How the Bible Corrupted the Soul of Western Civilization - Part 4

Does Christianity Foster Progress and Prosperity?

This is Part 4 in a series. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. Part 3 here.

If I had to name the most plausible claim made in favor of Christianity’s contribution to civilization, it would be that it helped unleash modern progress.

That claim is plausible because, unlike reason, science, and liberty, which all had undeniable roots in ancient Greece, technological progress was new. Though the Greeks achieved relative prosperity in their day and the Romans achieved technological marvels, it was primarily in the Christian West that you saw the rise of labor-saving technology and, ultimately, the Great Enrichment made possible by the Industrial Revolution.

But to make the case that Christianity is the foundation of modern progress, you would have to contend with facts that Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World glides over: above all, Christianity’s anti-wealth, anti-progress track record. Just as Christians have held widely divergent views about reason, so they have held widely divergent views about production, and rather than grapple with that fact, Mangalwadi largely sweeps it under the table.

Did Christianity Invent Inventiveness?

Years ago I took part in a media training workshop. One of the principles the trainer laid down was: don’t answer the question they asked; answer the question you wish they asked. For anyone interested in the West’s distinctive contribution to civilization, the question is: what created the Great Enrichment that began with the Industrial Revolution? Mangalwadi sidesteps that question for one that better suits his purposes: why, he asks, did the West start developing labor-saving technology?

It’s a deft move. The Romans were technologically advanced, but they weren’t particularly interested in labor-saving inventions. Christian monks, meanwhile, were eager to make more time for prayer and so, while they celebrated work as a form of penance, they also embraced technology like the wheeled plow and the water mill that reduced the need for work.

According to Mangalwadi, they learned this lesson from the Bible. Invoking the work of the twentieth-century historian Ernst Benz, he writes:

Christendom pioneered technological creativity because the Bible presented a God who was a Creator, neither a dreamer nor a dancer, as Indian sages believed. God was the architect of the cosmos. He shaped man out of clay as a potter does, making man in his own creative image and commanding him to rule the world creatively.

Jesus Christ’s incarnation in a physical body and his bodily resurrection instilled into Christian philosophers the unique idea that matter was created for a spiritual purpose. Adam was created to take care of the earth, not to despise it or try to transcend it. Benz realized that the Judeo-Christian view of reality and destiny produced and nurtured technology in four ways: First, the Bible emphasized intelligent craftsmanship in the world’s design. Second, the Bible suggested that human beings participate in divine workmanship by being good artisans themselves. Third, the Bible taught that we follow divine example when we use the physical universe for righteous ends. And fourth, the Bible challenged the West to use time wisely, because each moment is a valuable, one-time opportunity. (96-97)

Mangalwadi acknowledges that “Scholars have qualified Benz’s thesis because not all versions of Christianity developed equally strong traditions of technology.” (97) But this hardly does justice to the matter. Many Christians have been actively hostile toward technology, and even the other major historian Mangalwadi leverages to make his case, Lynn White, admits that the inventiveness of the pagans and Chinese demonstrates that “Christianity obviously is not essential to technological dynamism.” (Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology, 237)

So we’re left with a rather modest claim: some medieval Christians interpreted Christianity in a way that encouraged them to develop and adapt technology. And yet we’re still overstating the case, because while Benz and White were certainly noteworthy twentieth century historians, Mangalwadi seems completely unaware that, in the decades since their work, the field has exposed important shortcomings in their scholarship that totally undermine Mangalwadi’s case.

For example, Magalwadi follows White in claiming that it was Christians who were responsible for the proliferation of the water mill (though acknowledging it was invented a century before Christ). “Water mills . . . became useful to power machinery by the invention of the crank, the most important invention after the wheel. . . . At the peak of their cultural development, the ancient and Greeks and Romans knew nothing about the crank.” (103-104) But archaeologists working near the end of White’s life concluded that the water mill was used in Rome more often than White allowed, and Romans were even familiar with the crankshaft many centuries before White thought it was invented. (David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin, Religion and the New Ecology, 38)

On the whole, concludes economic historian Joel Mokyr, “It is now widely agreed that White may have underestimated the technological achievements of classical Rome and exaggerated the discontinuity that medieval Europe presented in technological development.” (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 135-136) If Christians were not notably more inventive than their pagan counterparts, then there’s no grounds to look to Christianity to explain their greater inventiveness.

And even if we needed an explanation for Western inventiveness, the proposition that Christianity made the West more inventive is not a particularly good one. White’s basic claim is that pagan cultures were animistic, which led them to be wary about transforming nature for human purposes, and that this changed with Christianity, which put an end to animism and taught that God gave man dominion over the Earth.

But even before Christianity arose, the Greeks rejected crude animism and embraced human beings’ power to use reason to control nature. As the Greek Stoic Chrysippus wrote two hundred years before Christ:

Here somebody will ask, for whose sake was all this vast system contrived? For the sake of the trees and plants, for these, though without sensation have their sustenance from nature? But this at any rate is absurd. Then for the sake of the animals? It is no more likely that the gods took all this trouble for the sake of dumb, irrational creatures. For whose sake then shall one pronounce the world to have been created? Doubtless for the sake of those living beings which have the use of reason; these are the gods and mankind, who assuredly surpass all other things in excellence, since the most excellent of all things is reason. Thus we are led to believe that the world and all the things that it contains were made for the sake of gods and men. (Quoted in Peter Coates, Nature, chapter 2)

The ancient Hebrews, meanwhile, opposed animism but did not develop an inventive culture. As for the Christian West, it’s not even true that it had rejected animism, which could be found in the widespread belief in magic and even ideas from pagan science that dominated up until the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, the very idea that God giving mankind “dominion over the Earth” entitled human beings to transform the world for human ends is basically an anachronism. “An exhaustive study of medieval commentaries on Genesis 1:28 demonstrated that premodern Jews and Christians rarely, if ever, saw the verse as applying to technological domination of nature at all; rather, the exegesis of the verse typically dealt with issues related to God’s covenant and human sexuality.” (David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin, Religion and the New Ecology, 39-41)

So was the Christian West uniquely inventive before the modern era? Not really. And is there strong evidence to think that the inventiveness they did achieve was rooted in Christianity? No. All we can say is that a significant number of medieval Christians were open to invention, and saw some warrant for it in the Bible.

But let’s not forget, Christianity at its founding was an apocalyptic cult warning people to drop their earthly concerns because the world was about to end. Early Christian heroes were martyrs and radical ascetics who gained their fame by giving away their wealth and mortifying the flesh. It is utterly ridiculous to say that this was a movement urging people to innovate and prosper. If some strains of Christianity did develop such ideas (and some did), it was because they were adding something to Christian doctrine—not faithfully reading their Bible.

How Did the West Grow Rich?

Mangalwadi may find it convenient to focus on medieval technology. But for anyone concerned with a flourishing civilization, the goal is not to safeguard a culture that ekes out a few technological advances every century or so—it’s to nurture the distinctively modern rapid progress that lifted mankind out of poverty, extended lifespans by decades, and allows us to live richer, safer, more empowered lives than any human beings in history.

What is crystal clear is that the Great Enrichment was an Enlightenment achievement. As I’ve discussed at length, it was made possible by the free human mind applied to the task of improving earthly life. Or, as scholars of this transformation will often put it, it was made possible by institutions that secured thought, production, and trade—and by a culture that valued the development of “useful knowledge” and the deployment of that knowledge by profit-seeking inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists. As Mokyr puts it, the Enlightenment’s key themes were:

a culture of practical improvement, a belief in social progress, and the recognition that useful knowledge was the key to their realization. These beliefs were complemented by other cultural elements we see as enlightened: the idea of political power as a social contract, formal limits on the executive branch, freedom of expression, intellectual contestability, religious tolerance, basic human legal rights, the realization that exchange was a positive-sum game, the virtuousness of economic activity and trade, the sanctity of property rights, and the folly of mercantilist notions that placed the state (and not the individual) as the ultimate object of society.

The increased prevalence of these beliefs, which fit uneasily but conveniently under the big umbrella of the Enlightenment, was the cultural underpinning of economic growth, the scaffold on which new and more prosperous economic buildings could be erected. Of all those beliefs, the notions about the power of useful knowledge to transform the economy constituted the driving force in bringing about the Great Enrichment. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 266)

The institutions and culture of growth of the Enlightenment had earlier roots, of course. But they were hardly biblical. We’ve already discussed how the fundamental institution of political freedom was not an achievement of Christianity, so consider culture.

Mangalwadi’s case for Christianity as the cause of a technological civilization requires him to establish a robust continuity between the (allegedly distinctive) inventiveness of the Middle Ages and post-Enlightenment progress. Yet if we look at the state of the culture in the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, what we find is that it was in no way hospitable to modern growth.

First, let’s call to mind something that Mangalwadi denies: that Christians had maintained a deeply hierarchical society that regarded money-making as sinful. You cannot serve two masters, Jesus had insisted. Your attention is fixed either on this world—or the next. (Matt. 6:24) And this world is coming to an end. So do not store up false treasures here, but treasures in heaven. (Matt: 6:19-21) The desire for earthly gain is not just a distraction from what’s truly important—it is the antithesis of devotion to God. You should be content that your minimal needs are met—that you have food and clothing. To desire more is to plunge yourself into ruin and destruction. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim. 6:2-10)

And if you do have riches? If you do have more than your minimal needs? Here Jesus did not mince words. When a rich young man asked him how to achieve eternal life, Jesus did not respond with an enigmatic parable. He stated bluntly: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” As if that weren’t clear enough, he elaborated to his disciples: “[I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matt. 19:13-29)

(Mangalwadi sweeps all this aside and invokes the parable of the talents, which in his narrative celebrated money-making and even created “our complex system of capitalism.” (324) But to thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, the parable was an allegory about using God’s gifts in accordance with God’s will, not a call to seek riches.)

These ideas were still dominant in Europe well into the early modern era. In historian Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life, he looks at England (where the Great Enrichment got its start) during the period of 1530-1780. In his account, England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still an essentially religious, hierarchical society. The purpose of life was to glorify God and perform the duties of one’s social station.

Contemporary moralists were hostile to most forms of social mobility. The Church of England taught that the social hierarchy was divinely ordained and that it was a religious duty to be content with one’s lot. “God hath appointed every man his degree and office,” declared the official Homilies, “within the limits whereof it behoveth him to keep himself.” The inequalities of this world would be blotted out in the next. Meanwhile, it was un-Christian for a yeoman to desire to be a lord or a gentleman. Even the vagrant, dying of starvation in the street, should not grumble at his lot. To be discontented with one’s position in life was a breach of the Eighth Commandment. (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 17)

This was a world in which ambition and acquisitiveness were vices, and where conformity was a virtue. To defy convention was to commit the sin of “singularity.” “‘Desire not to be singular, nor to differ from others,’ warned a Jacobean cleric, ‘for it is a sign of a naughty spirit, which hath caused much evil in the world from the beginning.” (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 18-27) Your job was to accept your ordained place in society, accept the job your parents chose for you, quietly go about your work, and not make trouble.

There were, to be sure, few legal barriers to social mobility, and an individual could be forgiven for rising through education; there was less sympathy for “those who rose by making money.”

In the Christian tradition, riches had always been regarded as an impediment to salvation. They were despised by all truly pious persons. Treasure was to be sought in heaven not earth. The only valid justification for great wealth was that it enabled the holders to do good works, by benefiting religion, the poor, and the common weal. (Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, 32, 111)

This was hardly an auspicious environment for economic growth. But there were countervailing forces. These came, however, not from Christianity, but above all from two thinkers who would champion the use of reason to discover the secrets of nature and wield that knowledge for humanity’s earthly betterment: Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

Bacon’s key idea, Mokyr observes, was that “[k]nowledge ought to bear fruit in production, science ought to be applicable to industry, and it was people’s sacred duty to improve and transform the material conditions of life.” (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 70) With Bacon’s program, English thinkers increasingly focused on improving human wellbeing on Earth: “the glory of the Creator took a back seat.” (Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, 41)

But Bacon was not a discoverer of new scientific knowledge. His belief in the power of useful knowledge was more of a hope than an established postulate. That would change with Newton.

His insights more than ever confirmed the belief in a mechanistic, understandable universe that could and should be manipulated for the material benefit of humankind. In some form, the anthropocentric idea of nature in the service of humans had been around since the Middle Ages, but what counted was its triumph over what their proponents regarded as obscurantism and superstition. Seventeenth-century science prepared the ground for the Industrial Enlightenment by stressing mankind’s relationship with the environment as based on intelligibility and instrumentality. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 103)

It’s true, as Mangalwadi points out (99), that most of the early technological achievements of the Industrial Revolution did not leverage the new science. (The steam engine is an important exception.) But that is not the point. The point is that Newton’s achievements helped build a culture with the knowledge, skills, and outlook that created a culture of growth.

Take the case of Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century English potter and entrepreneur. He was, notes historian Roy Porter:

one of a remarkable new breed of men conspicuous for pursuing business through enlightened thinking. Though of meagre formal education, he displayed a consummate faith in reason, and a passion for measuring, weighing, observing, recording and experimenting: all problems in ceramics manufacture would, he maintained, “yield to experiment.” . . . Becoming “vase-maker general to the universe,” he died worth half a million. (Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, 432)

The culture that Bacon and Newton helped create would see a transformation in attitudes toward productive work and profit-seeking. Regarding work, Bacon’s and Newton’s elevation of the pursuit and deployment of useful knowledge raised the social status of inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As a result, the best, most ambitious minds gravitated, not to the church or the military, but to business. (Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, 389-390)

To devote oneself to business was no longer seen as ignoble, and the desire to improve one’s station through productive achievement was no longer condemned as vain. Enlightenment thinkers rejected the Christian animus against money-making and riches, and instead saw them as vital contributors to human flourishing. As historian Ritchie Robertson puts it in his history of the Enlightenment:

The perpetual wars of medieval times, and the violent sports favoured by the nobility in intervals of peace, were contrasted with the quiet, sedate and inoffensive occupation of the merchant. It was in this sense that Johnson could say to Boswell: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” The rational interests of the businessman were seen as promoting peace and stability, in contrast with the unbridled passions of the aristocracy. (Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment, 523)

The Enlightenment outlook on production would be articulated most enduringly by Adam Smith, who saw himself as doing for political economy what Newton had done for physics. Smith rejected the rigid ideals of the status society, and argued that an economy governed by market forces rather than coercion would be one “where every man was perfectly free both to choose what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper.” The result would be that free individuals pursuing their self-interest would live prosperously and peacefully. “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I.7, I.10, I.4)

It was the Enlightenment, not Christianity, that created a culture of growth. Most of the thinkers responsible for this transformation were Christians, of course. The English Puritans, for instance, were important early champions of Bacon and the experimental sciences, and both Bacon and Newton were themselves religious. But the reorientation of English society involved breaking away from and redefining Christian orthodoxy.

As the cases of the Jesuits and orthodox Calvinists illustrated, Christianity could still be a barrier to embracing science and progress. (Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 228) England was able to embrace the new science and culture of growth in large part because, as historian of science Margaret C. Jacob put it, “A new religious outlook was being invented. ‘Natural religion’ and ‘natural theology’ became passwords to a distinctive religiosity. Miracles and divine interventions became rarer; being religious began to mean thought rather than prayer. A vision of order and harmony, God’s work, replaced biblical texts and stories, God’s word.” (Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, 74)

Christianity didn’t create Enlightenment progress—the Enlightenment defanged Christianity so that it would not stand in the way of Enlightenment progress.