12.28.05
Christianity and Progress
Another review of Stark’s Victory of Reason.
Trying to annex the idea of progress to Christianity just doesn’t work. It is true that this religion tills the soil, so to speak, and carries an eschatological ancestor of the idea. To fully understand the complexity of the question is a long study. One good place to start is Norman Cohn’s Chaos, Cosmos, And The World To Come, an excellent study of the history of Zoroastrianism, with a clear recognition that primordial ideas of progress find a deep source in the legacy of the brilliant Zarathustra. But the overall picture is not easily told in soundbites, for there is, for example, Edelstein’s study of the gestation of the idea of progress among the ancient Greeks. One problem here is that there has been a postmodern attack on all ideas of progress, as, once again, a modern innovation becomes a conservative hand-me-down. Bury’s classic is a good place to start in the study of the idea as it was up to a generation ago among liberal thinkers. There are a dozen good studies of the idea of progress in that vein beside which this conservative trick or treat could not last long.
In any case, the eschatological predecessors of the idea of progress do not explain its modern transformation. What ever happened to Lowith’s critique? Conservatives used to ridicule the idea of progress as a degeneration of theistic historicism.
Let’s take back the idea from Stark: the modern idea of progress finds is real birth during the battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as the Moderns began to sense, for the first time in centuries, that society was beginning to surpass the heights of antiquity. Modernity had ‘progressed’, and the evidence was increasingly apparent to all.
So Stark’s claims are simply misleading, to say the least.
This book presents some interesting material, such as the medieval inventions — including water and windmills, horse collars, mechanical clocks and chimneys — that significantly improved the material welfare of European peoples. However, many readers may be reluctant to take the next step with Stark, that “these remarkable developments can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason
Technological progress is something different from the total advance of a cultural whole. It is certainly true that medieval inventions contribute to development, but they didn’t create the modern world.
The book is confusing because the solid evidence for ’something resembling capitalism’ prior to the modern period initiates a flood of fallacies on a host of other topics.
Debunking Weber is old hat, but his thesis is not so far off the mark,whatever its flaws: we see a clear association between the Protestant Reformation and the early modern, to put the issue very generally. That doesn’t mean they invented capitalism, to be sure, nor does it disallow the contributions from Catholic countries. Protestantism was really the first modern revolution, and without it modernity would probably have been stillborn. If you don’t think so consider the tenacity of struggle up to the Thirty Years War.