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It is easy to take for granted what we have grown accustomed to, be it freedom, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, or countless other values and institutions that are part and parcel of a civilized society. But we are left aghast upon realizing that those values and institutions are trampled on, if not completely inexistent, in other societies. What accounts for such a stark contrast?
The Gift of Reason
The title of the article might raise some eyebrows. Didn’t Christianity thrust humanity into the “Dark Ages”? Perhaps the biggest lie about the “Dark Ages” that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire is that these ages were dark at all. The “Dark Ages” were in fact an era of achievements in a vast number of fields, from agriculture and architecture to art and technology. Simply examining the technical innovations made by Cistercian monks is sufficient to realize this.
This is hardly a coincidence. Church fathers have always maintained that reason is the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of Scripture and revelation. The Catholic emphasis on the exercise of reason led to the rise of scholasticism, a medieval and educational movement that sought to reconcile faith and reason through meticulous logical reasoning. It was spearheaded by a wide variety of thinkers, the most famous being, without a shadow of a doubt, Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism laid the foundations for a particular Christian institution that is far from becoming obsolete: the university. Is it a surprise that the first universities in the world (the University of Paris and the University of Bologna) were staunchly Catholic?
Alongside the thirst for knowledge comes faith in progress and in the existence of a better way to get things done and to understand Scripture, notably through the use of reason. Christianity is oriented towards the future and does not dogmatically cling to a distant past that is deemed superior, unlike Enlightenment thinkers who were romantically attached to classical Antiquity.
The Birth of the Individual
Why has freedom seldom existed in most of the world? Central to most Christian philosophies is the doctrine of free will. Man is endowed with the ability to choose between good and evil. And here lies the genius of Christianity: salvation is a purely individual issue, meaning that the individual is responsible for his own acts. The community has nothing to do with it. As clearly shown in passages like Matthew 16:27 and Romans 14:12, personal accountability and responsibility are emphatically condoned in the Bible.
Individual responsibility and the primacy of liberty might sound like self-evident truisms at first glance, but they were moral innovations in antiquity. The notion of the “person” was alien to Greek philosophers. Plato, for instance, focused on the polis (the city) rather than on the citizen. In fact, it was common for authors to refer to themselves in the third person. This literary trend is called illeism. Saint Augustine’s use of the first-person narrative in his Confessions marked a radical departure from the traditional illeism. By “inventing” the individual, Christianity paved the way for other innumerable intellectual landmarks.
Soft on Slavery?
The rise of Christianity and individualism prompted self-examination and questions on the boundaries of personal freedom. Christianity’s role in abolishing slavery is often downplayed, if not completely overlooked. Although slavery is rightly seen as an abhorrent institution, it was nonetheless a universal institution that littered the vast majority of human societies and is still practiced in some parts of the globe. Plato owned slaves, so did Aristotle, David Hume, Voltaire, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.
However, most historians agree that slavery disappeared from Europe by the end of the tenth century. And it was only because the Church extended its sacraments to all slaves and imposed a ban on the enslavement of Christians and Jews. Within the context of medieval Europe, this was tantamount to abolishing slavery.
The Myth of the Protestant Ethic
Renowned sociologist Max Weber attributed the rise of capitalism in the West to the Protestant ethic in a famous book. But it flies in the face of easily accessible evidence. If we define capitalism as an economic system wherein privately owned enterprises pursue commercial activities and compete in a free market, then the rise of capitalism antedates the Protestant Reformation by centuries.
It is worth noting that in their critical period of economic development, northern medieval cities that were commercial powerhouses were Catholic, not Protestant. John Gilchrist, a leading historian of the economic activity of the medieval church, pointed out that the first examples of capitalism appeared in the great Christian monasteries. It is also widely recognized that even in the nineteenth century, Protestant regions and nations on the Continent did not hold a conspicuous advantage over many Catholic areas, despite the perceived “backwardness” of Spain.
Furthermore, celebrated historian Henri Pirenne notes that extensive literature establishes the fact that all of the essential features of capitalism (individual enterprise, advances in credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc.) are to be found in the twelfth century on, in the city republics of Italy, Venice, Genoa, and Florence. Nevertheless, there is some truth to be found in Weber’s thesis: religious ideas played an instrumental role in shaping capitalism as we know it.
To conclude, what does the West owe to Christianity? In a word, reason. But a mere article will not suffice to sweep away the attacks against Christianity, and the Book of Proverbs makes it clear that “as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.”
