Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 64

MODERN AGE

progress stagnated as the city-states were
submerged beneath new empires" (30). The
fact remains, however, that the Greeks, while
failing to live up to their own best insights,
offered an indispensable model for many of
the most important attributes of subsequent
Western civilization.
The condemnation of slavery, Stark maintains, "awaited the rise of Christianity: the
first known instance of the general abolition
of slavery anywhere in the world lay a millennium in the future in medieval Europe"
(29). The attitude that ended slavery emerges
along with many other beneficial features
from Christianity's Jewish foundation,
which is expounded in the next chapter,
"Jerusalem's Rational God."
Stark's principal thesis in this chapter is
that the scientific method of investigating
nature by means of careful observation and
rational inference, which leads to a belief in
the possibility of progress, results from the
Judeo-Christian conception of the world
as the work of a rational Creator. This is
hardly a new idea, and Stark might well be
accused of oversimplifying and exaggerating
it. In my view, the theme is handled with
more finesse by other works, such as Stanley Jaki's The Road of Science and the Ways
to God (1980), which Stark does not cite.
St. Thomas Aquinas is credited with "optimism about progress" on the basis of three
secondary sources (only one of them dealing specifically with St. Thomas): "Because
humans could not see into the very essence
of things, Thomas argued, they must reason
their way to knowledge, step by step-using
the tools of philosophy, especially the principles of logic, to construct theology" (41).
Although one can see a connection between
Thomistic theological procedures and the
scientific method, the observation furnishes
an exiguous basis for deeming the Angelic
Doctor an apostle of progress.
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SUMMER 2014

Stark quotes City of God to assert that
St. Augustine was likewise confident of
human progress: "Progress in general was
inevitable as well [as progress in theology],
he supposed. Augustine wrote: 'Has not the
genius of man invented and applied countless
astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention,
so that this vigour of mind . . . betokens an
inexhaustible wealth in the nature which
can invent, learn, or employ such arts'" (41).
This unusual recourse to a primary text is
not altogether satisfactory, since Stark does
not mention that the quoted passage comes
in a chapter entitled "Of the good things
with which the Creator has filled even this
accursed life." It immediately follows a
chapter entitled "Of the troubles besides
those evils common to the good and the bad
which especially pertain to the travail of the
just." This preceding chapter concludes by
proving that "the testimony of so many and
such evils" shows "this life to be accursed."
It is only by taking some of St. Augustine's
statements out of context that he may be
characterized as an unequivocal believer in
earthly human progress.

tark's disdain for Rome and its contribution to Western civilization likewise
seems exaggerated and based on a rather
selective assessment of the evidence. "The
Roman Interlude" closes by asserting that
the fall of Rome was not the fall of civilization: "To the contrary, with the stultifying
effects of Roman repression now ended,
the glorious journey toward modernity
resumed" (66). Stark makes much of the
fact that Roman culture and technology
both derived from the Greeks. Roman
temples, aqueducts, baths, mines, and even
the famous system of roads are dismissed as
negligible achievements (53). Roman literature is dismissed on the basis of one second-

Modern Age - Summer 2014

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