{"id":3458,"date":"2017-11-07T01:22:56","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T22:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3458"},"modified":"2017-11-07T01:22:56","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T22:22:56","slug":"the-evil-that-i-would-not-christianity-and-human-fallibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3458\/the-evil-that-i-would-not-christianity-and-human-fallibility\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evil That I Would Not: Christianity And Human Fallibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” <\/em>\u2014St. Paul, Letter to the Romans, 7:19<\/p>\n

I <\/strong>NOW WANT TO EXAMINE <\/strong>a second major feature of Western civilization that derives from Christianity. This is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life:’ It is the simple idea that ordinary people are fallible, and yet these fallible people matter. In this view, society should organize itself in order to meet their everyday concerns, which are elevated into a kind of spiritual framework. The nuclear family, the idea of limited government, the Western concept of the rule of law, and our culture’s high emphasis on the relief of suffering all derive from this basic Christian understanding of the dignity of fallible human beings.<\/p>\n

Let’s explore this by considering two related themes that arise from the same Christian root. The first is Paul’s statement above. Here Paul in a single phrase repudiates an entire tradition of classical philosophy founded in Plato. For Plato, the problem of evil is a problem of knowledge. People do wrong because they do not know what is right. If they knew what was right, obviously, they would do it. But Paul denies that this is so. His claim is that even though he knows something is wrong, he still does it. Why? Because the human will is corrupt. The problem of evil is not a problem of knowledge but a problem of will.<\/p>\n

I also want to focus on the Christian exaltation of the low man, the common man, and the underdog. These groups were not favorites in the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Homer ignored them in his epics, concentrating entirely on life among the ruling class. Lesser men appeared, if at all, as servants. Aristotle too had a job for low men: slavery. Aristotle argued that with low men in servitude, superior men would have leisure to think and participate in the governance of the community. Aristotle cherished the “great-souled man” who was proud, honorable, aristocratic, rich, and (if this were not enough) spoke in a low and measured voice.<\/p>\n

But Jesus was not such a man. Jesus was born in a stable and lived most of his life as a carpenter’s apprentice. He usually traveled by foot and occasionally by donkey. As literaryscholar Erich Auerbach writes, “Christ had not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans. He moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk. He talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children. It may be added that Christ came to a bad end on the cross, hanged like a common criminal and flanked by two actual criminals.<\/p>\n

Yet Auerbach notes that despite Christ’s undistinguished origins, simple life, and lowly death, everything he did was imbued with the highest and deepest dignity. The fishermen the Greeks would have treated as figures of low comedy were in the Christian narrative embroiled in events of the greatest importance for human salvation. The sublimity of Christ and his disciples completely reversed the whole classical ideal. Suddenly aristocratic pride came to be seen as something preening and ridiculous. Christ produced the transformation of values in which the last became first, and values once scorned came to represent the loftiest human ideals.
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\nCharles Taylor notes that as a consequence of Christianity, new values entered the world. For the first time people began to view society not from the perspective of the haughty aristocrat but from that of the ordinary man. This meant that institutions should not focus on giving the rich and high-born new ways to pass their free time; rather, they should emphasize how to give the common man a rich and meaningful life. Moreover, economic and political institutions should be designed in such a way that sinful impulses\u2014what Kant termed the crooked timber of humanity\u2014could nevertheless be channeled to produce humane and socially beneficial outcomes.<\/p>\n

One area where we see this change is in the social importance that is given to marriage and the family. Today we take it for granted that the family is the institution entrusted with the care and rearing of children. Incredible as it seems, the family was not very important in ancient Greece. In fact, Plato proposed an abolition of marriage and the family, envisioning a republic in which the whole business of procreation and care of the young was turned over to the state.<\/p>\n

Aristotle, more prudent than Plato, recognized the need for the family. At the same time he described the family as an infrastructural good. Of course family is necessary for the good life, just as it is necessary to eat and sleep every day, but for Aristotle a life devoted to the family is neither a complete nor a noble one. The Greeks viewed the family almost exclusively as a vehicle for procreation. Most marriages were arranged, and the husband and wife were not even expected to be friends. Indeed Aristotle thought women largely incapable of friendship, and he certainly did not expect wives to relate to husbands on a plane of equality. The unimportance of romantic love in ancient Greece can be verified from the fact that of the three dozen or so Greek tragedies we possess, not a single one has love as its subject.<\/p>\n

Eros was a powerful force in ancient Greece, but it expressed itself mainly in homosexuality. The practice was common in Athens, but the Spartans were especially notorious for it, encouraging it in their gymnasiums and using homosexual attachments to build solidarity among soldiers in war. Historian Michael Grant writes that Eros was also the basis for the practice of pederasty. He notes that sexual relations between men and boys were “far more favored than homosexual relations between men of the same age.” The ancients also erected an educational philosophy based on pederasty. As historian K. J. Dover describes it, the man always played the active role and the boy the passive role. The whole project was conceived of in terms of an exchange; the young boy agreed to sexualrelations with an older man and in return he received knowledge and tutoring.<\/p>\n

We may worry that the younger boy might be exploited in such a relationship, but the ancients did not. Many of them felt like Pausanius in Plato’s Symposium, <\/em>who frets that pederastic arrangements are unfair to older men because young boys, once they have received their mentoring, casually move on to other partners their own age. We can admire the great achievements of classical philosophy, drama, and statesmanship, but when we rhapsodize about “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” we should keep in mind that the sexual practices of these civilizations live on today only in prisons and in the ideology of marginal groups like the North American Man\/Boy Love Association.
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\nIn the Christian era, pederasty and homosexuality were considered sinful. Instead, Christianity exalted heterosexual monogamous love, which would provide the basis for a lasting and exclusive relationship between husband and wife, oriented toward the rearing of children. We take the family so much for granted\u2014it remains such a powerful ideal in our society, even when actual family life falls short\u2014that we forget the central premises on which it is based. Those premises were introduced by Christianity into a society to which they were completely foreign.<\/p>\n

First, Christianity made family life important in a way that it wasn’t before. No longer was family life subordinated to the life of the city, as both Plato and Aristotle thought it should be. Indeed, the family came to be viewed for the first time as the central venue for the fulfillment of life’s main satisfactions. This change began with the elevation of marriage to a Catholic sacrament, giving it religious prestige beyond its social necessity. An equally significant shift was wrought by the Protestant Reformation. The Catholics had revered the celibate priest, modeled on a celibate Christ, as the exemplar of virtue, but Martin Luther disputed this interpretation, insisting that the ordinary Christian who took a wife and had children by her was also fulfilling a vocation or “calling” from God.<\/p>\n

Second, Christendom developed a new notion of romantic love, which is today one of the most powerful forces in our civilization. While marriages continued to be arranged in the West, especially among the more affluent classes, a new and alternative ideal emerged in the Middle Ages. This was the idea of love as the basis for getting married and also for preserving a happy marriage. I am not saying that people did not “fall in love” before the medieval era. But “falling in love” was previously considered a mild form of insanity, something that could not and should not be the basis for enduring marriage. The medieval Christians began to understand marriage between a man and a woman as a relationship similar to that between Christ and the church. The Bible portrays this relationship as intimate and passionate, certainly not as some kind of a mercenary bargain. So Christians began to view marriage as an intimate companionship enlivened by romantic passion.<\/p>\n

Romantic love is today considered to be little more than a feeling, but that is a pale shadow of its original meaning. It was meant to be the culmination of a quest, to represent the high ideals of personal sacrifice and service to another. The concept was at first confined to the aristocracy, but it soon spread throughout society. The first hint of romance as an important social value emerges in the courtly love poems that fused erotic and spiritual love and focused it on a beautiful woman, usually unavailable. This literature of longing implanted the dream of romance in the mind of the West.<\/p>\n

Third, Christianity introduced consent on the part of both the man and the woman as theprerequisite for marriage. Again, we take this for granted today, but you have only to go to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East to see that people there are frequently pressured into marriage against their will. I grew up in India, where marriages even today are often arranged by the parents. The West, however, since the early days of Christianity, has had marriage by choice and mutual agreement. This did not originate because of “equality between the sexes.”
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\nRather, it originated because of the Christian idea that each of us has a partner God made for us. Romantic feeling was perceived as an activity of the soul guiding us to find this lifelong companion. As fallible human beings we can be wrong about a lot of things, but we cannot be wrong in how we feel about someone else. At the same time, Christianity emphasized that free choice should also be binding choice. As we have consented to marry without coercion, we should live up to our vows and preserve marriage as a lifelong commitment.<\/p>\n

The Christian priority of extending respect to ordinary persons\u2014while taking into account human failings and shortcomings\u2014can also be seen in the emergence in the West of new political institutions. These political institutions existed nowhere else in the world, and they did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. Something changed within the West to give rise to them. That something is Christianity. Consider our modern concept of “rule of law” In his book Law and Revolution <\/em>Harold Berman argues that the modern Western legal system is “a secular residue of religious attitudes and assumptions which historically first found expression in the liturgy and rituals and doctrine of the church, and thereafter in the institutions and concepts and values of the law” This is quite true, but there is much more to the story.<\/p>\n

Plato says that the highest form of law is discretion. This sounds strange to us, but it is correct. The best form of justice is to give each person his appropriate deserts. In the family, for example, you don’t treat your children exactly alike by establishing “laws” for them. You adapt your instructions and requirements in keeping with their individual personalities and situations. So it is, according to Plato, in politics. The best form of government is a benign monarchy or aristocracy ruling by discretion and dispensing justice in each indi- vidual case.<\/p>\n

But we don’t do this in the West. Consider the simple example of speeding on the highway. We establish fixed rules\u2014such as a limit of seventy miles per hour\u2014and then enforce them. This does not, however, seem like the best system. Some people drive safely at eighty miles per hour. Others are a danger to themselves and others at fifty miles per hour. So why don’t we let the authorities decide each case on its merits? The simple answer is that we don’t trust the policeman to do this. We consider him a fallible human being who may be guided by prejudices. We would rather all live under a uniform rule that applies to everyone.<\/p>\n

This idea that power should be very cautiously entrusted to fallible human beings became the basis of the modern liberal idea of laws. The people choose the government, but the American system imposes “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” as internal mechanisms to keep the government honest and accountable. The American founders devised a structure that deliberately fostered economic and political rivalries in order to prevent unhealthy concentrations of power. In The Federalist <\/em>51, Publius describes such measures collectively as “supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.” Moreover, in the West we insist that the people who make the laws be subject to them and to the recall of the people on whose behalf they are making them.Christianity enhanced the notion of political and social accountability by providing a new model: that of servant leadership. In ancient Greece and Rome no one would have dreamed of considering political leaders anyone’s servants. The job of the leader was to lead. But Christ invented the notion that the way to lead is by serving the needs of others, especially those who are the most needy. Mark 10:43 quotes Christ: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant … for even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve.” And in Luke 22:27 we hear Jesus say, “Who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” In the new Christian framework, leaders are judged by how well they respond to the concerns and welfare of the people. Over time, people once known as “followers” or “subjects” become “customers” and “constituents.” As a consequence of the new ideal, the job of the political leader, the merchant, and the priest becomes serving the people by attending to their political, material, and spiritual needs.
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\nThe system of modern capitalism arose in the West. To some it is surprising that capitalism developed so easily in conjunction with a Christian ethic. But capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism\u2014it is in human nature. As Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations, <\/em>the desire to better our condition “comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave.” Selfishness, like lust, is part of the human condition. It is hopeless to try to root it out, although some zealous utopians have certainly tried. Over the centuries, Christianity came up with a much better solution. The Bible is often quoted to say that money is the root of all evil, but the relevant passage actually says that “love of money is the root of all evil.” This is a condemnation of a certain human attitude to wealth, not a condemnation of either wealth or commerce.<\/p>\n

The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits. Moreover, capitalism encourages entrepreneurs to act with consid- eration for others even when their ultimate motive is to benefit themselves. So while profit remains the final goal, entrepreneurs spend the better part of each day figuring out how better to serve the needs of their actual and potential customers. They are opera- tionally, if not intentionally, altruistic. As Samuel Johnson once put it, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently occupied than in getting money.” One may say that capitalism civilizes greed in much the same way that marriage civilizes lust. Both institutions seek to domesticate wayward or fallen human impulses in socially beneficial ways.<\/p>\n

And when it came to capitalism, Christian civilization created the basic rules of modern economics. In the Middle Ages, Rodney Stark shows, people first realized that prices should be determined through supply and demand. In the past, prices had been set by law or custom. But Albertus Magnus, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, explained that prices reflect “what goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale.” And this of course is what we believe now<\/p>\n

In his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, <\/em>Max Weber traces the rise of capitalism to a spirit of calling or election introduced by Calvinism. But as in the case of market pricing, the core elements of capitalism all predate the Reformation. Some scholars have traced them to the monastery communities of the early Christian era, in which bandsof monks demonstrated a strong work ethic, practiced specialization and division of labor, borrowed and lent money, and engaged in long-distance trade involving a fairly wide range of foodstuffs and other commodities. Stark argues that “all of the essential features of capitalism … are to be found from the twelfth century on, in the city republicans of Italy, such as Venice, Genoa, or Florence.\u201d<\/p>\n

My goal here is not to settle the issue of which Christians got there first. Capitalism grew in stages, each of them influenced by a different aspect of Christianity. When Francis Bacon and Descartes called for a technological system in which man becomes a master and possessor of nature, they made their case in terms of recovering the prosperity of the Garden of Eden. When Locke defended property rights and the cultivation of nature by practical intelligence, he saw humans as imitating the creativity of God and thus acting “in His image.” Even today we think of work in terms of a “calling” or “vocation.” In this Christian understanding, we receive our talents from God and use them to benefit ourselves, our families, and our society in line with God’s will for us.
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\nWith capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future. History is seen as moving in a straight line, onward and upward. In the past century the idea of progress has seen some strange and ugly manifestations, such as “survival of the fittest” and the supposedly inevitable “revolution of the proletariat.” Tarred as it now may be, the ideal of progress endures, and in some form it is now part of the furniture of the modern mind. Most of us, for example, fully expect our children to live better than we do. We also tend to believe in moral progress. The abolition of slavery, for instance, seems to be an irreversible moral achievement. We hope that future generations will be more morally enlightened than we are, take better care of the planet, and stop killing the unborn.<\/p>\n

This is not, however, the way the Greeks and the Romans\u2014or the Chinese and the Indians\u2014saw 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, <\/em>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\u2014a story of creation, incarna- tion, and last judgment\u2014is converted into a story of human advancement. Thus through human effort we fulfill a kind of spiritual mandate to continually make things better.<\/p>\n

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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014St. John’s Hospital, St. Luke’s Hospital, Methodist Hospital, Lutheran Hospital, and so on\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n

Christianity has also produced many great figures, from Vincent de Paul to Mother Teresa, who have dedicated their lives to the service of the poor and sick. Nowhere else\u2014not in other religions nor in secular society\u2014do we find anything like this. One does not have to be a Christian or even a believer to acknowledge that this Western faith has done an incredible amount to improve human life and reduce human suffering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” \u2014St. Paul, Letter to the Romans, 7:19 I NOW WANT TO EXAMINE a second major feature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[62,85,7343,7344,7345,7284,6387,7346,4550,7347,7348,7349,7350,7351,7352,482],"class_list":["post-3458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-ancient-greece","tag-aristotle","tag-charles-taylor","tag-classical-philosophy","tag-common-man","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-epics","tag-everyday-concerns","tag-exaltation","tag-nuclear-family","tag-ordinary-life","tag-ordinary-people","tag-romans-7","tag-ruling-class","tag-spiritual-framework","tag-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}