{"product_id":"the-victory-of-reason-isbn-9780812972337","title":"The Victory of Reason","description":"Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.In \u003cb\u003eThe Victory of Reason,\u003c\/b\u003e Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark’s view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.In explaining the West’s dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted “truths.” For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic–or even Protestants–he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of “exuberant invention.” By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as “inconsistent with human virtue”–which helps further underscore that Augustine’s times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West’s future glories. This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time. \u003cb\u003eThe Victory of Reason\u003c\/b\u003e proves that what we most admire about our world–scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce–is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.Rodney Stark is University Professor of the Social Sciences, Baylor University. Before earning his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a staff writer for several major publications. Among his many books are the influential studies The Rise of Christianity and One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism.chapter one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Blessings of Rational Theology\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    christian faith in progress\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    theology and science\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    China  Greece  Islam\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    moral innovations\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the rise of individualism\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the abolition of medieval slavery\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is  taken to mean a passé form of religious thinking that embraces  irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism. According to any  edition of Webster’s, “scholastic” means “pedantic and dogmatic,” denoting  the sterility of medieval church scholarship. John Locke, the  eighteenth-century British philosopher, dismissed the Scholastics as “the  great mintmasters” of useless terms meant “to cover their ignorance.”1 Not  so! The Scholastics were fine scholars who founded Europe’s great  universities and launched the rise of Western science. As for theology, it  has little in common with most religious thinking, being a sophisticated,  highly rational discipline that is fully developed only in Christianity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes described as “the science of faith,”2 theology consists of  formal reasoning about God. The emphasis is on discovering God’s nature,  intentions, and demands, and on understanding how these define the  relationship between human beings and God. The gods of polytheism cannot  sustain theology because they are far too inconsequential. Theology  necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being  of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral  codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious  intellectual questions such as: Why does God allow us to sin? Does the  Sixth Commandment prohibit war? When does an infant acquire a soul?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To fully appreciate the nature of theology, it is useful to explore why  there are no theologians in the East. Consider Taoism. The Tao is  conceived of as a supernatural essence, an underlying mystical force or  principle governing life, but one that is impersonal, remote, lacking  consciousness, and definitely not a being. It is the “eternal way,” the  cosmic force that produces harmony and balance. According to Lao-tzu, the  Tao is “always nonexistent” yet “always existent,” “unnamable” and the  “name that can be named.” Both “soundless and formless,” it is “always  without desires.” One might meditate forever on such an essence, but it  offers little to reason about. The same applies to Buddhism and  Confucianism. Although it is true that the popular versions of these  faiths are polytheistic and involve an immense array of small gods (as is  true of popular Taoism as well), the “pure” forms of these faiths, as  pursued by the intellectual elite, are godless and postulate only a vague  divine essence—Buddha specifically denied the existence of a conscious  God.3 The East lacks theologians because those who might otherwise take up  such an   intellectual pursuit reject its first premise: the existence of a  conscious, all-powerful God.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In contrast, Christian theologians have devoted centuries to reasoning  about what God may have really meant by various passages in scripture, and  over time the interpretations often have evolved in quite dramatic and  extensive ways. For example, not only does the Bible not condemn astrology  but the story of the Wise Men following the star might seem to suggest  that it is valid. However, in the fifth century Saint Augustine reasoned  that astrology is false because to believe that one’s fate is predestined  in the stars stands in opposition to God’s gift of free will.4 In similar  fashion, although many early Christians, including the apostle Paul,  accepted that Jesus had brothers,5 born of Mary and fathered by Joseph,  this view came   increasingly into conflict with developing theological views about Mary.  The matter was finally resolved in the thirteenth century, when Saint  Thomas Aquinas analyzed the doctrine of Christ’s virgin birth to deduce  that Mary did not bear other children: “So we assert without qualification  that the mother of God conceived as a virgin, gave birth as a virgin and  remained a virgin after the birth. The brothers of the Lord were not  natural brothers, born of the same mother, but blood-relations.”6\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These were not mere amplifications of scripture; each was an example of  careful deductive reasoning leading to new doctrines: the church did  prohibit astrology; the perpetual virginity of Mary remains the official  Catholic teaching. As these examples demonstrate, great minds could, and  often did, greatly alter or even reverse church doctrines on the basis of  nothing more than persuasive reasoning. And no one did this better or with  greater influence than Augustine and Aquinas. Of course, thousands of  other theologians also tried to make their mark on doctrines. Some  succeeded, most were ignored, and some of them were rejected as heretics:  the point being that an accurate account of any aspect of Christian  theology must be based on major, authoritative figures. It would be easy  to assemble a set of quotations to demonstrate all manner of strange  positions, if one selectively culled through the work of the thousands of  minor Christian theologians who have written during the past two  millennia. That approach has been all too common; but it is not mine. I  will quote minor figures only when they expressed views ratified by the  major theologians, keeping in mind that the authoritative church position  on many matters often evolved, sometimes to the extent of reversing  earlier teachings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leading Christian theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas were not what  today might be called strict constructionists. Rather, they celebrated  reason as the means to gain greater insight into   divine intentions. As Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second   century: “Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God  the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing  which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason.”7 In  the same spirit, Clement of Alexandria warned in the third century: “Do  not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith,  but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe  to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth  cannot be without reason.”8\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hence, Augustine merely expressed the prevailing wisdom when he held that  reason was indispensable to faith: “Heaven forbid that God should hate in  us that by which he made us superior to the animals! Heaven forbid that we  should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we  could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.” Augustine  acknowledged that “faith must precede reason and purify the heart and make  it fit to receive and endure the great light of reason.” Then he added  that although it is necessary “for faith to precede reason in certain  matters of great moment that cannot yet be grasped, surely the very small  portion of reason that persuades us of this must precede faith.”9  Scholastic theologians placed far greater faith in reason than most  philosophers are willing to do today.10\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course, some influential churchmen opposed the primacy given to reason  and argued that faith was best served by mysticism and spiritual  experiences.11 Ironically, the most inspiring advocate of this position  expressed his views in elegantly reasoned theology.12 Dissent from the  priority of reason was, of course, very popular in some of the religious  orders, especially the Franciscans and the Cistercians. But these views  did not prevail—if for no other reason than because official church  theology enjoyed a secure base in the many and growing universities, where  reason ruled.13\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    christian faith in progress\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Judaism and Islam also embrace an image of God sufficient to sustain  theology, but their scholars have tended not to pursue such matters.  Rather, traditional Jews14 and Muslims incline toward strict  constructionism and approach scripture as law to be understood and  applied, not as the basis for inquiry about questions of ultimate meaning.  For this reason scholars often refer to Judaism and Islam as “orthoprax”  religions, concerned with correct (ortho) practice (praxis) and therefore  placing their “fundamental emphasis on law and regulation of community  life.” In contrast, scholars describe Christianity as an “orthodox”  religion because it stresses correct (ortho) opinion (doxa), placing  “greater emphasis on belief and its intellectual structuring of creeds,  catechisms, and theologies.”15 Typical intellectual controversies among  Jewish and Muslim religious thinkers involve whether some activity or  innovation (such as reproducing holy scripture on a printing press) is  consistent with established law. Christian controversies typically are  doctrinal, over matters such as the Holy Trinity or the perpetual  virginity of Mary.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course, some leading Christian thinkers have concentrated on law and  some Jewish and Muslim scholars have devoted themselves to theological  issues. But the primary thrust of the three faiths has differed in this  respect and with very significant consequences. Legal interpretation rests  on precedent and therefore is anchored in the past, while efforts to  better understand the nature of God assume the possibility of progress.  And it is the assumption of progress that may be the most critical  difference between Christianity and all other religions. With the  exception of Judaism, the other great faiths have conceived of history as  either an endlessly repeated cycle or inevitable decline—Muhammad is  reported to have said, “The best generation is my generation, then the one  that follows it, and then the ones that follow that.”16 In contrast,  Judaism and Christianity have sustained a directional conception of  history, culminating in the Millennium. However, the Jewish idea of  history stresses not progress but only procession, while the idea of  progress is profoundly manifest in Christianity. As John Macmurray put it,  “That we think of progress at all shows the extent of the influence of  Christianity upon us.”17\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Things might have been different had Jesus left a written scripture. But  unlike Muhammad or Moses, whose texts were accepted as divine  transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism, Jesus wrote  nothing, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason  as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings—the New  Testament is not a unified scripture but an anthology.18 Consequently, the  precedent for a theology of deduction and inference and for the idea of  theological progress began with Paul: “For our knowledge is imperfect and  our prophesy is imperfect.”19 Contrast this with the second verse of the  Qur’an, which proclaims itself to be “the Scripture whereof there is no  doubt.”20\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    From very early days, Christian theologians have assumed that the  application of reason can yield an increasingly accurate understanding of  God’s will. Augustine noted that although there were “certain matters  pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one  day we shall be able to do so.”21 Augustine celebrated not only  theological progress, but earthly, material progress as well. Writing  early in the fifth century, he exclaimed: “Has not the genius of man  invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of  necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigour  of mind . . . betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can  invent, learn, or employ such arts. What wonderful—one might say  stupefying—advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and  building, of agriculture and navigation!” He went on to admire the “skill  [that] has been   attained in measures and numbers! With what sagacity have the movements  and connections of the stars been discovered!” And all of this was due to  the “unspeakable boon” that God conferred upon his creation, a “rational  nature.”22\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Augustine’s optimism was typical; progress beckoned. As Gilbert de Tournai  wrote in the thirteenth century, “Never will we find truth if we content  ourselves with what is already known. . . . Those things that have been  written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for  it is not yet totally possessed.”23 Especially typical were the words  preached by Fra Giordano in Florence in 1306: “Not all the arts have been  found; we shall never see an end to finding them. Every day one could  discover a new art.”24 Compare this with the prevailing view in China at  this same time, well expressed by Li Yen-chang: “If scholars are made to  concentrate their attention solely on the classics and are prevented from  slipping into study of the vulgar practices of later generations, then the  empire will be fortunate indeed!”25\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Christian commitment to progress through rationality reached its  heights in the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, published in  Paris late in the thirteenth century. This monument to the theology of  reason consists of logical “proofs” of Christian doctrine and set the  standard for all subsequent Christian theologians. Aquinas argued that  because humans lack suf-  ficient intellect to see directly into the essence of things, it is   necessary for them to reason their way to knowledge, step by step. Thus,  although Aquinas regarded theology as the highest of the sciences, since  it deals directly with divine revelations, he advocated the use of the  tools of philosophy, especially the principles of logic, in seeking to  construct theology.26 Consequently, Aquinas was able to use his powers of  reason to find the most profound humanism in God’s creation.27\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Aquinas and his many gifted peers could not have excelled at rational  theology had they conceived of Jehovah as an inexplicable essence. They  could justify their efforts only because they assumed that God was the  absolute epitome of reason.28 Moreover, their commitment to the  progressive reasoning out of God’s will required them to accept that the  Bible is not only or always to be understood literally. This too was the  conventional Christian view, since, as Augustine noted, “divers things may  be understood under these words which yet are all true.” In fact,  Augustine frankly acknowledged that it is possible for a later reader,  with God’s help, to grasp a scriptural meaning even though the person who  first wrote down the scripture “understood not this.” Thus, he continued,  it is necessary to “enquire . . . what Moses, that excellent minister of  Thy faith, would have his reader understand by those words . . . let us  approach together unto the words of Thy book, and seek in them Thy  meaning, through the meaning of Thy servant, by whose pen Thou hast  dispensed them.”29 Moreover, since God is incapable of either error or  falsehood, if the Bible seems to contradict knowledge, that is because of  a lack of understanding on the part of the “servant” who recorded God’s  words.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These views were entirely consistent with the fundamental Christian  premise that God’s revelations are always limited to the current capacity  of humans to comprehend. In the fourth century, Saint John Chrysostom  noted that even the seraphim do not see God as he is. Instead, they see “a  condescension accommodated to their nature. What is this condescension? It  is when God appears and makes himself known, not as he is, but in the way  one incapable of beholding him is able to look upon him. In this way God  reveals himself proportionately to the weakness of those who behold  him.”30 Given this long tradition, there was nothing even slightly  heretical about John Calvin’s assertion that God accommodates his  revelations to the limits of human understanding, that the author of  Genesis, for example, “was ordained to be a teacher of the unlearned and  primitive, as well as the learned; so could not achieve his goal without  descending to such crude means of instruction.” That is, God “reveals  himself to us according to our rudeness and infirmity.”31\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in  human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity  to better understand. Moreover, because God is a rational being and the  universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful,  stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This was the key  to many intellectual undertakings, among them the rise of science.[quote]--The Wall Street Journal","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302126932197,"sku":"NP9780812972337","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812972337.jpg?v=1767742074","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-victory-of-reason-isbn-9780812972337","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}