Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

Samuel Gregg

• Editorial: Regnery Gateway
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781621579069
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political History & Theory

"Gregg's book is the closet thing I've encountered in a long time to a one-volume user's manual for operating Western Civilization."—The Stream "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization offers a concise intellectual history of the West through the prism of the relationship between faith and reason." —Free Beacon The genius of Western civilization is its unique synthesis of reason and faith. But today that synthesis is under attack—from the East by radical Islam (faith without reason) and from within the West itself by aggressive secularism (reason without faith). The stakes are incalculably high. The naïve and increasingly common assumption that reason and faith are incompatible is simply at odds with the facts of history. The revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures of a reasonable Creator imbued Judaism and Christianity with a conviction that the world is intelligible, leading to the flowering of reason and the invention of science in the West. It was no accident that the Enlightenment took place in the culture formed by the Jewish and Christian faiths. We can all see that faith without reason is benighted at best, fanatical and violent at worst. But too many forget that reason, stripped of faith, is subject to its own pathologies. A supposedly autonomous reason easily sinks into fanaticism, stifling dissent as bigoted and irrational and devouring the humane civilization fostered by the integration of reason and faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century attests to the totalitarian forces unleashed by corrupted reason. But Samuel Gregg does more than lament the intellectual and spiritual ruin caused by the divorce of reason and faith. He shows that each of these foundational principles corrects the other's excesses and enhances our comprehension of the truth in a continuous renewal of civilization. By recovering this balance, we can avoid a suicidal winner-take-all conflict between reason and faith and a future that will respect neither.

CHAPTER ONE

The Speech That Shook the World

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

—Blaise Pascal

Located about sixty miles north of Munich, the small Bavarian city of Regensburg was the site of a Roman garrison from the end of the first century AD. You can still see the Porta Praetoria (Praetorian Gate) constructed by Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century to defend a major point of entry into the Roman Empire. For centuries afterwards, Regensburg served as a crossroads of European trade. It was also a seat of the Holy Roman Empire’s parliament, the site of a massacre of Jews by Crusaders making their way east to seize back control of the Holy Land from Muslim invaders, and the site of a major battle during the Napoleonic Wars.

Among Regensburg’s most famous inhabitants have been the Jewish mystic Judah ben Samuel (1150–1217) and one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, Albertus Magnus (1200–1280), the patron saint of natural scientists and bishop of the city for three years.

Modernization came after World War II with the arrival of state-of-the-art factories employing hundreds of people and the establishment, in 1965, of the University of Regensburg. One of the first faculties to hold classes was that of Catholic Theology. Its star recruit arrived in 1969, a forty-two-year-old native Bavarian, Father Joseph Ratzinger, who had made a name for himself as a theologian advising Catholic bishops during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).

Returning to his old university on September 12, 2006, Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, delivered a lecture bearing the seemingly harmless title “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections” to old friends and the Regensburg faculty.

Hours later, the world exploded.

An emperor speaks

Across the globe, Pope Benedict’s lecture was ferociously attacked by Muslim religious and political leaders. In several Muslim countries, there were mass rallies and riots, some of which culminated in attacks on Christian churches. Most terribly, an Italian nun, Sister Leonella Sgorbati, and her Muslim driver, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, were gunned down by two jihadists outside a children’s hospital in Somalia, five days after Benedict’s Regensburg address.

Few of those chanting their fury at the pope, I suspect, had actually read Benedict’s words. What had enraged some Muslims was his quotation from a Byzantine emperor’s dialogue with an unnamed Persian from around the year 1391.¹

The emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1350–1425) was that rare combination of politician, soldier, and scholarly author of poetry and theological treatises. Having spent much of his youth as a hostage at the court of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, he was familiar with Muslim thought and practice.² In his dialogue with the Persian, Manuel focused on Islam’s long and disconcerting history of invoking religious claims to justify violence. Violence, the emperor frankly stated, seemed endemic in the Muslim world. “Show me,” he wrote in the passage quoted by Benedict at Regensburg, “just what Mohammed brought about that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” ³

The frenzied nature of some Muslims’ reaction to this quotation—and the constant invocation of the Koran by jihadists such as those who had destroyed the Twin Towers in New York five years and one day before the Regensburg lecture—convinced many Westerners that this Byzantine emperor was onto something. After all, people who take reason seriously don’t respond to criticism with insults, threats, or violence.

The fury provoked by Benedict’s speech, however, distracted attention from the pope’s central point about religion’s place in the West and faith’s relation to something regarded as essential to the West’s identity—reason.

The Regensburg lecture certainly concerned Islam, reminding Westerners that the problem of jihadist terrorism was at its root theological. That was an unwelcome message to the many Westerners convinced that poverty is the cause of most problems and unwilling to acknowledge that different understandings of God can have different practical consequences—for better or for worse.

Is God a reasonable Deity? This question matters, not least because one alternative to a Deity who embodies reason is a Deity who is pure will, operating beyond reason. Quoting the French scholar of Islam, Roger Arnaldez, Benedict noted in his Regensburg lecture that such a God “is not bound even by his own word.” He could even command us “to practice idolatry.” ⁴

It requires little imagination to realize that such a God could bless flying passenger planes into skyscrapers or cutting the throat of an eighty-five-year-old priest as he celebrates Mass in his parish church in France.

The significance of Benedict’s remarks thus extended far beyond Islam. His lecture was about us, we who have inherited the civilization called the West. His question to everyone who thinks that Western civilization is worth preserving and promoting—a question that is central to this book—was this: Do you understand that unless the West gets the relation between reason and faith right, it will be unable to overcome its inner traumas or defend itself from those who wage war against it in the name of particular ideologies?

In answering this question, my objective is not to produce an exhaustive study of the ideas that have shaped the West, nor do I try to assess the effects of every major historical event or epoch on the relation between reason and faith. I am certainly not proposing that all the West’s problems revolve around the question raised at Regensburg. Mono-causal explanations are usually wrong.

Instead I want to show how the expression and makeover of different ideas about reason and faith by such figures as Plato, the Hebrew prophets, the apostle Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche have contributed to civilizational growth but also regression in the West.

Through an examination of these and other thinkers, we’ll see how the West’s unique integration of reason and faith—specifically, Jewish and Christian faith—encouraged the ideas, commitments, and institutions that give the West its core identity. But we’ll also observe how mistaken conceptions of reason and faith have enabled the emergence of intellectual movements such as scientism, Marxism, and Nietzscheanism—and more recent phenomena like liberal religion, authoritarian relativism, and Islamism—which corrode and threaten those same ideas, commitments, and institutions.⁵

Defining the West

At this point, readers will start asking important questions. What is the West? When did the West begin? How does it differ from other civilizations? Who is a Westerner? What’s so special about the West that it is worth defending? Does the West mean anything anymore?

Western civilization began in the Mediterranean basin, from which it spread. Today, it tends to be associated with North America and Europe, particularly Western Europe, regions that remained relatively free and democratic during the Cold War. Communist regimes were seen as standing for totalitarianism, economic collectivism, and deep hostility to the two faiths of the West, Judaism and Christianity.

A moment’s thought, however, makes it clear that Western civilization can’t be primarily about geography, including that of the Cold War. Did Poland cease to be part of the West because it was governed by Marxist-Leninists between 1947 and 1989? Would anyone suggest that Australia, Uruguay, New Zealand, Chile, or Israel isn’t part of the West simply because it is not in North America or Europe?

Trying to define the West geographically becomes even more difficult when we consider that some countries reflect mixtures of civilizational influences. Lebanon, for example, is deeply marked by various expressions of Islam and Arab culture. Thanks, however, to Christianity’s two-thousand-year presence there and the nation’s enduring links to France, it’s plausible to describe Lebanon as more Western than, say, Saudi Arabia, even though Beirut is closer to Riyadh than to London.

We move onto firmer ground when we start identifying cultural accomplishments that can only be described as Western. No one would mistake the Parthenon, the Rule of St. Benedict, Michelangelo’s David, Mozart’s Coronation Mass, Plato’s Gorgias, Jefferson’s Monticello, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, the United States Constitution, or Shakespeare’s Richard III as representative of Japanese, Persian, Tibetan, or Thai culture.

Another way of understanding the West is through such representative figures as Charlemagne, Alexis de Tocqueville, Theodor Herzl, Galileo Galilei, Charles de Gaulle, John Locke, Jane Austen, Christopher Columbus, Ludwig van Beethoven, Marie Curie, Czesław Miłosz, Albert Einstein, Flannery O’Connor, Voltaire, Golda Meir, or George Washington. These people belong to different historical periods and held dissimilar views on many questions. But would we view any of them as rooted in Hindi civilization or any of the numerous African cultures?

Many of these figures also consciously thought of themselves as belonging to the West. The biographer Jean Lacouture writes that Charles de Gaulle “had a clear idea not only of France but of Western civilization, and in 1939 he was never in any doubt as to his duty to confront the challenge thrown down by totalitarianism.” ⁶ Something similar can be said of de Gaulle’s most important wartime ally, Winston Churchill, who understood on the eve of the Battle of Britain that “the survival of Christian civilization” was at stake.⁷

For de Gaulle and Churchill, the fight against National Socialism was not about protecting a localized portion of human history. It was about saving universal aspirations and achievements of concern to all humanity.

Threats have a way of concentrating the mind. They cause us to ask ourselves what we are willing to fight and perhaps even die for. In the twentieth century, the twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism had that effect. People had to consider what the West really stood for and why these ideologies were antithetical to Western civilization, even though fascism and Marxism were products of Western minds.

This pushes us to clarify which ideas are distinctly Western, to identify those that have contributed to the West’s development as a civilization, and to specify how they differ from other cultures’ dominant intellectual settings.

Take, for instance, political ideas such as personal freedom, the rule of law, constitutionally limited government, the distinction between church and state, and human rights. Few would dispute that these concepts have received their fullest expression in Western societies. When we speak of nations “Westernizing,” we mean they are adopting ideas such as these.

Rationality and religion

Many societies outside Europe and North America have adopted Western institutions and even particular Western ideas. But does this mean all of them have become Western?

After 1853, Japan reversed almost two hundred years of attempted isolationism and began embracing Western technology and political structures. The Meiji Restoration, as it came to be called, also involved extensive industrialization. Today, terms like “democratic,” “economically developed,” and even “modern” can rightly be applied to Japan.

But most people, including most Japanese, would pause before describing Japan as a Western country. That hesitation surely has something to do with Japanese culture. Even after more than 150 years of sustained interaction with Western countries, Japanese culture remains distinct from that of Poland, Spain, or Canada. An important reason for this distinction is that the Meiji reformers weren’t interested in turning Japan into a Western nation. They certainly wanted to transform the economy, employ modern technology, and develop Japan’s ability to defend itself against other nation-states. Nonetheless, the Meiji reformers also insisted on grounding these changes in traditional Japanese values.⁸

Another example of modernization without Westernization is the reforms embarked upon by the Ottoman Empire from the 1840s onwards. While commonly described as an exercise in Westernization and secularization, twenty-first-century scholars have established that successive Ottoman governments adopted Western technology, military methods, and administrative methods without fully embracing Western principles. Instead, as one historian of the Middle East observes, they consistently associated their reform efforts with “Islam, the sultan and caliph, the glories of the Ottoman and Islamic past, and the anxiously hoped-for return to splendor and worldly power.”⁹

“Modernization” and “Westernization,” then, are not the same thing. It is possible to embrace institutions or technologies developed in the West without embracing Western culture in its totality.

The term “culture” is derived from the Latin word cultus, meaning that which is adorned, cultivated, protected, and worshipped. If, then, we want to understand what is central to a civilization’s culture, we must ask what it seeks to uphold. What does it revere? What “cult” is at its heart?

For centuries, the West has attached great value to freedom. The nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton famously portrayed Western history as the movement, in fits and starts, from oppression towards liberty, understood as the minimization of unreasonable constraints. “Liberty,” he wrote, “is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” ¹⁰ Even Marx saw the end-state of history, which he called Communism, as a world in which everyone would be free “to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after din...