Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

Reason, Faith and the Struggle for Western Civilization by Samuel Gregg

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This is a well-written, well-informed and erudite survey of Western intellectual history.

Author Samuel Gregg starts with Pope Benedict's Regensberg Address and its observation that Christianity was based on the theological principle that God was Reason in contradistinction to Islam which conceived of God as Will. Gregg then follows up Christianity's definition of God as Logos and subsequent Christian intellectual history from Augustine through the modern era. This thinking was responsible for notions of freedom of choice, reason and constitutionalism.

Gregg also follows Pope Benedict's diagnosis of “pathologies of faith and pathologies of reason.” These pathologies include, Prometheanism (the idea that man can be recreated by changing society), relativism, nihilism, Nietzscheanism, and Scientism, all of which totalize science at the expense of faith. Gregg follows Pope John-Paul II's observation that both science and faith are necessary, that mere faith reduces to superstition, whereas mere science removes the goal or content for which science exists.

Gregg's book is erudite. The reader is introduced to writers, ideas and concepts that are old friends if he has an acquaintanceship with the literature of Western ideas, but, for those who don't this is a good entry point.

For myself, I appreciated Gregg's linkage of Justice Kennedy's “sweet mystery of life” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to the philosophy of Nietzsche. I have often wanted to turn the tables on another Supreme Court decision with the aphorism that “while the Constitution does not incorporate Mr. Spencer's Social Statics, it seems that it does incorporate Nietsche's “Beyond Good and Evil.”

This is an intelligent, mind-stretching discussion on the connection between faith and reason in the West, where the West has gone wrong, and what might be done to correct the problems. It is worth the time spent.