The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY

  The birth of Christianity represented the first serious attempt to merge Jewish thought with Greek thought. The Christian admixture was far more Jewish than Greek in its vision of God and of man’s quest in the world, but it was also far more Greek than Jewish in its universality.

  Christianity universalized the message of Judaism. The Gospels were deliberately written in Greek, not the Aramaic used by the Jews of the period. Jesus’s story was meant to extend to the entire world. Because Jesus was no longer a Jewish figure in the Christian view, but the material incarnation of the divine, that meant that Jewish law could be abandoned in favor of universalism. As historian Richard Tarnas writes, “That supreme Light, the true source of reality shining forth outside Plato’s cave of shadows, was now recognized as the light of Christ. As Clement of Alexandria announced, ‘By the Logos, the whole world is now become Athens and Greece.’”3 The Judaic notion of God, so focused on law and the Jewish people as God’s torch burning in the darkness through fulfillment of that law, was turned aside. Instead, Jesus became all:

  Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. . . . If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him.4

  Access to God became universal, and far more easily attainable: the answer lay in belief. This key Christian concept—the notion of faith in one personal redeemer, the representative of God’s logic in the universe—broadened the appeal of Judaism to billions of people over history in a way Judaism never would have: Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense. The commandments of Judaism are intricate and difficult. Christianity dispensed with the need for them. Faith is paramount.

  In making faith paramount, however, Christianity demoted the role of Greek reason in the life of human beings; despite Christianity’s vision of God as the Logos, the logic lying behind all of the universe, Christianity conflated that Logos with the person of Jesus. The great early Christian thinker Tertullian (155–240) summed up the idea well: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, the Church with the Academy, the Christian with the heretic? . . . After Jesus we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research.”5 Likewise, Saint Augustine (354–430) suggested that investigating the universe was a waste of time for those who accepted the truth of revelation: “Many scholars engage in lengthy discussions on these matters, but the sacred writers with their deeper wisdom have omitted them. Such subjects are of no profit for those who seek beatitude, and, what is worse, they take up very precious time that ought to be given to what is spiritually beneficial. . . . The truth is rather in what God reveals than in what groping men surmise.”6 Augustine was not a full opponent of reason; if not for original sin, Augustine said, reason alone could have connected man with God. But grace had to fill the gap between man and God after the Fall; reason couldn’t be the primary fuel for crossing that boundary.

  Christianity solved the dilemma of the polis vs. the individual by suggesting that Jesus’s transformation of the world was essentially spiritual, not material. Judaism had posited that the messiah would be a political figure, not primarily a spiritual one—and that very idea put Judaism inherently in conflict with any powerful material empire. Christianity redefined the concept of the messiah entirely: Paul morphed the Jewish belief in a political messiah who would usher in an age of worldly peace to the Christian belief in a spiritual messiah who had to die to atone for human sins.

  This division was made clearest by Augustine, who, in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, was deeply concerned with rejecting the idea that Christianity’s rise had led to the collapse of the Empire. Augustine dealt in dichotomies, chief among them the division between what he called the City of God and the City of Man. The City of God revolves around virtue; it is the community of Christians who have been initiated by grace into Jesus’s love. The City of Man is the material city, the polis so treasured by the Greeks—grasping, materialistic, incapable of bringing happiness, in Augustine’s description.7

  This dichotomy suggested that the existing governments need not feel threatened by Christianity, which, after all, just sought the hearts of men in worship. Christianity was beyond politics; citizenship was to be governed by the City of Man. Augustine wrote:

  Christ’s servants—whether kings or princes or judges, whether soldiers or provincials, rich or poor, free or slave, men and women alike—are told to endure, if need be, the worst and most depraved republic and, by their endurance, to win for themselves a place of glory in the most holy and majestic senate of the angels, so to speak, in the heavenly republic whose law is the will of God.8

  The realm of man was man’s; the realm of God was God’s.

  In reality, of course, the Church would quickly centralize temporal as well as spiritual power. Augustine’s dichotomy between the City of God and the City of Man actually supported that power seizure, since the best City of Man would presumably be one that utilized the values of the City of God. Augustine controversially followed the path of power on occasion, too: when a schismatic sect called the Donatists threatened him and the regime under which he lived, Augustine used the Roman authorities to quash them, arguing, “You are of opinion that no one should be compelled to follow righteousness; and yet you read that the householder said to his servants, ‘Whomsoever ye shall find, compel them to come in.’ . . . sometimes the shepherd brings wandering sheep back to the flock with his rod.”9 Defenders of Augustine said that this was less doctrinal than an emergency defense; either way, the Catholic Church would not shy away from the arrogation of power over the course of coming centuries.

  THE VICTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

  The spread of Christianity was immediate and far-reaching. Historian Rodney Stark estimates that there were about one thousand Christians in the year 40 CE; by the year 300, there were some six million Christians, a growth rate of some 40 percent per decade.10 What drove Christianity’s spread? There have been several theories, aside from the obvious spiritual ones. First, concurrent historians suggested that Christianity’s rise had been driven by admiration for its system of care for the poor: the emperor Julian, a committed opponent of the Church, spoke of pagan shortcomings when compared with the “moral character, even if pretended,” of the Christians, including their “benevolence toward strangers and care of the graves of the dead.” Julian saw Christians’ attention to the impoverished as a chief outreach method.11

  Then there was the fact that Christianity was the only religion actively seeking converts: after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE, Judaism had stopped religious outreach (there is controversy as to whether Judaism sought religious conversion even before that event). Because Christianity proposed both universal salvation and exclusive salvation, furthermore, it drew adherents from Roman society—it’s easier to evangelize those of foreign religion if they are barred from eternity by failure to join.

  Early Christians were persecuted brutally by the Romans, who saw them as a rebellious and millennialist offshoot of the Jewish tree. But Christianity’s division between the spiritual and material worlds allowed various emperors to treat the religion as either a scapegoat or as a potential source of support. Emperor Diocletian launched the most vicious round of persecution against the Christians in 303 CE, but in 311 CE, Emperor Galerius issued an edict of toleration granting Christianity the status of legal religion within the Eastern Empire; two years later, the Edict of Milan extended that toleration to the Roman Empire as well. Finally, in 325, Emperor Constantine took part in the First Council of Nicaea, an ecumenical council designed to settle the main points of Christian canon. The result of that meeting, the Nicene Creed, set the theological framework for Christianity. On his deathbed,
Constantine finally converted to the religion he loved. In 380, Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The astonishing rise of a tiny Jewish sect to the religious leadership of the most powerful empire on earth was complete.

  But the Roman Empire was already tottering on its last legs. In 476, the last emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustus, abdicated at point of sword. (The Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople, remained, transforming into the Byzantine Empire and lasting all the way until the fifteenth century.) The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West fragmented the continent in terms of political control. The Catholic Church moved quickly to fill the gap, centralizing both temporal and spiritual power.

  From the fall of Rome through the twelfth century, Christianity would spread from its base in the Italian peninsula to the British Isles, France, Germany, and eventually the Nordic countries as well. While Augustine had posited a great divide between the City of God and the City of Man, the Catholic Church was quite active in the City of Man—the Church received tithes from Christians the continent over and had its own ecclesiastical courts. By the tenth century, the Church was the single largest landowner in Western Europe.12 Kings found their legitimacy through the conduit of the Church, and battled with the Church to expand their own power: Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV walked barefoot in the snow to earn back the approval of Pope Gregory VII; Henry II of England (1133–1189) had himself flogged in order to win back the approval of his Christian population after accidentally ordering the death of Archbishop Thomas Becket.

  Popular history maintains that this period represented the “Dark Ages.” But that’s simply inaccurate. Progress continued as Christianity spread. The monastic system centralized learning in monasteries, where priests and nuns devoted themselves to ascetic pursuit of Divine understanding. In educational terms, this devotion revolved around scripture. The Benedictine monks, for example, lived under the rules created by Saint Benedict (480–547), a set of orders regarding the hierarchy of monasteries, the behavior by which to abide, and the requirements of work. The arts thrived in the monastic system; manuscripts were preserved by monks devoted to writing new copies and beautifying them. In the monastic system, the liberal arts taught by the Greeks and the Romans—as championed by Cicero and Seneca, among others—survived, albeit in spiritualized form: Augustine himself, despite his distaste for paganism, suggested that the liberal arts education could be hijacked for service to God. Augustine likened such cultural appropriation to the Jews taking Egyptian gold during the Biblical Exodus: “This is their gold and silver, which they have not created themselves but have extracted from certain ores, as it were, of precious metal, wherever they found them scattered by the hand of divine providence. . . . These we need for our life here below, and should appropriate and turn them to a better use.”13 These liberal arts were categorized by the philosopher Boethius (481–525) into the famous quadrivarium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) and trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic).

  Meanwhile, the Middle Ages saw technological revolution in agriculture, the rise of commerce, and the institution of new forms of art ranging from polyphonic music to Gothic architecture; it also saw new developments in the art of war, with technological advances that would allow the West to defeat its enemies in the course of coming centuries.14 While many historians tout the power of Islamic civilization during this time period—and Islamic civilization did thrive on the Arabian Peninsula particularly—when Islamic civilization came up against Western civilization at the Battle of Tours, Islamic forces were soundly defeated.

  By the eighth century, Christian leaders were crusading against enslavement (except, notably, for the enslavement of Muslim war captives); monasteries were engaging in proto-capitalism as well.15 Furthermore, the Catholic Church was responsible for learning and teaching. Virtually all literacy sprang from monasteries.

  Still, the modern world could not have been created under these circumstances alone. Faith provided individual moral purpose; faith provided collective moral purpose. But while individual capacity was bolstered by the doctrinal belief in free will and the value of work, reason had been made secondary to faith; while collective capacity was bolstered by the presence of a strong social fabric, the all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church and the rule of monarchs meant that individual choice was heavily circumscribed. Even education had been radically reoriented toward the Church; all true knowledge lay in the Bible, and the liberal arts were only useful so far as they bolstered the Biblical story. For science and democracy to take hold in the West, reason would have to be elevated once more.

  That process began with the reintroduction of Greek reason to the West in the eleventh century. Christianity, comfortable now in its dominance, could afford more exploratory thinking when it came to secular learning. This bred a new movement, called scholasticism—and that movement encouraged Christians to extend the provenance of God’s dominance over all of the areas of human knowledge. Scholasticism would open the door for a renewed investigation into the unity between God and His created universe, and between faith and reason. Leading scholastic Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141) famously stated, “Learn everything, later you will see that nothing is superfluous”; he followed through on his own injunction by attempting to write a book that covered the gamut of human knowledge, known as a summa.16

  Scholasticism became the dominant philosophy of the Church. The Church launched a program of support for universities: the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne; the University of Bologna; and the University of Oxford. As Thomas E. Woods Jr. writes, “The Church provided special protection to university students by offering them what was known as benefit of clergy. . . . The popes intervened on behalf of the university on numerous occasions.”17

  But the grandest attempts to reunify Athens and Jerusalem came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During the twelfth century, Aristotle’s works, long buried, were rediscovered in the West. They had been maintained in the Arabic-speaking world for generations, but they were only retransmitted in Europe over the course of that century, breaking anew and with massive impact in the thirteenth century.18

  Athens was back.

  There were several leaders in the newfound attempt to unify Athens and Jerusalem: Maimonides (1135–1204), whom we will discuss later, was the most profound thinker among Jews. Among Christians, the leader in this respect was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Aquinas became father of a philosophy named after him: Thomism. The basic idea was a merger of Aristotelianism and Christianity—a commitment to reason and logic, as well as to revelation. Aquinas stated, “They hold a plainly false opinion who say that in regard to the truth of religion it does not matter what a person thinks about creation so long as he has the correct opinion concerning God. An error concerning the creation ends as false thinking about God.”19 As God was the master of heaven and earth, His creation was evidence of Him, and knowledge of that creation would bring us closer to Him. But to know God meant first to believe in Him. God made man to know God.

  Aquinas, like Maimonides and Muslim philosophers like Al-Farabi (872–950), concerned himself, therefore, with proofs of God’s existence. This was, in and of itself, somewhat revolutionary in the Christian world. Judaism offered no proof of God beyond revelation; God was simply the Creator. End of story. And Christianity offered no logical proofs for God’s existence; Jesus walked the earth and rose from the dead. End of story.

  But Aquinas sought to use reason to bolster faith. He offered several proofs of God’s existence, the most convincing of which was a form of the cosmological argument promoted by Aristotle. Essentially, Aquinas argued that all things in life are a combination of actual and potential—that a candle, for example, is a candle right now, and has the potential to become a pool of wax when operated on by fire. The reason the candle is currently in its state is because of something acting upon it. That something, in turn, is dependent on something else. But, Aquinas argues, that chain c
annot continue forever; in the end, there must be a final cause, an Unmoved Mover standing behind things as they are. That Unmoved Mover will not be a combination of actual and potential at all—it will be pure actuality, since if it had potential, that potential could only be actualized by another force, which would continue the regress. This final Unmoved Mover, says Aquinas, is what we call God. And that Unmoved Mover must exist immaterially, exist outside of time and space, and be perfect—otherwise, the Unmoved Mover would not be pure actuality.20

  Aquinas went further still. If reason supports the notion of an intelligent God who crafts nature and stands behind its ever-present glory, Aquinas posited, then human beings can examine the natural world as a pathway to understanding Him. God made nature; to discover nature is to investigate the works of God. In fact, God wanted man to do this—God wanted man to seek Him everywhere. And God granted human beings the power of free will and reason to do so—as Aquinas celebrates, “man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought . . . forasmuch as man is rational it is necessary that man have a free-will.”21

  In Aquinas’s thought, Jerusalem and Athens are reunified. God orders us to use our reason, and reason impels us to discover the natural law—laws designed by God.

  Aquinas is completely comfortable with the notion of scientific discovery and progress; he openly states that if the astronomers of his day were proved to be wrong, that would not refute any of his metaphysics, since “perhaps the phenomena of the stars are explicable on some other plan not yet discovered by man.”22

  If reason suffices to bring us all this way, according to Aquinas, then why is revelation even necessary? Aquinas here borrows from Augustine: were we perfect, reasoning beings, revelation might be unnecessary. But we are not. Revelation thus bridges the gap. As theology professor Ernest Fortin suggests, Aquinas believes that “between the truths of Revelation and the knowledge acquired by the sole use of reason and experience there is a distinction but there can be no fundamental disagreement.”23