The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  Aquinas’s faith in human reason—and his faith that human reason would not be able to tear down the revelation of God—led to a consonance that would blossom into the scientific revolution. The development of Western science was rooted in the notion that man’s task was to celebrate God through knowledge of His creation. Contrary to the propaganda of a postmodern atheist movement, nearly every great scientist up until the age of Darwinism was religious. The Scholastic movement produced the earliest roots of the scientific method, all the way up through the discovery by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) of a heliocentric solar system.24

  Perhaps the greatest exponent of the Scholastic method was Roger Bacon (1219–1292), a Franciscan friar who devoted himself to understanding the natural world. Like Aquinas, Bacon was a devoted Aristotelian who suggested gathering facts before coming to conclusions. He wrote fulsomely on optics, alchemy, and astronomy; he suggested revising the Julian calendar, which he found obtuse; he even set down the first European formula for gunpowder. The age of scientific progress didn’t begin with the Enlightenment. It began in the monasteries of Europe.

  FLAWS IN THE CONSONANCE

  This consonance could not last, and it didn’t.

  To see why, we must examine where the legacy of Augustine and Aquinas fell short, and where those shortcomings were brought to fruition in the rise of the Enlightenment. Let us, then, return to our basic framework for happiness, and examine it in light of the dominance of Catholic European thought: individual purpose, individual capacity, communal purpose, and communal capacity.

  The rise of Scholasticism provided a serious answer to the question of purpose: human beings are placed here by a loving God, who seeks from us to do good and avoid evil. This is the same answer provided by Judaism, modified only by simplification of Judaic legalism into Athenian-seeming universal natural laws, discoverable through reason. According to Aquinas, human beings have natural inclinations, placed there by God; when we rule those natural inclinations through reason, we discover the good.25 Augustine would have preached that belief in Jesus provided that sole window to knowing God; Aquinas, while not rejecting that New Testament ordinance, found another window through the use of reason.

  Aquinas also provided a strong belief in human capacity. Both Augustine and Aquinas believed in free will, but Aquinas’s faith in reason stretched beyond Augustine’s. That faith in reason would allow Aquinas to make room for exploration of the material world, without fear that such exploration would detract from the religious mission to know God. Aristotelian focus on the immanent replaced Platonic speculation about the transcendent.

  What of communal purpose? Christianity provided a sense of communal purpose in fighting for the good. But Christianity, like all religions, focuses on the spiritual to the exclusion of the physical. And that failure to take into account the drive for betterment in the physical world would be used as a club wielded against Christianity itself before long.

  When it comes to communal capacity, however, the dominance of the Catholic Church provided a stumbling block. Neither Augustine nor Aquinas would have contemplated a separation between church and state in any real sense. Augustine sought to defend religion against the predations of a secular state but would have preferred a Christian monarch to a secular one; Aquinas, like Aristotle, believed that the promotion of the common good through the state was worthwhile, even if he demoted that promotion to secondary status behind the promotion of spiritual salvation.

  While the end of the Middle Ages provided yet another major stone in the foundation of Western civilization, then, those foundations were not yet complete. They would not be complete without learning two more critical lessons: the dangers of communal power and the human capacity for material betterment.

  Chapter 5

  Endowed by Their Creators

  If one attitude characterizes modern politics, it’s an attitude of complete and utter moral certainty. Those on the political Left are certain that those who oppose them are Nazi-esque monsters hell-bent on domination of individual lives; those on the political Right are certain that the opposite is true. Most important, both sides of the political aisle seem determined, at times, to use the power available in culture and government to cram down their vision of the world on their opponents—to establish a heavenly kingdom of hegemonic, one-party rule.

  That demand for certainty cuts against the foundations of our very civilization.

  The history of the West teaches us that while we must share a common vision for our civilization, the means by which we pursue that vision need not be shared. That lesson was learned over the course of centuries, at the cost of tremendous quantities of blood and tears. The bricks of the West were mixed from Athens and Jerusalem, yes—but the catalyzing factor was a large dose of humility.

  By the end of the thirteenth century, Western civilization was completely dominated by Catholicism. That dominion stretched across Europe, giving new freedom to thinkers like Aquinas—but it also masked serious religious tensions among various orders, as well as even deeper tensions with secular rulers who felt threatened by the arrogation of power to the Church. Furthermore, the reign of Catholicism masked serious conflicts within the Church itself. All of these conflicts frequently broke out into open conflict; in 1303, for example, Pope Boniface VIII found himself arrested by forces in the pay of France’s King Philip IV, which resulted in the temporary exile of the papacy from Rome itself.

  From this era of challenges, two strong new ideas emerged: first, human beings are capable of exploring the world and bettering their material condition in it; second, each human being is free and endowed with natural rights. Skepticism of centralized political power grew from centuries of political and religious conflict; optimism in the power of science grew from new discoveries made in light of the liberated individual mind. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment completed the foundations of the West that built our world.

  THE POWER OF SCIENCE

  The explosion of science in the West is perhaps the West’s best-known, most-celebrated legacy. The story of technological development has never changed—human beings want to live more comfortably in the world. But the story of science changed radically beginning with Thomas Aquinas and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and their successors: human beings sought the cosmos through science, and used that newfound knowledge to develop technologies that would later be thought to obviate the need for God Himself. The secularist myth holds that religion held back science for millennia. The reverse is true. Without Judeo-Christian foundations, science simply would not exist as it does in the West.

  Contrary to popular opinion, new discoveries weren’t invariably seen as heretical or dangerous to the dominion of the Church; in fact, the Church often supported scientific investigation. Nicole Oresme (1320–1382), the discoverer of the Earth’s rotation about its axis, was a bishop of Lisieux and a graduate of the University of Paris. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), cardinal of Brixen, theorized that the Earth was not stationary, but moved through space.1 Nicolaus Copernicus studied in parochial school and served the church of Warmia as medical adviser; his publication of De revolutionibus, his theory that the Earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, in March 1543, included a letter to Pope Paul III.2

  Eventually, the backlash to the inclusion of secular knowledge in the Christian worldview—a backlash led by thinkers like Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564)—led to the Church’s famous persecution of Galileo. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) famously posited that the Earth moves around the sun, and was forced to recant by the Church for his failure to state that his theory was not fact. Copernicus had been treated with decency by the Church of his own time—but in 1616, in response to the new fundamentalist religious wave, Copernican ideas were banned. The ban would last until the early nineteenth century, and Galileo’s official pardon from the Vatican would only be issued at the end of the twentieth century.3

  Still, the Thomistic allegiance to
both reason and faith could not be quashed. Despite his differences with the Church, Galileo never abandoned his own faith that science could be a pathway to God. He wrote, “I say that as to the truth of the knowledge which is given by mathematical proofs, this is the same that Divine wisdom recognizes, [although] our understanding . . . is infinitely surpassed by the Divine. [Yet] when I consider what marvelous things and how many of them men have understood, inquired into, and contrived, I recognize and understand only too clearly that the human mind is a work of God’s, and one of the most excellent.”4

  Galileo was no exception. He was a representative of the rule: religious men saw a duty to examine the universe, and to do so with the best possible methodology. This philosophy permeated the wisdom of the Enlightenment’s greatest scientists. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, explained: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”5 Kepler routinely described his own physics as part and parcel of Aristotelian metaphysics, and explained that the laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”6 Kepler’s philosophy was also that of Isaac Newton (1642–1726): “Opposite to [God] is Atheism in profession & Idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”7

  SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, CONTINUED

  The progress of science was motivated by a determination to know God’s universe, but it became increasingly clear that one significant by-product of that quest for knowledge was the betterment of man’s material status. Like Ockham, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) dispensed with the Aristotelian notion of final causes in science—he saw that human beings could all too easily substitute their own conclusory reasons for hard data. “To go beyond Aristotle by the light of Aristotle is to think that a borrowed light can increase the original light from which it is taken,” Bacon wrote.8

  Bacon’s rejection of Aristotelian science also led him to reject Aristotelian teleology more broadly. Man’s purpose was not, in Bacon’s view, to act in accordance with his nature as a reasoning being. Bacon instead sought purpose in “extend[ing] more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man.” Bacon wanted to turn the pursuit of knowledge toward “the benefit and use of men . . . for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.”9 In tones that remind us of those of today’s modern social scientists, Bacon also suggested the use of science to determine the best mode of governance and ethics.10

  Unlike modern social scientists, however, Bacon took his cue for governance and ethics from the Judeo-Christian tradition. While Bacon upheld the importance of the scientific method and a belief in the pure value of innovation to better the material lives of human beings, Bacon was no atheist. He derided the notion of a Godless universe in harsh terms, suggesting that while “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”11 Bacon wrote this prayer in Novum Organum: “let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can be said of every worldly good: talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself, and the rest. Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.”12 This last statement is an attempt to read ancient thought and Christianity back into science, over his own objections.

  Bacon’s confidence in man’s mind to better the world—in accordance, of course, with “right reason and true religion”—saw further development from René Descartes (1596–1650), who also discarded “speculations” on behalf of “useful knowledge.” He saw meaning not in theology, but in science—full knowledge of which would surely carry mankind forward toward “the perfect moral science.” As with Bacon, the good of man lay not in the search for God or the pursuit of a virtuous telos, but in the quest to better the material state of man. Morality would surely follow in the wake of man’s technological progress and increased scientific knowledge.13

  Such knowledge, Descartes believed, could not be pursued without radical skepticism of received wisdom: “I ought to reject as absolutely false all opinions in regard to which I could suppose the least ground for doubt, in order to ascertain whether after that there remained aught in my belief that was wholly indubitable.” This led Descartes to doubt all of his senses—except his knowledge of his own thinking. Thus, Descartes stated, “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. From this basis, he reintroduced a good God who would not create senses that lie to us.14

  Both Bacon and Descartes, while discarding the teleology of the ancients, maintained faith in the Bible and in God. But they also laid the groundwork for the rise of Deism—and in time, for the fall of religion itself. By cutting final causes from science, by separating God from the natural world, the modern scientific project would eventually remove religion and purpose from the domain of reason—a project that both Bacon and Descartes would have abhorred.

  THE RISE OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

  The rise of science was coincident with the simultaneous rise of human freedom. The dominance of the Catholic Church over the course of the Middle Ages and Renaissance led some to rebel against the notion of centralized authority altogether. One of the first to do so was Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342), who fought against the notion of papal plenitude of power—the notion that the Church ought to rule in the City of Man as well as the City of God. Marsilius saw that the Catholic Church’s power could threaten secular authorities—and that those secular authorities could then turn on the Church. Instead of theocracy, Marsilius proposed sovereignty of citizens. His philosophy actually bordered on calls for democracy—he suggested that freedom to worship God itself prohibited theocracy. No wonder Pope Clement VI stated that he had almost never read a worse heretic than Marsilius.15

  Marsilius’s skepticism regarding the Church would be taken to the next level by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). Like Marsilius, Machiavelli saw oppression in the guise of the Catholic Church: in The Prince, Machiavelli openly mocked the Church.16 Machiavelli believed that those who proclaimed that the state could be governed in accordance with virtue were merely lying for the sake of convenience. His cynical suggestion: that states be governed in accordance with virtù, a mix of cruelty and kindness generating both fear and love. The goal of such governance: to prevent utopian schemes designed to instill virtue in the citizenry through the power of the sword.

  In The Prince, Machiavelli proposed that human beings are not driven by reason—thereby tacitly rejecting the ancient notion of Aristotelian virtue—but that they were instead driven by passion. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli suggested that we presuppose that “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” The best way to ensure the freedom of human beings, then, would be to check passion with passion: “The desires of free peoples are rarely harmful to liberty, because they arise either from oppression or from the suspicion that they will be oppressed . . . the people, although ignorant, can grasp the truth, and they readily yield when they are told the truth by a trustworthy man.”17 Machiavelli thus discarded the ancient search for a utopian republic and disdained the notion that a state can exist to make men virtuous. Naturally, as with Marsilius, the Catholic Church banned Machiavelli’s Prince in 1559.

  But the Catholic Church’s woes were just beginning. The rise of Lutheranism challenged both the spiritual and temporal power of the Church. Luther, in his ardent attempt to reclaim the Bible from what he deemed the thoroughgoing corruption of the papacy, worked to decimate the hierarchy of believers, leaving merely individuals before God, capable of comprehending God’s direct word: “A shoema
ker, a smith, a farmer, each has his manual occupation and work; and, yet, at the same time, all are eligible to act as priests and bishops.” In pursuit of that egalitarian vision, Luther discarded the notion of sanctuary from the secular law: “It is intolerable that in canon law, the freedom, person, and goods of the clergy should be given this exemption, as if the layman were not exactly as spiritual, and as good Christians, as they, or did not equally belong to the church.” Luther’s translation of the Bible into German also made practical his notion of individuals communing directly with God. As history professor Joseph Loconte of King’s College writes, “Luther offered more than a theory of individual empowerment. He delivered a spiritual bill of rights.”18

  In the realm of government, Luther was no democrat. He believed that the state’s authority did not derive from the authority of the people, but from God Himself: “We must firmly establish secular law and the sword, that no one may doubt that it is in the world by God’s will and ordinance.” In consigning reason to secondary status behind faith, Luther demeaned popular sovereignty, though he saw the value of placing restrictions on absolute monarchs—Christians were not to obey anti-Christian commands, for example. Similarly, Calvin believed in an aristocracy governed by checks and balances, but, like Luther, he saw the presence of a particular government as a sign of God’s will in action.19

  Nonetheless, it would be Luther and Calvin’s religious fragmentation and their devolution of authority down to the individual that would lead to a true transnational movement away from authoritarian government. The horrors of religious conflict from the mid-sixteenth century culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)—a war that resulted in some eight million deaths—and forced the choice of religious toleration or mass carnage. It was in making this choice that the notion of human rights was born.