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.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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