How Should We Then Live?

The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

Francis A. Schaeffer

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781433576942
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Francis Schaeffer's Classic Analysis of the Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

Civilizations throughout historyhave built societies around their own limited value systems including rulers, finite gods, or relativism—only to fail. The absence of a Christian foundation eventually leads to breakdown, and those signs are visible in present-day culture as well. Can modern society avoid the same fate?

In this latest edition of How Should We Then Live?, theologian Francis A.Schaeffer traces the decline of Western culture from the fall of Rome, through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, and up to the twentieth century. Studying humanism's impact on philosophy, science, and religion, he shows how this worldview historically results in apathy, chaos, and decline. Schaeffer's important work calls on readers to live instead by Christian ethics, placing their trust in the infinite personal God of the Bible. Originally writtenin 1976, How Should We Then Live? remains remarkably applicable today.

• A Theology Classic: Written by renowned Christian philosopher Francis A. Schaeffer
• For Those Interested in Philosophy and History: Engages with the ideas of Plato, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire, and examines the art, architecture, and ideas that shaped modern society
• Explores the Importance of a Christian Worldview: A practical assessment of the evolution of culture and the steadfast alternative offered by the biblical perspective

Chapter One

Ancient Rome

There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind—what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems, and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true of a dictator’s sword.

People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.

“As a man thinketh, so is he,” is really most profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought-world determines the outward action.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room”—that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or basic presuppositions. These basic options will become obvious as we look at the flow of the past.

To understand where we are in today’s world—in our intellectual ideas and in our cultural and political lives—we must trace three lines in history, namely, the philosophic, the scientific, and the religious. The philosophic seeks intellectual answers to the basic questions of life. The scientific has two parts: first, the makeup of the physical universe, and then the practical application of what it discovers in technology. The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic worldview of the scientists. People’s religious views also determine the direction of their individual lives and of their society.

As we try to learn lessons about the primary dilemmas which we now face, by looking at the past and considering its flow, we could begin with the Greeks, or even before the Greeks. We could go back to the three great ancient river cultures: the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Nile. However, we will begin with the Romans (and with the Greek influence behind them), because Roman civilization is the direct ancestor of the modern Western world. From the first conquests of the Roman Republic down to our own day, Roman law and political ideas have had a strong influence on the European scene and the entire Western world. Wherever Western civilization has gone, it has been marked by the Romans.

In many ways Rome was great, but it had no real answers to the basic problems that all humanity faces. Much of Roman thought and culture was shaped by Greek thinking, especially after Greece came under Roman rule in 146 BC. The Greeks tried first to build their society upon the city-state, that is, the polis. The city-state, both in theory and fact, was comprised of all those who were accepted as citizens. All values had meaning in reference to the polis. Thus, when Socrates (c. 469–399 BC) had to choose between death and exile from that which gave him meaning, he chose death. But the polis failed since it proved to be an insufficient base upon which to build a society.

The Greeks and later the Romans also tried to build society upon their gods. But these gods were not big enough because they were finite, limited. Even all their gods put together were not infinite. Actually, the gods in Greek and Roman thinking were like men and women larger than life, but not basically different from human men and women. As one example among thousands, we can think of the statue of Hercules, standing inebriated and urinating. Hercules was the patron god of Herculaneum, which was destroyed at the same time as Pompeii. The gods were amplified humanity, not divinity. Like the Greeks, the Romans had no infinite god. This being so, they had no sufficient reference point intellectually; that is, they did not have anything big enough or permanent enough to which to relate either their thinking or their living. Consequently, their value system was not strong enough to bear the strains of life, either individual or political. All their gods put together could not give them a sufficient base for life, morals, values, and final decisions. These gods depended on the society which had made them, and when this society collapsed the gods tumbled with it. Thus, the Greek and Roman experiments in social harmony (which rested on an elitist republic) ultimately failed.

In the days of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), Rome turned to an authoritarian system centered in Caesar himself. Before the days of Caesar, the senate could not keep order. Armed gangs terrorized the city of Rome, and the normal processes of government were disrupted as rivals fought for power. Self-interest became more significant than social interest, however sophisticated the trappings. Thus, in desperation the people accepted authoritarian government. As Plutarch (AD c. 50–120) put it in Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, the Romans made Caesar dictator for life “in the hope that the government of a single person would give them time to breathe after so many civil wars and calamities. This was indeed a tyranny avowed, since his power now was not only absolute, but perpetual, too.”

After Caesar’s death, Octavian (63 BC–AD 14), later called Caesar Augustus, grandnephew of Caesar, came to power. He had become Caesar’s son by adoption. The great Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC) was a friend of Augustus, and he wrote the Aeneid with the object of showing that Augustus was a divinely appointed leader and that Rome’s mission was to bring peace and civilization to the world. Because Augustus established peace externally and internally and because he kept the outward forms of constitutionality, Romans of every class were ready to allow him total power in order to restore and assure the functioning of the political system, business, and the affairs of daily life. After 12 BC, he became the head of the state religion, taking the title Pontifex Maximus and urging everyone to worship the “spirit of Rome and the genius of the emperor.” Later this became obligatory for all the people of the empire, and later still, the emperors ruled as gods. Augustus tried to legislate morals and family life; subsequent emperors tried impressive legal reforms and welfare programs. But a human god is a poor foundation, and Rome fell.

It is important to realize what a difference a people’s worldview makes in their strength as they are exposed to the pressure of life. That it was the Christians who were able to resist religious mixtures, syncretism, and the effects of the weaknesses of Roman culture speaks of the strength of the Christian worldview. This strength rested on God’s being an infinite-personal God and His speaking in the Old Testament, in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, and in the gradually growing New Testament. He had spoken in ways people could understand. Thus the Christians not only had knowledge about the universe and mankind that people cannot find out by themselves, but they had absolute, universal values by which to live and by which to judge the society and the political state in which they lived. And they had grounds for the basic dignity and value of the individual as unique in being made in the image of God.

Perhaps no one has presented more vividly to our generation the inner weakness of imperial Rome than has Fellini (1920–1993) in his film Satyricon (1969). He remind...