How the Bible Corrupted the Soul of Western Civilization - Part 3

Does Christianity Foster Rationality and Learning?

Vishal Mangalwadi, in The Book That Made Your World, writes: “The scientific, technological, military, and economic success of the West came from the fact that it became a thinking civilization.”

Here we’re in complete agreement. The West moved humanity forward because it embraced reason. But why, asks Mangalwadi, did the West embrace reason? “Was its rationality a coincidence in history? Or did the Bible promote rationality because it informed the West that the ultimate reality behind the universe was the rational Word (logos) of a personal God?” (77-78)

That, of course, is a false alternative. But it is striking that Mangalwadi never once quotes the Bible as praising the power of reason or encouraging individuals to adhere to the laws of logic. No. Literally the only thing he cites from the Bible is its invocation that Christ is the logos, from which he deduces:

If God is Truth, if he can speak to us in rationally understandable words, then human rationality is really significant. The way to know the truth is to cultivate our minds and meditate on God’s Word. These theological assumptions constituted the DNA of what we call Western civilization. (82)

The logos is a concept that comes out of Platonic and Stoic philosophy, and later gets picked up by Jewish thinkers such as Philo, the author of John, and some of the early Christian apologists. The pivotal Christian account of the logos comes from Justin Martyr. As one Christian historian summarizes, “[T]he special functions of the Logos, according to Justin, are two: to be the Father’s agent in creating and ordering the universe, and to reveal truth to men.” (J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 97; see also Justo L. Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought, Vol 1, 45-46, 52, 101-109) The logos, for Christians, is an account of creation and revelation—it is not a call to follow reason.

What does the Bible actually say about reason? Precious little. But what it does say is consistent: reason is limited, dangerous, and must be subordinated to faith.

Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight [often translated as “understanding”].” 1 Corinthians 1:20–25 condemns the “wisdom of the world” and declares that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.” Colossians 2:8 warns that “no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” The Bible’s message is that faith—”the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1)—is a more reliable guide to life than the individual’s earthly reason.

Nevertheless, Mangalwadi wants us to believe that the Bible told human beings to be rational and that the Christian West therefore embraced reason and moved civilization forward. What about the Christian East? Mangalwadi doesn’t say.

As for why it took the Christian West so long to embrace reason, Magalwadi claims that the West fell into disarray due to the “barbarian conquests,” which depressed literacy and education from the fifth century to the ninth century. (208) However, the work of leading Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, and John of Damascus kept alive the values of reason, logic, and learning until their full re-emergence starting with the rise of Cathedral schools and universities and climaxing with the Reformation. (86-88, 208-212)

It’s a story based on half-truths and wild distortions that disguises the real lesson of history: Christianity has been reason’s greatest enemy.

Reason Discovered, Reason Shackled

Human beings have been using reason for as long as there have been human beings. But the discovery of reason as a distinct faculty, and the discovery of a method for self-consciously adhering to reason, was an achievement of the Greeks. The Greeks were the first to grasp that the world could be understood in naturalistic terms, and that this understanding was to be arrived at through argument, not authority.

The culmination of the Greek achievement came with Aristotle, who was the first to grasp that reason worked by forming concepts from observation and integrating them logically into a non-contradictory understanding of reality.

Mangalwadi is well aware of Greece’s role in the discovery of reason, because he notes, “Six hundred years before Christ, beginning with philosophers like Thales and Anaximander, the Greeks indeed cultivated the life of the mind.” But, he goes on,

That tradition continued as long as they respected logic. But it began to die out after they denied the existence of transcendent logos and yielded to Gnostic efforts to transcend rationality.

Professor Raoul Mortley examined the rise and fall of logos in ancient Greece. In the study From Word To Silence, he pointed out that the idea of logos, or the rational word, as the controlling feature of the universe originated in Greece with the pre-Socratic thinkers. It ended with the closing of the Athenian Academy in AD 529. (81)

I won’t try to unpack what is a rather bizarre series of assertions. I will simply note what Mangalwadi’s deft use of the passive voice disguises: that what closed the Athenian Academy was the Christian emperor Justinian I.

Let’s be clear. The Late-stage Athenian Academy was not exactly a bastion of reason. It was essentially a haven for neoplatonist mystics. But what it does highlight is how Mangalwadi leaves out of his story Christianity’s role in the decline of reason and learning as we enter the Dark Ages.

I said earlier that the Bible’s core message about reason is that it must be subordinated to faith. What the history of Christianity reveals is that this subordination can take many shapes. It can involve the subordination of reason across the board or in some realm where reason allegedly can’t achieve knowledge (typically, the mysteries of the divine realm). It can involve a dismissive hostility to reason or the view that reason is a useful supplement to revelation.

You can find both strands in early Christianity. Several times in his book, Mangalwadi invokes the research of Edward Grant, but whereas Mangalwadi presents Christianity as consistently pro-reason, Grant is under no such illusion. He catalogs two “conflicting Christian attitudes” toward reason. The first, best represented by Tertullian, was virulently anti-reason and openly rejected pagan knowledge as worthless. The second, embodied by thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria and later Augustine, embraced reason as a handmaiden to theology, and accepted pagan learning insofar as it did not conflict with scripture.

The sentiment that pagan philosophy could not be rejected arose from an early belief that pagan thought foreshadowed Christianity and that the latter might therefore receive guidance and insight from the secular knowledge and learning of pagan authors. The idea emerged that Christians might take what is of value in pagan thought and use it for their own benefit. . . . Another incentive for studying the philosophy and science of the pagans was to use their own words and ideas against them. (Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, 33)

Augustine, for example, held that reason can illuminate scripture, especially by resolving apparent contradictions, and that reason can also prevent Christians from making embarrassing blunders when defending their faith against pagans. But to say that reason is a handmaiden to faith is to say that it can never challenge revelation.

For example, pagans may believe that observation demonstrates that resurrection of the dead is impossible, and on those grounds dismiss Christian claims that Christ has risen. But this, says Augustine, only reveals why we must not begin our reasoning from observation. The correct starting point for logical reasoning is the infallibility of the Bible. “This can all be put very briefly as follows: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ risen again; but Christ has risen again; therefore there is a resurrection of the dead.” (Quoted in Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, 39) Similarly, in The City of God, Augustine mocks those who argue that the Earth is ancient. Scripture assures us that it is only 6,000 years old. (Augustine, The City of God, XII.11)

Christianity, then, gets credit, not for injecting reason into the West, but for limiting its authority. Even the most pro-reason Christians denied the sovereignty of reason, refusing to grant it license to question the tenets of faith, and many shared with Augustine the concern that the fascination with earthly knowledge would unleash “the lust of the eyes.” While the barbarian invasions certainly played a major role in bringing the West into the Dark Ages, Christian ambivalence toward reason had its role to play as well.

Were Christians bemoaning the decline of reason and learning during the Dark Ages? Boethius, perhaps, but what about Gregory the Great, who served as Bishop of Rome from 590 to his death in 604? He dismissed the classical tradition as mere “worldly wisdom” that all too easily unleashed pride and heresy. (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 234-5.)

Historian Jacques Le Goff argues that many medieval Christian thinkers chose to deliberately dumb themselves down in order to reach an increasingly ignorant community. The influential early-sixth-century bishop Caesarius of Arles, for instance, apologized to his educated readers for his “rustic expressions” and “down-to-earth language.” “Since the ignorant and the simple cannot raise themselves to the height of the educated, let the educated deign to lower themselves to their ignorance.” Le Goff concludes:

It is striking to see the most cultivated and the most eminent representatives of the new Christian elite, conscious of their cultural unworthiness compared with the last purists, renounce what they yet possessed or could acquire in the form of intellectual refinement so that they could make themselves accessible to their flocks. They chose to grow stupid in order to conquer. (Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization: 400-1500, 117.)

Arguably the most important way in which Christianity helped foster early medieval ignorance was simply through its shift in focus: even if it was not sinful to investigate nature, this world wasn’t important enough to deserve much attention. Consequently, few Christians devoted themselves to science, and few scribes bothered to preserve the work of those who did. Of the 264 surviving manuscripts we have from between 550 and 750 CE, all but 26 deal with religious subjects. Equally revealing, the library of Bede, the most learned man of his age, consisted of biblical commentaries, the works of the Latin Fathers, and a few secular works, such as Plinty’s Natural History, that were useful for biblical exegesis. (Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 317-318.)

How did the West Become Pro-Reason?

How did the West claw its way out of the Dark Ages? Not by reading the Bible, but by once again leveraging the Greeks—above all, Aristotle.

Boethius had kept Aristotle alive in the West by translating some of his logical texts into Latin. On its own, this amounted to very little in the way of cultural influence. But it made Western thinkers receptive to Aristotle and other pagan thinkers when their works were rediscovered by the West starting in the late eleventh century. (This, in essence, is the story Grant tells in God and Reason in the Middle Ages.)

I say it made the West receptive, but that’s an overstatement. Many powerful Christians were not at all receptive. At the University of Paris, conservatives banned Aristotle in 1210, then again in 1215, and once more in 1231. Then, in the late 1270s, the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, became alarmed by some of the more radical ideas proposed by Aristotelian scholars. In 1277 he formally condemned 219 doctrines. His goal was not to forbid Aristotle—an impossibility in any case—but to humble philosophers who dared speculate on issues reserved for theologians, including the immortality of the soul and the eternality of the universe. Anyone teaching the condemned doctrines—indeed, anyone daring to listen to them—was subject to excommunication. “The condemnations,” David Lindberg observes, “were a ringing declaration of the subordination of philosophy to theology.” (David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 248.)

Aristotle was hardly the only target. Though Magalwadi (and Christians more generally) credit the West for creating the university, they ignore that medieval universities were hardly bastions of free thought.

The new corporations of masters and students, known as studia generalia or universities, were allowed to govern themselves, under the mostly nominal authority of a bishop, in return for an undertaking that licentious behavior by students and dangerous speculation by masters—what we would call “intellectual freedom”—would be reined in. Thought-control was indeed the chief aim of the new corporations, at least initially. (James Hankins, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, 33)

Even so, the rediscovery of the ancients was transformative. Reason and learning were revived, enough to birth the Renaissance and lay the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution. But despite the progress toward a culture of reason, the West was still in the grips of the handmaiden view that held reason in fetters.

Mangalwadi acknowledges as much when he admits that this was an era of “intolerance and persecution,” marked by “the attempt to suppress dissent and bring about conformity by force.” (86) But, he says, the West was saved by “the open, questioning attitude of reforms like Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, who sought to make the Bible available to people so they could discover the truth for themselves.” (86)

Statements like this sometimes make me wonder if Mangalwadi is trolling us. As I noted last time, Luther and Calvin were hardly advocates of an “open, questioning attitude” toward religion. Indeed, it was precisely their influence that the West would have to escape in order to build the modern world.

Consider the case of England. Before Englishmen were liberated to read the Bible, Mangalwadi claims, “England was only a middling power. But once the English people began using logic to interpret the Bible, they acquired a skill that propelled their nation to the forefront of world politics, economics, and thought.” (88) It’s a nice, neat, simple story: read the Bible, discover the power of logic, transform the world. But it’s just not what happened.

In his history of the early British Enlightenment, philosopher Frederick Beiser notes that, “According to Luther and Calvin, the final standard of truth is Scripture, which contains mysteries beyond the ken of our natural light. The reformers sharply distinguished between the spheres of nature and grace, the earthly and the heavenly, and warned reason not to presume to judge faith.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 4)

No, they weren’t hostile to reason across the board, but reason needed to be kept in its place. Their rejection of the sovereignty of reason—of reason as our only ultimate guide of knowledge in every domain of life—followed from their core religious doctrines. Beiser summarizes:

(1) That all human powers have been utterly corrupted by the Fall, so that it is not possible for man to attain salvation through his own efforts, or to know God through his natural reason.

(2) That the sphere of reason is possible experience alone, so that it cannot discover, explain, demonstrate, or refute any belief concerning the supernatural and spiritual realm beyond it.

(3) That the true meaning of the Bible cannot be understood by reason but by the spirit alone.

(4) That God completely transcends the nature of man, and is different from him not only in degree but also in kind, so that to apply rational discourse to him is only to indulge in anthropomorphisms. (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 21)

Officially, the Church of England supported this outlook and opposed the rise of reason in Britain during the sixteenth century. But by the eighteenth century, virtually everyone in England agreed that reason was “the highest authority, the final court of appeal,” such that it “takes precedence over every other source or standard of truth, such as inspiration, tradition, or the Bible,” and that it has “the power and right to examine all of our beliefs, even religious and political ones.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 3)

What changed? In Beiser’s account, there were two steps. First, English rationalists, who were for the most part clerics in the Church of England, found it necessary to embrace the sovereignty of reason in order to defend the Church. Second, “the growing authority of reason, though it served religious ends, eventually led to the decline of religion itself.” (Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason, 17)

This was a fraught transition. Though press freedom had dramatically increased in the late 1600s, authors could still be prospected for blasphemy, imprisoned for denying Christianity, and unorthodox works censored and burnt. Englishmen had been executed for denying the Trinity as recently as the 1600s. (Roland Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 6-9)

But by the eighteenth century—that is, by the time England was “propelled. . . to the forefront of world politics, economics, and thought”—the general sentiment was that England had disclaimed Christianity. As historian Roland Stromberg puts it:

Hardly a single devout man, indeed, neglected to charge the times with abandonment of religion, and relatively disinterested observers added the weight of their testimony. Daniel Defoe believed in 1722 that “no age, since the founding and forming of the Christian Church, was ever like, in open avowed atheism, blasphemies, and heresies, to the age we now live in.” William Whiston declared that anyone with “a right sense of religion” must be aware of its “decay and disesteem in the world.” Swift was fond of noting sardonically how little the principles of religion were pursued in the world. Bishop Butler concluded that religion had fought a losing battle with unbelief. David Hume, who was perhaps an unwilling sceptic, agreed: England, he wrote, showed the most indifference to religious matters of all nations. (Roland Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 2-3)

This was, Stromberg points out, “petulance or hysteria.” The point is simply that, as reason gained authority, religion lost its grip on the English mind.

Mangalwadi is right: reason does explain the rise of the West. But reason’s triumph was a triumph over Christianity—not a triumph made possible by Christianity. The Greeks had discovered that reason is our means of knowledge—Christianity taught mankind to demote and shackle reason.

It was only because some thinkers were willing to challenge Christian dogma and face Christian persecution in order to uphold the sovereignty of reason that the modern world was created.

The attempt to resurrect faith is not only suicidal—it is an act of treason against those who build the knowledge, freedom, and progress we enjoy today.