This is not, however, the way the Greeks and the Romans—or the Chinese and the Indians—saw it. Most cultures believe that history moves in cycles. Things go up and then they go down. An alternative view is that things were better in the past, and the further you go back, the better they get. As J. B. Bury shows in The Idea of Progress, Westerners think of progress not in terms of cycles but arrows. Our modern ideas of “development” and “progress” are a secular version of the Christian idea of providence.” The Christian narrative of history guided by God from beginning to end—a story of creation, incarna- tion, and last judgment—is converted into a story of human advancement. Thus through human effort we fulfill a kind of spiritual mandate to continually make things better.
A final aspect of the Christian legacy of human fallibility and ordinary satisfaction should be stressed. This is our culture’s powerful emphasis on compassion, on helping the needy, and on alleviating distress even in distant places. If there is a huge famine or reports of genocide in Africa, most people in other cultures are unconcerned. As the Chinese proverb has it, “the tears of strangers are only water.” But here in the West we rush to help. Massive relief programs are organized. The rock singer Bono launches a campaign to raise funds. Sometimes even military intervention is considered as a last resort to stop the killing. Part of the reason why we do this is because of our Christian assumptions. Those people are human like us. They too deserve a chance to be happy. If we are more fortunate than they are, we should do what we can to improve their lot.
The ancient Greeks and Romans did not believe this. They held a view quite commonly held in other cultures today: yes, that is a problem, but it’s not our problem. Aristotle, who came closest to the Christian view, wrote that the great-souled man does in fact assist thosein need. But in Aristotle’s view he does so out of liberality, in order to demonstrate his magnanimity and even superiority to those beneath him. Ancient aristocrats funded baths, statues, and parks that prominently bore their names and testified to their family nobility and personal greatness. This is not the Christian view, which demands that we act out of compassion, which means “suffering with others.” We help starving infants in Haiti and Rwanda not because we are better than they are but because we are, humanly speaking, all in the same boat. Christian humility is the very opposite of classical magnanimity.
It was the Christian spirit of mutual love and communal charity that astonished and impressed the pagans and the Romans. The emperor Julian, seeking to revive paganism in the fourth century, professed admiration for the way in which Christians looked after their poor, their widows and orphans, and their sick and dying. However paradoxical it seems, people who believed most strongly in the next world did the most to improve the situation of people living in this one.
In the West, the Christians built the first hospitals. At first they were just for Christians, but eventually they were open to everyone, even Muslims who had entered Christian lands with the aim of conquest. Today many hospitals have Christian names—St. John’s Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital, Methodist Hospital, Lutheran Hospital, and so on—and relief organizations like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross bear, sometimes lightly, the Christian influence that brought them into existence. So do organizations like the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, and the YMCA, all of which are involved in civic and charitable activities.
