Some preached a radical asceticism and practiced gruesome acts of self-flaggelation, while others held that earthly pleasures and earthly riches could be reconciled with a good Chrisitan life so long as they were subordinated to spiritual ends. What all agreed on—and what Christians agree on to this day—is that this world is of only secondary importance.
My central claim throughout this review has been that civilization has been built by those who value this world. It is only to the extent that an individual or a society values reason, as our means of knowing this world, and earthly happiness, as the insignia of flourishing in this world, that we advance learning, science, freedom, and progress. These values were first pioneered in Athens, not Jerusalem, and to the extent Christians advanced and built on them, they were building on a foundation fundamentally at odds with Christianity’s other-worldly essence.
While Christians have made vital contributions to the civilizing process, Christianity has been an obstacle, not an asset. The more consistently we embrace the other-worldly doctrines of Christianity, the more we descend into barbarism—and the more consistently we embrace an earthly idealism that prioritizes flourishing in this world, the more we thrive.