The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

Every now and then a book can change you in a very fundamental way. This book has changed the way I look at Christianity. The Victory of Reason is a history book, not a book on religion. It posits that Christian theology has led to four big accomplishments of mankind: 1 - a belief that human progress was possible, 2 - that personal freedom was essential to happiness, 3 - technical and organizational innovation and 4 - the development of capitalism. Mr. Stark succeeds in showing how reason made all four possible - reason derived from Christian theology. As someone educated in science, I have for many years looked on Christianity as something that had to be overcome or ignored. The dogma could so easily be disproved by modern science. It stood in the way of accepting evolution and cosmology. The very idea that Christianity could be behind the victory of reason was counter intuitive. Since I was raised as a Methodist, my early education led me to believe that the Protestant Ethic was responsible for much of life's success and that Rome and the Pope were trying to block scientific progress. The success of Western Civilization was obvious, but what could that be attributed too? Surely not just the superiority of Europeans. This idea was falling out of favor as I was leaving high school and entering the university in 1954. No, it must be related to the scientific progress that came from overcoming religious dogma. Perhaps. But then why did this occur in Europe and North America and not in China, India or the Middle East? Couldn't they have overcome religious dogma too? It just couldn't be related to religion. After all, didn't Rome fall because of Christianity as Gibbon suggested? How can you run a civilization based on turning the other cheek and glorification of the meek, the poor and the humble? Not to mention the nonsense of virgin birth and a heaven in the clouds with a large white male in charge. So there was no good explanation of how success came to us and not to others. The idea that a religion can change in fundamental ways over time is not something that is obvious. Religions depend on faith and it is very dangerous to even allow questioning or debate. So it is a surprise for me to find out that Christianity has undergone such changes. This is unique among all religions, I guess. It alone allows reason and logic to be used whereas others embrace "mystery and intuition." In early Christianity revelation was in vogue, the past was emphasized and predestination embraced. Today reason, the future and free will are. Rodney Stark shows how Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and others transformed Christianity. How capitalism is good in spite of the "eye of the needle" quote. And how personal freedom and technical progress derived from or at least were allowed by Christianity. The book is not without flaws. When he denigrates the dark ages at the beginning of chapter two, he errs. If you read the small book "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" by Bryan Ward-Perkins you find out that archeology shows that not only government, but pottery, utensils, tools, clothing, houses and food also went into a 500 year dark age. Stark's examples of progress and reason are almost entirely from 1100 AD on. His claim that science and technology was enhanced by Christianity is also over the top. But his point is valid - only in Christian Europe did the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Method occur. To me, any history book can be judged by what you learn that is new. This book is full of examples. Did you know that the Italian city-states brought banks and multi-national firms to northern Europe and England for the first time in the 13th century? Why did Spain fall from prominence so quickly? It too was very Christian. This answer and many more await the reader of "The Victory of Reason."

Rodney Stark's "The Victory of Reason" is a startling, original, and masterful refutation of the arrogance and disinformation that masquerades as progressive thinking within the academy, especially that which concerns the rise of civilization in the West. As the author illustrates with many well documented examples and case histories, the so-called Dark Ages were anything but dark, and the high culture that arose in Europe during the Middle Ages was unique, unprecedented, and never duplicated in any other culture, East or West. All civilizations rise from religion, and the Christianity which emerged from the ashes of the Roman empire fostered independent thinking, respect for the worth of the individual, a commitment to liberty and autonomy, the ideas of progress and exploration, as well as the foundations of modern commerce from which capitalism would naturally evolve. The author provides a capsule of the thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, and the Church Fathers that informed the age, demonstrating how faith in a living God who rewards virtue and punishes sin helped to mold the character of Europeans during a most remarkable millennium. While Stark concedes there were missteps at various times and places, when prelates overstepped their roles and authority, Christianity reflexively opposed slavery and oppression and championed free will, accountability, and compassion. Stark writes that "Christianity was founded on the doctrine that humans have been given the capacity and, hence, the responsibility to determine their own actions." In such a world, fatalism was impossible and reason was essential. Comparisons presented in the text with the reasoning of other faiths - pre-Christian paganism, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Communism, and secular humanism - provide an eye-opening contrast. The lengthy middle section of the book presents a chronicle of the birth of commerce and self-governance in Italy and central Europe, revealing the degree to which reason combined with trial and error led to the formation of the modern world. Eighteenth-century intellectuals - Voltaire, Rousseau, and the like - advanced the canard that all the world was immersed in ignorance, superstition, and darkness before their time. They claimed responsibility for awakening the human mind from the Dark Ages: in truth, the anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical, anti-rational world they created turned out to be a somber and blood-stained affair - leaving behind a tragic view of life that sadly haunts the academy to this day. In this work, Rodney Stark demonstrates persuasively how "Christianity created Western Civilization," and he describes with compelling insight the process by which the engines of reason and progress were combined to transform our world. His review in the concluding chapters of the explosive growth of Christianity around the world is captivating, even as it raises many troubling questions about the intellectual and moral decadence of Christian culture and the West today. The author's reputation as one of the most insightful analysts of the emergence and consequence of Christianity is well deserved. This imminently readable volume ought to be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the roots of contemporary culture and how our world came to be as it is.

Rodney Stark's "The Victory of Reason" was at once illuminating and exasperating. It was illuminating because of how it traced the origins of capitalism and industrialization to developments in the very early middle ages (what used to be called simply "the Dark Ages"). And it was exasperating because he made his points about Christianity's beneficent effects by simply bifurcating its effects into good or bad, and attributing the good effects to "true" or "authentic" Christianity, and its bad effects to politics rather than to religion. Thus the malevolent effects of the Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Papal States in Italy were all due to the quest for political power on the part of the ruling elites, not due to evils inherent in Medieval Christianity. Whereas the creativity of the northern Italian Renaissance city states was entirely due to the people's Catholic Chrsistian religion. I am willing to believe Christianity had something to do with the "Triumph of the West" after the 15th Century. But the way the condemnation of Galileo quashed science in Italy, and the way the Inquisition in Spain quashed any move toward modernity there until the 20th Century, makes me sensitive to the ways in which Christianity can be used for either good or evil purposes. These uses of the religion,for either good or ill purposes, do not seem to me to arise from the defining traits of the religion itself. I am, alas, helpless to say what exactly it does come from. Stark did force me to go back and do further reading about the "Fall of Rome" and about the "Dark Ages." He led me to a recent reinterpretation of these transitions by some contemporary historians such as Peter Brown (author of "The World of Late Antiquity"). These historians argue that there was no such thing as a 5th Century "fall" of civilization. There was merely a transformation of civilization from one form of social organization (Imperial Rome) to another (comprised of monasteries and feudalism). It was this latter form of social organization, according to Stark, which then produced caapitalism and modernity. This thesis that there was no real "fall" from civilized life in 5th Century Italy is severly contested by other historians, such as Bryan Ward-Perkins (author of the recent "Fall of Rome.") Ward-Perkins presents lots of archeological evidence that there really was a collapse of civilized life in 5th Century Italy which caused great suffering among those who endured it. I have concluded Ward-Perkins has an overwhelmingly strong evidential case against the continuity theorists like Peter Brown and Stark. Yet the "Dark Ages" were fruitful in many ways. The Franks developed the horse collar, the moldboard plow, crop rotation, the stirrup, and other innovations which put Europe on an upward track toward technological superiority. Why were these illiterate Franks so much more innovative than the Romans? Stark claims their Christianity was the cause, but he fails to say how, exactly, their Christian beliefs produced these effects. One unexpected connection he revealed to me was the link between the cloth industry and the advent of both capitalism and industrialization. The story of the rise of capitalism begins (he says) in the northern Italian city states of the Renaissance, then moved to the Netherlands prior to the wars with Spain. After the Spanish Netherlands were trashed by Catholic armies, the development toward modern cloth weaving technology moved first north to Holland, and then after the Dutch were defeated by the British at sea, these developments were transplanted to England. The mechanization of the cloth industry there was advanced first by the use of water power, and then by the use of steam power. This final transition to steam powered cloth factories is what is typically meant by "the Industrial Revolution." The spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth is the only thing which all these developments share in common. Why was cloth making the engine pushing all these technological developments, rather than, say, iron smelting? Again I do not know, but the entire question has been made salient for me by Stark's book. I would agree that freedom (as articulated, say, by Mill's essay "On Liberty,") is the linchpin of Western superiority over non-Western cultural forms (such as Sunni Islam, for example). I am not clear how this was caused by Christianity, if indeed it was. But plainly whatever that original connection may have been, the link has now been severed. No one would want to call Mill or Kant (or more recently, John Rawls) "Christian" philosophers. So if there ever was a "Christian Victory of Reason," it occurred in the remote past, and is only of antiquarian interest today.

This is definitely one of the most refreshing and surprising books I have ever read. It makes me realize (among other things) how much anti-Christian, "Dark Ages" propaganda I have been indoctrinated with. This is a book which is badly needed, and needed NOW, with so many born-again anti-Christians running around. I suppose the finger of blame needs to be pointed at Gibbon's "Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire." Rodney Stark's first main argument is that Gibbon had hold of the wrong end of the stick: the Roman Empire was a slave-driving tyranny that badly deserved to crumble and fall. Crumble and fall it did, because of its own internal logic: tyrannies never produce good economies or good citizens. Well, the Western Empire did fall, so we were off into the Dark Ages, right? So we have been told, a thousand times. The facts are quite different, since what actually happened was an explosion of European creativity and progress, freed from the Roman tyranny and guided by the precepts of Christian theology. Christian theology expected progress, because it was future-oriented, and because it believed that the natural world followed natural laws. In quick order, the "ignorant peasants" of the "Dark Ages" discovered the metal plow, the three-field system of cultivation, the water wheel, the windmill, the stirrup, chain-mail armor, and other items too numerous to mention in a brief (!) review. Christianity and science were not opposed; they worked together, hand in hand, as is obvious from the history of the great monastic estates and the discoveries made there. Again, there are too many items to discuss, but one sticks in my memory: nobody had discovered how to transport heavy loads over long distances, before the "ignorant peasants" of the "Dark Ages" figured out the correct way to harness draft animals, and also began breeding much larger horses. (Oh, and they invented the horse-shoe as well). Eyeglasses and watches --- no one else had them! And nobody else had the system of private property, free trade, and capitalism which were developed during the "Dark Ages." In fact, the whole capitalist system originated in Christian monasteries. Higher culture was not in disarray: writers from Dante to Chaucer helped to create the vernacular languages of Europe. Universities were created by the Church. Polyphonic music was discovered (or invented), and so were the instruments to play it. I hope this gives you a taste of the book's contents. In case you are wondering about reviewer bias, I am not a Christian. But I am a member of (what used to be) Western Civilization, and I am convinced that we must understand where it came from if we want to prevent it perishing. It may be the case that "all of mankind's great religions are false," as Santayana claimed, but, strangely enough, it does not follow that they are all equally effective or equally good. After all, we lived with the Ptolemaic system for centuries, and made great progress in astronomy -- even though the Ptolemaic system was upside-down. If Christianity tells a culture that it can move towards the future --- that it can understand the natural world --- these may be critically important theological points. Highest possible recommendation!

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark examines why the West achieved political freedom and economic prosperity in advance of other societies. When non-Western countries excel economically, they do so by instituting economic policies based on Western ideals. Many deny this achievement. Some point to significant inventions and flourishing civilizations outside the West as evidence against the Western achievement. Others focus on the crimes of European and North American polities to denigrate the Western record. But Stark is not arguing that the people of the West were morally and intellectually superior; rather, in the West people first pursued economic and political freedoms that made economic progress and relatively free political communities possible on a large-scale. They benefited from a superior idea of the relationship between man and his natural and spiritual environment--Christianity. Stark reviews the historical record of economic development in the medieval Italian city states, Flanders, Holland, England and North America, while contrasting these expressions of capitalism with countries where free enterprise was not encouraged--Spain and France. He makes many observations about why these different areas flourished, stagnated or declined. His principal point is that the Christian context to these cultures created a value system vital to the economic and political progress of the West. The ideas he attributes to Christianity and that he denies coming from other sources--classical or otherwise--include faith in progress, a belief in an orderly universe accessible to reason, and a belief in the moral equality of all humans. These principles were necessary for science, the concept of human rights, free enterprise and limited government. These ideas are so rooted in our heritage that we take them for granted and have difficulty imagining their absence in other historical periods. This, coupled with many elites' disdain for Christianity, makes it hard to recognize how instrumental Christian ideas have been in the progress and freedoms that make our modern way of life possible. Stark has done us all a service in showing how much we owe to Christianity. Despite our differences, most moderns agree on the value of the individual and human rights, the primacy of economic and political freedoms, the importance of reason, science and technology. If we do not understand the roots of these ideals, we are in danger of undermining the foundations of our civil order. Stark's book is succinct and organized, a work of incisive thought without unnecessary clutter. I highly recommend it to all open-minded students of human affairs.

Rodney Stark has written a gem; it deserves to be in every library, and should be a required textbook in our high-schools and colleges. For too long we have bowed to the politically-correct (and historically-incorrect) version of the philosophy and events which led to the rise of Capitalism and the West as the pinnacle of human achievement, led by the hand of Christianity. Those of us who were educated before the left completely took over our educational system have watched in horror as the characters and events which gave rise to our society have been systematically undermined by the anti-scholarship of the "progressive" and "politically correct". Here in an eminently readable tome is all the information one needs to reassert our belief in reason and in the institutions, governments, and economic systems it created, and we have all the tools required to debunk any and all assertions to the contrary. This book is an inspiration and reminds us that regardless of how we may wish things were, they way they actually are is the product of a unique set of circumstances and events which arose only under a particular set of conditions, and that what was created is not only superior, but it should be celebrated and praised; not denigrated or denied.

In the Acknowledgments, Rodney Stark says he intends this book for the general reader. If he means the casual reader, I'd say not quite. It's a bit too textbooky. I found myself engrossed by his thesis, and then kept reading to find evidence of it, of which there is plenty. Once he actually got into the nuts and bolts of Capitalism, and the history thereof, I got somewhat bogged down. What I mainly learned from this book, to quote a Firesign Theatre record title, is that everything I know is wrong. I'm one of the few who learned the wrong things almost from their original sources, having read them in classes at college. These wrong things are generally believed, but most people never actually read these sources. One of them is that Capitalism arose from the Protestant work ethic after the Reformation. The other is the sustaining myth of the modern world, the Enlightenment (who named it that?) invention of the Dark Ages. What else didn't I know? That slavery was virtually wiped out of Europe by the end of the tenth century, and that when it returned in the New World, the pope excommunicated anyone who trafficked in slaves. The Enlightenment writers didn't mention that fact, since they were slave owners. For me, the word "Capitalism" summons up the sort of abuses that Chesterton was always arguing against. But Stark, in very lengthy passages, explains its theory so that even this reader, with zero economic prowess, can grasp it. He shows that it can only flourish in a relatively free society, hence the "Western Success" of the subtitle. He also considers the paradox of "religious economies", concluding that state- established churches stagnate, while religious belief thrives in an environment of freedom and pluralism. The common core underlying that belief in the West is that the Creator has made a reasonable world that can be discovered by reason, a radically liberating idea that led to "Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success" in the Bright Ages.

This book is a definite mind-opener. The book is about the impact of Christianity on capitalism and thus later western success. After reading this you won't look at things quite the same. The book is really two books merged into one. That technique is easy to broaden the approach to a complex issue like Western Civilization. The downside is you miss some of the background information that makes the cases stronger. I liked the story about capitalism. It runs you through a thousand years of history quite rapidly. You learn about how capitalism grew. A major force in that growth back in the dark ages was the church's system of monasteries. Then how Christian theology emphasizes the individual creates an environment which accelerates the growth of free markets. The other half of the book covers the growth of the church in the world. That growth converts people's hearts which in turn builds western society. The western values we hold dear only arose in Christian societies. Jesus pushed forth the idea of moral equality across all classes. Wealth isn't grounds for special distinction. Ideas like the separation of church and state did not start with Jefferson. It started with Jesus when he tells the crowd to give to Caesar what is his, and give to God what is his. Several Popes issued decrees banning slavery. These ideas create an environment in which capitalism flourishes. I would have liked to see more material on the theology part. Some of the statements about the role of the church needs more explanation. When that is done I am sure the book will succeed.

I bought this book through a suggestion by helen p shrauder while a answering a question on crusadeer kingdoms. Ok the way of writ3is not great just like giving a lengthy boring statements. The subject matter is neither deep nor shallow ,and doesn't explains whats the influence of christianity just explains the way churches operated .Nothing new!!!!

Auf die Lektüre freue ich mich. Aber ich weiß noch nicht, ob ich dieses Exemplar lesen werde: Die Schrift ist viel zu klein! Es handelt sich offensichtlich um eine verkleinerte Ausgabe des Originals. Werde mir wohl eine andere Ausgabe besorgen müssen.

Conseillé par Henri-Jérôme Gagey, théologien, dans son ouvrage "Les ressources de la foi", (ouvrage que je recommande également pour tout catholique qui souhaite éclairer la posture à prendre dans l'évangélisation), la version française n'est hélas plus disponible et les livres d'occasion sont vendus à des prix exorbitants. Par conséquent, je me suis résolu à le lire dans sa version originale, en anglais, qui est facile à lire (le langage est simple). Rodney Stark développe les arguments sur l'importance du christianisme dans le développement de l'esprit scientifique qui permet à l'homme de sortir des mythes, des superstitions, des tentations totalitaires (athées ou religieuses comme nous le constatons depuis 14 siècles), ou des sagesses à quatre sous, grâce à la raison: il est une référence crédible pour démontrer que la science est dans son essence redevable de la rationalité du christianisme. Et comme le développe clairement saint Jean-Paul II, dans l'encyclique "Fides et ratio", la raison ne peut se déployer sans la foi (entendons-nous bien sur le sens de la foi: croire en Jésus Christ qui est Dieu et sauveur du monde). Bonne lecture. Guillaume

Good work by Rodney Stark.

Un testo provocatorio e bene informato; una lettura adatta a ricordarci che la storia non è sempre quella che si racconta.