An Objectivist's Take on Christianity and the Rise of the West

This is an e-mail I sent out in response to a friend who sent me a link to The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason by Andrew Bernstein.

I glanced at the objectivist's essay.

My take is that he knows the words, but doesn't have a clue about the music because he ignoring Stark's central point, which is that the basic principles of orthodox Christianity - as it developed in the West - are what promoted science and capitalism. The author - Andrew Bernstein - is a captive of his own cultural worldview and doesn't know or appreciate the fact that there are different Christian theologies which would have had drastically different effects on cultural development.

For example, Bernstein burns the bulk of his essay on Christian oppression of heresy without ever discussing what those heresies stood for. It seems that to Bernstein all of these heresies were about "free thought" and therefore the repression of heresies like Manichianism and Catharism are uniformly an attack on free thought.

While this viewpoint may be understandable to those of us who live in a culture with a developed understanding of science and capitalism, which takes pluralism for granted, it is idiotic to project that perspective back to a time when the scientific worldview hadn't yet caught on and for which there was no guarantee that it ever would.

In that world, the repression of Manichianism and Catharism were absolutely "good" things that allowed the development of a scientific worldview. As everyone who has spent any time studying pre-modern heresies knows, Manichianism and Catharism were based on a dualistic view of reality where spirit was "good" and matter was "bad." Matter - the perceived world - was, for these theologies, the product of an evil, twisted god who wanted to trap the good spirit in a false and illusionary existence.

A fundamental question that Bernstein might ask - but doesn't - is what is the likelihood of science - which finds truth in the external world - would develop in a world that viewed matter as illusionary and deceptive?

In fact, we know the answer - not likely. We see this - and Stark explains this - in the Asian world which took exactly that perspective and never developed science.

So, Bernstein doesn't deal with Stark's central point; he just assumes the answer that fits his parochial 21st cultural perspective.

An analogy might be with Communism. Is it really a limitation on "free thought" and a setback to science if Communists are prevented from taking over the coercive powers of government? I don't think history would support that claim.

Likewise, Bernstein points out that some of Aquinas propositions ended up on the Bishop of Paris' list of condemned propositions. This is certainly true and may represent an internecine academic squabble between the school of theology and the school of arts more than an attack on "free thought."

Nonetheless, the interesting side effect of that condemnation was that it stimulated the empirical attitude on which modern science is based. By condemning some Scholastic propositions based on logic - such as whether there could be a plurality of worlds - the Bishop unintentionally re-oriented scholars to examine the physical world, which is obviously the heart of modern science. (This isn't my eclectic interpretation; I've seen the point made by several historians of science.)

But note that the empirical potential of science was latent in Scholasticism and Christianity from the beginning because orthodox Christianity affirmed the goodness of the created world and the lawfulness of nature. Moreover, Aquinas himself taught the Scholastic doctrine that there was nothing in the mind that was not initially in the senses, which is a nice summary of empiricism. Finally, Aquinas taught that the use of human reason and the examination of nature was compatible with revelation, and not a threat to it.

These points are, of course, found in Stark and missed in Bernstein, who undoubtedly assumes the modern view that progress to science was inevitable, which it wasn't.

I have a problem with Bernstein's claim Europe experienced no economic growth between 500 AD and 1500 AD. Obviously, the Europe of, say, 1350 was economically more powerful and better developed than the Europe of 800 AD in terms of banking, industry, commerce, technology. So, what is Bernstein's point?

Perhaps Bernstein's point is to cherry pick data. Yes, there was the Black Death and there were certainly famines at points in European history, but the significant thing is that Europe recovered from the Black Death in a way that Justinian's empire did not recover from a similar epidemic in the 600s. Could the reason for the difference have been the improvements in technology, commerce etc. that Stark cites?

Yup.

Bernstein is also faking some of his claims. He writes, for example, No one could match his “knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

Uhmmmm....not so much.

I was surprised to find that despite his nickname, the "angelic doctor" doesn't spend all that much time on angels in the Summa. Out of something like 600 questions in the Summa, his chapter on angels amounts to 14 questions (albeit the subject does crop up in a few other questions.)

On the other hand, the Summa is littered with discussions of Aristotelian physics, such as whether light is a body. Interestingly, Thomas gets the answer wrong – he says it is not – but he gets it wrong for perfectly rational reasons based on the observed data!!!!

Thomas writes:

The second reason is from movement. For if light were a body, its diffusion would be the local movement of a body. Now no local movement of a body can be instantaneous, as everything that moves from one place to another must pass through the intervening space before reaching the end: whereas the diffusion of light is instantaneous. Nor can it be argued that the time required is too short to be perceived; for though this may be the case in short distances, it cannot be so in distances so great as that which separates the East from the West.

Alas, Thomas didn’t have atomic clocks or lasers in the 13th Century in order to accurately measure very fast and very small things.

Nonetheless, we ought to give credit to Thomas for doing pretty well with the observations he was able to make with what he had available to him.

But note that Bernstein’s oservation that ” Reason is an observation-based methodology” to dismiss Aquinas is bogus. In fact, Bernstein is guilty of the sin he accuses Thomas of: rather than going to the data, Bernstein has concluded from “logic” what he expected to find.

Thomas’ interest in physics shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who takes some time to think about the subject. Thomas is deeply indebted to Aristotelian metaphysics, which are dependent on Aristotelian physics.

D’uh!

Finally, Bernstein's appreciation of Aristotle is ironic. I think it is terrific that Bernstein finds a great deal of value in Aristotle's contribution to the rise of science and rationality in Europe, but I know that Aristotle has taken a great beating among the heirs of the Enlightenment every since around 1600 and, today, the only place that one can find any kind of Aristotelian rationality is not among post-modern academicians, but in the Catholic Church which maintains a living continuity - as it has for the last two thousand years - with classical philosophy.

Those are my quick thoughts on this Friday morning.