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

by Rodney Stark

Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: Why does God allow us to sin? Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war? When does an infant acquire a soul? To

Legal interpretation rests on precedent and therefore is anchored in the past, while efforts to better understand the nature of God assume the possibility of progress. And it is the assumption of progress that may be the most critical difference between Christianity and all other religions.

Augustine’s optimism was typical; progress beckoned. As Gilbert de Tournai wrote in the thirteenth century, “Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known. . . . Those things that have been written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed.”23 Especially typical were the words preached by Fra Giordano in Florence in 1306: “Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them. Every day one could discover a new art.”

The Christian image of God is that of a rational being who believes in human progress, more fully revealing himself as humans gain the capacity to better understand. Moreover, because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension . This was the key to many intellectual undertakings, among them the rise of science. THEOLOGY

“The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief that . . . there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? . . . It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”

In On the Heavens, Aristotle noted that “the same ideas recur to men not once or twice but over and over again,” and in his Politics he pointed out that everything has “been invented several times over in the course of ages, or rather times without number,”

Greek learning was a barrier to the rise of science! It did not lead to science among the Greeks or the Romans, and it stifled intellectual progress in Islam, where it was carefully preserved and studied.

It would seem that Islam has a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science. Not so.58 Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes on the world as he deems it appropriate.

This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.

What the great figures involved in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century blossoming of science—including Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Kepler—did confess was their absolute faith in a creator God, whose work incorporated rational rules awaiting discovery.

The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles

From the beginning, Christianity has taught that sin is a personal matter—that it does not inhere primarily in the group, but each individual must be concerned with her or his personal salvation.

Unlike the Greeks and Romans, whose gods were remarkably lacking in virtues and did not concern themselves with human misbehavior (other than failures to propitiate them in an appropriate manner), the Christian God is a judge who rewards “virtue” and punishes “sin.” This conception of God is incompatible with fatalism.

Christianity was founded on the doctrine that humans have been given the capacity and, hence, the responsibility to determine their own actions. Saint Augustine wrote again and again that we “possess a will,” and that “from this it follows that whoever desires to live righteously and honorably, can accomplish

As noted, the other major religions are strongly oriented to the past, and to the principle that, if anything, history is regressive and later generations are prone to error. Therefore, to say that the sages or saints in times past may have had an imperfect or limited understanding of religious truths is rejected out of hand by Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus, and even by Muslims.

Rapid intellectual and material progress began as soon as Europeans escaped from the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism.

Freed of the grip of tyrants, the so-called Dark Ages saw an extraordinary outburst of innovation in both technology and culture. Some of this involved original inventions, some of it came from Asia. But what was most remarkable about the Dark Ages was the way in which the full capacities of new technologies were rapidly recognized and widely adopted,

an inventory conducted in the ninth century found that one-third of the estates along the Seine River in the area around Paris had water mills, most of these being on the religious estates.

When William the Conqueror had the Domesday Book compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported that there were at least 5,624 water-powered mills already operating in England, or one for about every fifty families.

Across the channel, early in the twelfth century, a company known as the Société du Bazacle was founded in Toulouse to offer shares in a series of water-powered mills along the Garonne River. The shares were freely traded, which led Jean Gimpel to propose that t...

A century later, water mills had become so important that in the center of Paris, along the Seine, there were sixty-eight mills in one section less than a mile long, an a...

At least as early as the twelfth century some very large dams were constructed— one at Toulouse was more than thirteen hundred feet across,

Soon waterpower was also utilized for sawing lumber and stones, for turning lathes, grinding knives and swords, for fulling (pounding) cloth, for hammering metal and drawing wire, and to pulp rags to make paper.

In order to take full advantage of the wind even when it shifted direction, medieval engineers invented the post mill, which mounted the sails on a massive post, leaving them free to turn with the wind. By late in the twelfth century, Europe was becoming so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.

In contrast, during the Dark Ages a rigid, well-padded collar was adopted that properly placed the weight on the horse’s shoulders instead of its neck, enabling the horse to pull as much as the ox and to pull it much faster. Having adopted the horse collar, European farmers soon switched from oxen to horses, with an immense gain in productivity—a horse could plow more than twice as much per day as an ox.

It was also not until after the fall of Rome that Europeans developed iron shoes nailed to horses’ hooves to protect them from the wear and tear that often causes unshod horses to become lame.

Having gained a much more efficient substitute for the ox, medieval Europeans promptly invented the heavy, wheeled plow to improve the productivity of their fertile, but very heavy, soil. Until sometime in the sixth century, farming depended on the scratch plow, which was nothing but a multiple set of digging sticks arranged in rows.

The three-field system first appeared in the eighth century and was adopted so widely and rapidly that during the nineteenth century many historians erroneously assumed it dated from Roman times.

In addition to technology used directly and specifically in production, medieval Europeans benefited from three inventions of immense indirect importance: chimneys, eyeglasses, and clocks.

the invention of eyeglasses, in about 1284 in northern Italy, had dramatic effects on productivity.

Within a century after their invention, the mass production of eyeglasses occupied plants in both Florence and Venice, turning out tens of thousands of eyeglasses a year.

Sometime during the thirteenth century, someone somewhere in Europe invented a dependable mechanical clock.

It was the “barbarous” Franks who, in 732, fielded the first heavy cavalry: armored knights astride massive horses, who charged behind long lances, secure in their high-backed Norman saddles and braced in their stirrups.

What is certain is that by 1325 cannons were in use all over western Europe.

Cannons could spread so rapidly because the capacity to cast them already existed all over Europe in the church bell industry.

The claim that the magnetic compass reached Europe from China through the Muslim world is false. It was invented independently in both China and Europe, probably in about the eleventh century.

The temporal clustering of written reports of this new invention demonstrates that it spread among sailors from Italy to Norway in only a few years.

Not only did the introduction of the horse collar revolutionize agriculture but in combination with crucial innovations in the construction of wagons, the horse collar revolutionized transportation as well.

Finally, it was medieval Europeans who invented harnesses and reins that permitted large teams of horses or oxen to be lined up in columns of pairs. Previously, teams of horses or oxen were arranged abreast, which severely limits the number of animals that can be employed. For example, to harness fifty-two oxen abreast is inconceivable, but in the eleventh century “ignorant” medieval Europeans used a fifty-two-oxen team, harnessed in a column of twenty-six pairs, to move large pieces of marble during the construction of the soaring cathedral in the French village of Conques.

It was medieval musicians who invented polyphony, the simultaneous sounding of two or more musical lines, hence harmonies. Just when this occurred is uncertain, but it was already well known when described in a manual published around 900.

it was during the Dark Ages that the instruments needed to fully exploit harmonies were perfected: the pipe organ, the clavichord and harpsichord, the violin and bass fiddle among others.

And in about the tenth century, an adequate system of musical notation was invented and popularized so that music could be accurately per...

Finally, artists in northern Europe in the thirteenth century were the first to use oil paint and to put their work on stretched canvas rather than on wood or plaster.

The need for pushers ended when Jean Buriden (1300–58), rector of the University of Paris, anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion by proposing that space is a vacuum, and that once God had put the heavenly bodies in motion (“impressed an impetus on each”), their motion was “not decreased or corrupted afterwards because there was not inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which could be corruptive or repressive of that impetus.”

Nicole d’Oresme (1325–82), the most brilliant of the Scholastic scientists. His work was remarkably mathematical, thereby setting a high standard for subsequent work in mechanics and astronomy.

Then came Bishop Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), who argued that “whether a man is on earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless center, and that all other things are in motion.

Late in the tenth century, an iron industry began to develop in parts of northern China.1

In short, China began to develop capitalism and enter an industrial revolution. But then it all stopped, as suddenly as it had begun.

Eventually, Mandarins at the imperial court had noticed that some commoners were getting rich by manufacturing and were hiring peasant laborers at high wages. They deemed such activities to be threats to Confucian values and social tranquillity. Commoners must know their place; only the elite should be wealthy. So, they declared a state monopoly on iron and seized everything. And that was that.

4 Ali Pasha was not a peasant hiding harvest surplus but a member of the upper elite, married to the sultan’s sister. If such a person could find no safe investments and dared not even leave his money at home, how could anyone else hope to do better?