Classical / Christian
Lots of people assume a narrative of western civilization that goes something like this:
Long ago when we lived in caves, we human beings were beset by real fears: will the hunt succeed? will the crops fail? will beasts or famine or weather kill us? To arm ourselves against these fears, we invented fables about supernatural parent figures who might look out for us, and thus was born religion. Early religion was primitive, but it refined over time in the bright fires of philosophy and science, and eventually we arrived at generally ethical religions that taught us to love our neighbor, more or less. One of the best of these moral philosophers was a gentle rabbi from Nazareth who was killed for challenging the powers that be, whereupon his benighted followers made him a god and forgot most of what he taught.
In this view of things, religion is the candy-coating that makes the good medicine of morality more palatable to the masses. It's fine in small amounts, but too much of it makes a body sick. And this, goes the story, is what happened. The power of philosophy and science had crested in ancient Greece and Rome. There western civilization made enormous progress toward democracy and individual rights and humane morals, but that progress was abruptly halted by the rise of the medieval church. The misguided followers of that gentle rabbi came to power and began burning scientists and philosophers who challenged their hegemony. Thus the church dragged western progress back into a long Dark Age. See attached graph:
1000 years later, the classical world is rediscovered in the Renaissance. The light of reason enters the musty cathedral gloom, science and philosophy reclaim their rightful thrones, and progress speedily follows. There are a few hiccups along the way, but we are brought quickly to our present state of superior moral understanding and cultural enjoyment. Religion is fine for those who like that sort of thing, as long as it remains a small candle to brighten one's private hours, but the main drivers of western civilization are the philosophy of the classical world and the science of the Enlightenment that followed from that philosophy, both elevated by the inevitable progress that comes with time.
As it turns out, nearly everything in that narrative is wrong, and the parts that aren't flat-out wrong are so misunderstood in the context of wrong that we might as well just call them wrong, too. It is one of the little joys of my life to discover people who do not share my religious views (which might justly be thought to bias me) also pointing out just how wrong is this widely-accepted narrative of the progress of western civilization.
Here's one. Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland), a Cambridge historian of the classical world and an agnostic, was recently involved in a moderated discussion with N. T. Wright on the program "Unbelievable". Holland discusses his growing conviction, as he researched and wrote books on antiquity, that the modern world is actually distinctively Christian, not classical:
"In almost every way, [classical antiquity] is a world that is unspeakably cruel, to our way of thinking. And so, this worried me more and more. I'm clearly not, as I had vaguely imagined, the heir of the Greeks and the Romans, in any way, really. And so where am I coming from? It was like a kind of itch you get on your back, and then you can't find it. And this was then enhanced for me by then writing a book about late antiquity and the emergence of Islam from the religious and imperial context of late antiquity. And again finding in Islam a profound quality of the alien ... And I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian. I began to realize that actually, Paul, although in many ways he seems a much less familiar figure than Cicero, ... compacted into this very very small amount of [Paul's] writing, was almost everything that explains the modern world."
(--"Well, the Western world, as we take for granted," interjects the interviewer.)
"Yes, but also the way that the West has then moved on to shape concepts like international law, for instance. Concepts of human rights. All these kinds of things. Ultimately, they don't go back to Greek philosophers. They don't go back to Roman imperialism. They go back to Paul."
The whole talk is worth your time, but as a teacher at a classical Christian school, I find this discussion of our cultural ancestry deeply interesting and important. Christianity is the story about how Christ redeems the world. The things that we love and admire about the classical world are its best qualities redeemed: its philosophy, its government, its stories, its understanding of honor and virtue -- all these and more come to us in the modern world through a medieval baptism, as it were.
And if you want another secular source that kicks over the narrative of western secular progress, here is the article where I found the chart above, which the atheist author dubs "The Most Wrong Thing on the Internet Ever". It's a review of a really excellent book that I highly recommend, God's Philosophers by James Hannam (published in the U. S. as The Genesis of Science).
Long ago when we lived in caves, we human beings were beset by real fears: will the hunt succeed? will the crops fail? will beasts or famine or weather kill us? To arm ourselves against these fears, we invented fables about supernatural parent figures who might look out for us, and thus was born religion. Early religion was primitive, but it refined over time in the bright fires of philosophy and science, and eventually we arrived at generally ethical religions that taught us to love our neighbor, more or less. One of the best of these moral philosophers was a gentle rabbi from Nazareth who was killed for challenging the powers that be, whereupon his benighted followers made him a god and forgot most of what he taught.
In this view of things, religion is the candy-coating that makes the good medicine of morality more palatable to the masses. It's fine in small amounts, but too much of it makes a body sick. And this, goes the story, is what happened. The power of philosophy and science had crested in ancient Greece and Rome. There western civilization made enormous progress toward democracy and individual rights and humane morals, but that progress was abruptly halted by the rise of the medieval church. The misguided followers of that gentle rabbi came to power and began burning scientists and philosophers who challenged their hegemony. Thus the church dragged western progress back into a long Dark Age. See attached graph:
As it turns out, nearly everything in that narrative is wrong, and the parts that aren't flat-out wrong are so misunderstood in the context of wrong that we might as well just call them wrong, too. It is one of the little joys of my life to discover people who do not share my religious views (which might justly be thought to bias me) also pointing out just how wrong is this widely-accepted narrative of the progress of western civilization.
Here's one. Tom Holland (not that Tom Holland), a Cambridge historian of the classical world and an agnostic, was recently involved in a moderated discussion with N. T. Wright on the program "Unbelievable". Holland discusses his growing conviction, as he researched and wrote books on antiquity, that the modern world is actually distinctively Christian, not classical:
"In almost every way, [classical antiquity] is a world that is unspeakably cruel, to our way of thinking. And so, this worried me more and more. I'm clearly not, as I had vaguely imagined, the heir of the Greeks and the Romans, in any way, really. And so where am I coming from? It was like a kind of itch you get on your back, and then you can't find it. And this was then enhanced for me by then writing a book about late antiquity and the emergence of Islam from the religious and imperial context of late antiquity. And again finding in Islam a profound quality of the alien ... And I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian. I began to realize that actually, Paul, although in many ways he seems a much less familiar figure than Cicero, ... compacted into this very very small amount of [Paul's] writing, was almost everything that explains the modern world."
(--"Well, the Western world, as we take for granted," interjects the interviewer.)
"Yes, but also the way that the West has then moved on to shape concepts like international law, for instance. Concepts of human rights. All these kinds of things. Ultimately, they don't go back to Greek philosophers. They don't go back to Roman imperialism. They go back to Paul."
The whole talk is worth your time, but as a teacher at a classical Christian school, I find this discussion of our cultural ancestry deeply interesting and important. Christianity is the story about how Christ redeems the world. The things that we love and admire about the classical world are its best qualities redeemed: its philosophy, its government, its stories, its understanding of honor and virtue -- all these and more come to us in the modern world through a medieval baptism, as it were.
And if you want another secular source that kicks over the narrative of western secular progress, here is the article where I found the chart above, which the atheist author dubs "The Most Wrong Thing on the Internet Ever". It's a review of a really excellent book that I highly recommend, God's Philosophers by James Hannam (published in the U. S. as The Genesis of Science).
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