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 ...
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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 The Victory of Reason, 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. The Victory of Reason 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.
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Rodney Stark�s history of the West, in Victory of Reason, stretches from the end of the Roman Empire to 20th century America. Stark looks at primarily economic history, but secondarily at political, religious, and scientific history too. With such a wide scope the view must be broad, or the book would take six hundred pages. So Stark does not go into fine details of history, but notes concepts that influenced institutions that influenced society. (Stark�s is a sociologist�s view of history.) He chooses to highlight democracy, capitalism, and Christianity. He touches on topics that were influenced by all three, like slavery, taxation, trade, and the Industrial Revolution. It is a good book for looking at such broad concepts as they developed in the West, and is followed by a bibliography that can be researched further for the more detailed history.
Stark�s history would have been considered rather conventional thirty years ago, as he defends what was established or the establishment views of the past. But after thirty years of postmodern or Marxist or political views from the left, of history, Stark�s history is actually unconventional today.
