The Book that made your world

Why the West was best? Vishal Mangalwadi looks at the question from an Indian perspective.

1,000 years ago, the Islamic civilisation had surpassed Europe in every respect.

But something changed. Now the people of Spain translate as many books into Spanish each year as Arabs have translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. If you take oil out of the equation, then the five million people of Finland export more goods and services each year than the 165 million of the Arab world. What brought about this dramatic rise of the West while the rest of the world stagnated?

My secular professors taught that the secret was the West’s discovery of human dignity during the Renaissance. That is true. But they also taught that the Renaissance humanists discovered this concept from the Greek and Latin classics. That is a myth. This unique idea came from the Bible.

Sheela’s death

In 1976 Ruth and I left urban India to live with the rural poor outside the village of Gatheora. Ruth decided to visit every family. In one family was a sick child named Sheela. Her thighs were only as thick as an adult’s thumb. Sheela was so weak that she could not even cry. She only sighed.

Despite repeated offers of our help, the family let Sheela die. Sheela’s parents starved her to death because they saw her as a liability. They already had a daughter to babysit their sons and to clean and cook for the family. A second girl was an unnecessary burden. From the perspective of their own culture, Sheela’s parents were not wicked people. They were ordinary human beings, as good or bad as anyone else. Sheela’s parents believed that, like themselves, Sheela was trapped inescapably in the clutches of poverty. They held to traditional Hindu fatalism.

Hindu worldview

For a person unfamiliar with the Hindu worldview, it will be hard to understand how parents could kill a child. Perhaps a vision of one of the fathers of modern Hinduism, Ramakrishna Paramhansa, would help. Ramakrishna saw his Mother-goddess, Kali, arise out of the dark waters of the river. She delivered a baby right before his eyes and then proceeded to eat her newborn child. In her hands the child appeared normal flesh and blood, but in her mouth the child seemed empty.

The Mother-goddess could kill her baby because faith in reincarnation trivialises death as well as life.

In the well-known Hindu Scriptures, Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna encourages Arjuna to kill his cousins and teachers because reincarnation means that death for a soul is like changing clothes. ‘As man leaves an old garment and puts on one that is new, the spirit leaves the mortal body and then puts on one that is new.’ The Lord Krishna advised Arjuna not to feel pity for those he was to kill because the soul is never really born and never dies.

As I began to see that these differences in worldview were matters of life and death and that fighting poverty required fighting fatalism, I began to speak to our neighbours about the need to know and trust the living God.

This connection between the knowledge of God (theology) and the knowledge of man (anthropology) is crucial to understanding the modern West.

Humanism

My secularised Indian friends believe, just as I do, that humans can create a better future for themselves. They don’t point to the Bible. To them, it’s common sense. But such an idea is not common sense in traditional India. Nor was it common sense in ancient or medieval civilizations. Infanticide was common practice in ancient Greece and Rome. Notions of human dignity and rights came to India with Christian education.

So how did the West’s conception of human beings become so radically different from all the rest? Europe had become ‘Christian’ long before AD 1500, but that did not make most aspects of its worldview biblical.

Folk spirituality continued in medieval Christendom in the form of fear of spirits and prayers to angels. The medieval philosophers, called scholastics, came under the influence of the ancient Greek cosmological view. They did not believe the universe began with a ‘big bang’. They assumed that the cosmos was the ultimate reality. Gods, spirits, angels, ideas, and human beings were all parts of the cosmos. Each had a fixed place in the scheme of things. This meant that even the Supreme God could not change the course of cosmic history. The cumulative impact of paganism, the cosmological worldview, and fatalism (transmitted by Islam after it conquered the Byzantine Empire) was to make medieval ‘man’ a helpless creature who lived in dread of unknown forces.

My professors believed the secular myth that the notion of human dignity originated in ancient Greece. But even as early as 1885, Henry Thode had already demonstrated that the naturalism of Renaissance art came from the Franciscan tradition, especially from the 14th-century thinkers who rejected Platonism and espoused a philosophy called nominalism. The Greek philosopher Plato held that ideas were the primary reality, and that the material world was a shadow of the Ideas that exist independently. A chair, in other words, was an imperfect shadow of ‘chairness’ that exists in the real realm, the real of ideas. Plato’s philosophy implied that human beings don’t create; we make copies or shadows of reality — ideas. But the medieval nominalists rejected this Greek assumption because the Bible begins with the words, ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. The Greeks had to be wrong, the nominalists reasoned, because God did not copy ideas that already existed. He created out of nothing, ex nihilo. The humanists accepted the nominalists’ idea of God’s freedom and developed its implications. Since God is free and not bound by pre-existing ideas or matter, and since man is made in God’s image, man must also be free. That meant man was not created to be a helpless creature trapped in an inescapable cycle of misery.

The incarnation

Islamic intellectuals were as competent as Europeans. They had the Greek classics and even the Jewish (Old Testament) idea of creation. Why didn’t Muslim scholars make the notion of human dignity an aspect of Islamic culture?

The answer is that the Renaissance writers did not derive their high view of man from only the creation of man. They found human dignity affirmed most supremely in the Bible’s teaching on the incarnation of Christ. The New Testament taught that God saw the misery of man and came as a man, Jesus Christ, to make human beings sons and daughters of God. But Islam said that for God to become a creature as lowly as man would violate his dignity. By asking rhetorically, ‘Can God also become a dog?’ Muslim apologists reduced man to the level of beasts. But far from violating God’s dignity, the incarnation was to be the ultimate proof of man’s dignity: the possibility of man’s salvation, of a man or a woman becoming a friend and child of God.

The poet Petrarch used the incarnation as a central argument in developing Renaissance humanism. He rested his case on the Bible and focused his criticism on Aristotle and Aristotle’s popular Islamic advocate Ibn-Rushd. Of course, Renaissance writers quoted classical writers (more Romans than Greeks) to garnish their treatises on man. But they could not and did not derive their high view of man from the Greco-Roman worldview. It was the Bible’s vision of what man was created to be, and saved to become, that became the commonsense view in the West. It was the biblical view that inspired Ruth to try to save Sheela.

The secular myth

My professors were confused about the philosophical foundations of human dignity because the myth has impressive pedigree. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an early creator of the myth. Shelley’s Prometheus (‘man’) is liberated by rebelling against Jupiter and taking his powers back from his imaginary god. Sophisticated mythmakers, like Marx, Nietzche and Freud, garnished his idea. They ignored the facts of intellectual history outlined above, looked at the failures of the church, and assumed that God was the source of human enslavement. In fact, Freud’s myth about God’s death actually brings man’s death. If there is no God, then man cannot be a spiritual entity. He cannot be a soul, an imaginative, creative self that transcends nature and acts upon nature as a first cause. In other words, Sheela’s parents were right: a baby is not innately better and should have no higher privileges than an unwanted dog, pig or rat.

The West became a humane civilisation because it was founded on the precepts of a teacher, Jesus Christ, who insisted man was valuable. Christ’s incarnation and death defined what a human being is. But now, having rejected its soul, the West has no option but to see human individuality and dignity as illusions, much as Sheela’s parents did.

This article is an edited extract from The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilisation (Thomas Nelson, 2011, £14.99, ISBN 978 1 595 553 225), and is used with permission of the author. To order a copy for £10.00, please call or email 10ofThose and quote 'EN Offer': 0844 879 3243 / sales@10ofthose.com