Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

Christianity is a fully formed worldview, with implications for all areas of life. Sunshine demonstrates that biblical ideas left their stamp on economics, politics, science, education, and, in fact, on the entire course of Western civilization for the past 1,700 years. All of the West’s distinctive achievements come from Christian foundations — a bold claim, but one echoed even by atheists, such as Germany’s Jürgen Habermas. For example, the concept of universal human rights and equality comes exclusively from the biblical idea that all people are created in the image of God. This book is thus an unabashed defense of the power of biblical ideas to shape culture and of a Christianity that unites heart and mind to bring the gospel of the kingdom boldly into all areas of human life.

A worldview is the framework you use to interpret the world and your place in it.

More simply, your worldview is what you think of as common sense about the world. It is your gut-level, instinctive response to the basic philosophical questions, such as “What is real?” (metaphysics), “What can I know and how can I know it?” ( epistemology), and “Are there such things as right and wrong, and if so, how do I know what they are?” (ethics).

Not everyone thinks of the same things as common sense, or, to put it differently, not everyone shares the same worldview.

Since worldviews are typically held unconsciously, formal philosophical or intellectual history does not usually deal with them much, preferring instead to focus on elites who self-consciously set out to develop systems of ideas.

In Western history, this means particularly Christianity. In fact, in many ways the history of Western worldviews is the history of the rise of Christianity and with it the emergence of a biblical worldview, the de facto rejection of this worldview over one thousand years later by a significant segment of the cultural and intellectual elites, and the results of the movement away from a biblical worldview.

Freedom was a status — if you were free, you were not a slave — but it conveyed none of today’s ideas of liberty. At the highest levels of society, treachery, poisoning, and assassination were common. And Roman decadence, gluttony, and sexual perversion are legendary.

Since Christianity was primarily an urban religion, followers of the older religions mostly lived in the countryside, and since they were pagani (rural people), their religions were described as “pagan.” (This same thing happened with the English word heathen: the people who lived on the heath worshiped the old gods.)

In fact, fathers had so much authority that Roman law, which was comprehensive in all other legal areas, left family law almost completely undeveloped. Why is this? Simply because the father was the law in his household. But what happened when the father died? In many families, he would join the pantheon of other heads of the family over the generations and be worshiped through the burning of incense at an ancestral shrine in the home. As the supreme authority over the household, fathers (and especially departed fathers) were the proper subjects of religious ritual.

Pagan religions did not require their adherents to worship only one god or even one set of gods. Many pagans believed that deities were local, so that if you moved to a different region, you would naturally change your gods. Adding one or more new deities to the religious system was not a problem; in fact, more educated people in the pagan world frequently thought of this as being broad-minded and inclusive. This attitude not only was seen as virtuous and cosmopolitan but also had real pragmatic value. People saw this inclusiveness as a source of strength for the Roman Empire because it helped prevent religious revolts against Roman rule. Besides, the more deities that supported Rome, the better.

Since the physical world changes constantly, ultimate reality must be based in the nonphysical world of ideas, since ideas are the only things we know of that do not change (at least according to Plato). So the idea of the Leaf (with a capital L), the universal, is primary. The universal Leaf, known as the form or the archetype, casts shadows, and these shadows form the leaves that we see and experience in the physical world. The particulars are real, but they have a secondary existence based on their connection with the Leaf. Since in this approach the idea is primary, it has become known as idealism.

The key here is that even as a realist, Aristotle allowed his ideas to trump observation. The reason is simply that he shared a worldview with his contemporaries that saw logic and ideas as the key to truth. This fundamental belief shaped his thought so that he did not see that his epistemology was disconnected from his metaphysics, or, to put it another way, that his approach to knowledge about the physical world was inconsistent with his belief in the priority of particulars over universals and thus of observation over logic.

Spirit was superior to matter (a concept called dualism), and spiritual beings were higher than material beings. Thus the gods were superior to nymphs, who were connected to physical objects, even if they were not themselves strictly physical beings. Nymphs were higher than any purely material creature. As rational beings, humans were superior to animals.

But just because the Romans no longer killed people for the gods or the manes , this did not mean that they suddenly valued human life. They picked up the Etruscan practice of having people fight to the death in “games” in honor of the dead (another form of human sacrifice) and moved it away from funerals to turn it into a form of popular entertainment. Gladiatorial matches and other spectacles at the circus entertained the population and fed the reputation of the sponsors at the cost of the blood of the slaves who fought and died in the arena. And in daily life, the Roman authorities would act with unsurpassed brutality against anyone who dared to question or challenge their authority.

Another consequence of this worldview had to do with attitudes toward the economy. In the early days of the Roman Republic (prior to the Empire) and even in early Greece, the nobility owned and worked their land alongside their servants and slaves. As the Republic expanded and encountered Carthaginian and Hellenistic Greek cultures, many of their ideas spread to Rome, and a decided shift in attitude took place among the Roman elites. Now, as had happened in Greece, contemplation of the spirit was

seen as higher than mucking about with the material world. Roman nobles began developing large, slave-run plantations known as latifundia, in which they increasingly gave themselves over to lives of luxury, with beautiful artwork, gardens, and homes. What better way to live a life contemplating the spirit than to live in the midst of beauty? After all, is not the One the source of the Beautiful, along with the Good and the True?

The latifundia of the nobility increasingly pushed the small family farms that had been the backbone of the Roman economy out of business, and agricultural production became largely a slave-driven enterprise. In the heyday of the Empire, virtually the entire economy depended on slave labor. In fact, although the Romans knew

about waterwheels and other labor-saving technologies, they never used them. Why make the capital investment when you can have slaves do the work?

The Romans may have lived in an oversexed society, but many of their sexual practices were nonreproductive, not just for the enjoyment of the different kinds of physical stimulation but in a deliberate attempt to prevent pregnancy. Even when sexual activity could have resulted in pregnancy, the Romans frequently used a variety of herbal and other contraceptive measures to prevent it. When those failed, they used surgical abortion as a means of birth control. This was particularly common when the baby was the product of an adulterous affair. The abortion techniques were crude, and the Romans did not even have soap to use as a disinfectant. As a result many women died or were sterilized by the procedure or the infections that followed it.

If all else failed and a child came to be born, infanticide was always an option. Roman families would usually keep as many healthy sons as they had and only one daughter; the rest were simply discarded. In fact, the Twelve Tables, the earliest codification of Roman law, made it mandatory for the father to kill any visibly deformed child born into the family. This practice was considered essential to the health of the society and was supported by prominent thinkers

such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero,...

The Jews had a unique worldview within the empire. The obvious difference between them and the rest of the Roman world was that they were radical monotheists. They believed that there was one and only one God. But in many ways, the number of gods worshiped was less important than the nature and character of the God of Israel. All of the pagan religions had origin stories for their gods. Not Judaism. The God of Israel simply was and is and will be forever. To put it another way, Israel’s God was self-existent.

There is an important difference between the Jewish and Neoplatonic concepts of God, however. The god of the Neoplatonists is impersonal, has no will, and simply throws off the emanations by virtue of its own existence. The God of Israel, on the other hand, is personal and created the world as a voluntary act. Also, the Neoplatonic universe is eternal. While the One exists, the universe does as well. The Jewish universe was created at a particular point in time.

Being God’s chosen people was a tremendous privilege, but it also carried with it a great deal of responsibility. Since God chose them and revealed himself to them in a unique way, more than he did for any other people, he also had very high standards for Israel. Much of Israel’s national history recorded in the Hebrew Bible is the story of Israel’s failure to keep the high standards of holiness God set for them and to give God their undivided and undiluted worship, and therefore it is also the story of God’s judgment on them for their sins. The Jews thus looked at the world and their place in it very differently from the way their pagan neighbors did.

So contrary to popular belief, the rise of Christianity had a very positive effect on the place of women in society.

The relationship of Christianity and slavery is another area that is widely misunderstood. Christians were the first people in history to oppose slavery systematically. Early Christians purchased slaves in the markets simply to set them free. Later, in the seventh century, the Franks (a Germanic people who controlled Western Germany and France), under the influence of its

All of this made the Christians nonconformists in Roman society. And in that tolerant society, nonconformity outside the bounds of tolerance was a death sentence. From the 50s AD on, Christians were sporadically persecuted, tortured, and killed, using the legal argument that they were subversives because they refused to burn incense to the emperor, and atheists because they did not acknowledge the Roman gods.

Of course, the Christians did their best to defend themselves, but they did it with ideas rather than force. A group known today as the Apologists (from the Greek word apologia, meaning “a defense”) did their best to refute attacks on Christianity. They corrected misunderstandings about the faith, such as the idea that they were cannibals because of the Eucharistic language of eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood, or the accusation that they engaged in orgies. They also went on the offensive against the immorality of the pagan world and pagan gods, presented arguments for the truth of Christianity based on fulfilled prophecy, and warned about the final judgment.

This Neoplatonic influence had a number of important consequences for Christianity. First, it encouraged a more allegorical approach to Scripture, which argued that although the literal meaning of the text was important (the particulars), what was more important was the deeper spiritual meaning that the literal pointed toward (the universals). It also meant that the church began to de-emphasize the physical world in favor of the spiritual. Thus, although the churches continued to feed the poor and take care of the sick, they began to put more and more emphasis on martyrdom and, failing that, asceticism — fasting, poverty, solitude, and especially virginity.

Constantine legalized and patronized the church, he neither made Christianity the formal state religion nor outlawed paganism. And for those who are critical of Constantine’s actions and their impact on the church, consider the persecutions that Christians had suffered less than a decade before. It is hard to blame the church for embracing Constantine when the alternative shortly before had been torture and death.

Guild members believed that their work was a calling from God, that they were following the command to “tend the garden” in a different way from the farmer, and thus that their work was being done to the glory of God. Production standards were set not simply for sound economic reasons, but because quality workmanship was seen as a legitimate end in itself. Whenever possible, guild members would leave identifying marks on their work, not so much for advertising or so that problems could be traced to their source, but as a sign of pride in their work.

Great ingenuity, effort, and expense went into producing labor-saving devices so that people could spend their time using their creativity rather than doing menial, repetitive tasks. The technologies were seen as enhancing work, making it more

meaningful and valuable, not as taking it away. They also increased production, of course, but this was also recognized as good, fulfilling more effectively the vocation to till the garden as described in Genesis.

The last pair is republic and democracy. A republic is rule by representation; a democracy is literally rule by the mob, through direct decision making by the populace. Democracies are a degenerate form of government because they are inevitably susceptible to falling under the control of a demagogue, a charismatic leader who can sway people to her or his own ends rather than to the common good. Republics are buffered from this danger by the representatives who run the government, yet

this system of government also retains the great advantage of buy-in from the citizens.

Although we typically associate the idea of inalienable rights

with the Declaration of Independence and one of its primary influences, the theories of British political philosopher John Locke, the idea itself comes from medieval political theory. As beings created in the image of God, humans have a number of natural rights that the state itself cannot violate. As we have seen, they include the right to property. The right to life is also assumed, and there are some tentative moves toward a limited idea of liberty — mostly in the form of limitations on the jurisdiction of civil and ecclesiastical government, so that the “liberties” of different groups are preserved. So, for example, the Magna Carta states that the English church is to be “free” and its “liberties unimpaired” by the crown, and confirms the “liberties” of the city of London.

This provides a foundation for criticizing government and finds its echo in Thomas Jefferson’s argument that the pursuit of happiness (by which he meant goodness and virtue) is an inalienable right. As we have seen, even at their most imperial, kings were below the laws of nature and reason, so even they needed to act in conformity to natural law.

Far from being a stagnant, backward era, the nearly thousand years that made up the Middle Ages were in fact a dynamic period that laid the foundation for Western civilization. From this too-brief summary of the period, several worldview ideas are obvious.

Renaissance thought was hardly progressive and forward looking. The very word renaissance means “rebirth” and refers to a rebirth of classical civilization, of ancient Greece and Rome. In other words, they used the ancient past as the measuring rod for everything.

So where do we get the idea that people thought the world was flat? Washington Irving — the man who wrote the short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” among other things — wrote a biography of Columbus in which he wanted to make Columbus out to be a great man. Since he could not very well say that Columbus was a hero because he had bought into bad numbers from Toscanelli, Irving decided to say that he was a brilliant visionary who was the first to realize that the earth was round, playing on the stereotype of medieval ignorance. Irving was a great writer of fiction, even as a biographer.

he key issue in the midst of all of these challenges is the question of knowledge: What can we know, and how can we know it? What was needed was an entirely new paradigm for knowledge, even though a new approach would inevitably ripple through the rest of the worldview. While all these challenges were undermining much of the old

worldview, the foundations for a new epistemology were being laid in the sixteenth century with the beginning of the scientific revolution.

From this, he derived his famous principle, “I think, therefore I am” (Latin, cogito ergo sum ), the point being that if there was doubt, there was thought, and if there was thought, there had to be someone doing the thinking.

The next step was, “I exist, therefore God exists.” While this may sound egotistical, it does not really mean that Descartes is God. Rather, the idea is that things do not just come into existence out of nothing. Instead, if something comes into existence, something else must have caused it.

Descartes’ third step was, “God exists, therefore clear and distinct ideas must be true.” If God was the creator, he must be the guarantor of truth as well. As a result, he would not deceive us, and so ideas that are “clear and distinct” are automatically true.

But Newton did not believe ongoing divine intervention was needed. His natural philosophy was designed to discover how God designed the world to operate as well as to reveal the character of God and his plans for the world.

Significantly, though, as the title of Tolland’s book implies, deists typically saw themselves as Christians. They may have disagreed with the church, with the Bible — with any sense of organized religion, in fact — but they still kept many aspects of the Christian worldview in place. For example, they generally accepted foundational ideas of political and economic theory drawn from the Christian tradition such as inalienable rights and specifically property rights. Many of their ethical ideas were also drawn from Christianity (though in terms of their own personal morality this was not always the case). Even the concept of reason was rooted in medieval Christianity’s belief that the world is governed by rational laws that human beings could discover.

So most deists in the period can actually be described as “Christian deists,” not because they held to traditional Christian beliefs,

but because so much of their thinking was drawn from Christian sources.