First Word

Some people think music a primitive art because it has only a few notes and rhythms. But it is only simple on the surface; its substance on the other hand, which makes it possible to interpret this manifest content, has all the infinite complexity that’s suggested in the external forms of other arts and that music conceals. There is a sense in which it is the most sophisticated art of all.
– Wittgenstein

“It is impossible to say . . . one word about all that music has meant in my life,”
– Wittgenstein

Without music, life would be a mistake.
– Nietzsche

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
– Martin Luther

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.
– Joseph Addison

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
– Thomas Carlyle

[Music speaks] the universal imageless language of the heart.
– Schopenhauer

Music can never, regardless of what it is combined with, cease being the highest, the redempitve art.
– Richard Wagner

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In his essay, “Christian Aesthetics,” Clark offers his judgment on music. “Music is the lowest form of art.” In what follows I will try to show that Clark’s argument for this conclusion is unsound and then offer some of my own thoughts on music.

Clark presents his main argument in the following paragraph.

“The purpose of art is expression. Of course this short sentence raises many questions. By itself it is uninformative. One should specify what art can and cannot express. One should specify what art should and should not express. These questions cannot be answered without having some notion of the nature of man. Here it is presupposed that God created man as essentially a rational being. This implies that man’s most valuable expressions are rational and intellectual. Therefore, although man can express emotion, by screaming “Ouch,” art becomes more human and valuable in proportion to its intellectual content. This does not deny that excellent technique may express triviality, evil, and insanity. It asserts, however, that what should be expressed is rational and intelligent.”

Drawing from other parts of the essay, Clark’s argument is something like the following.

1. The purpose of art is expression.*
2.1 A thing’s essence determines what is most valuable for it.
2.2 God created man as essentially a rational being.*
2.3 Therefore man’s most valuable expressions are rational and intellectual.*
3. Therefore art becomes more human and valuable in proportion to its intellectual content.*
4. Music is not very expressive; it has no definite meaning (i.e., little intellectual content).*
5. Therefore music has little humanity and value relative to the other arts.
6. Therefore music is the lowest form of art.*

(Asterisks indicate direct quotations from Clark. 2.3 follows from 2.1 and 2.2; 3 follows from 1 and 2.3; 5 follows from 3 and 4; 6 from 5.)

Let us take these premises in order. Clark realizes that (1) is vague as it stands, but thinks that it comes into clearer focus when man’s nature is understood. We shall come to this presently. For now, let us try to unpack this premise.

Since Clark is keen on clear definitions (at one point he accuses even the “better” authors in aesthetics of “not know[ing] the meaning of the words they use”), we should expect him to provide us with definitions for art and expression. Unfortunately he does not. At least no explicitly.

What then is meant by expression? J.L. Austin spoke of the “trailing clouds of etymology” and asserts “that a word never – well, hardly ever – shakes off its etymology and its formation.” Let us start, then, with the etymology of expression and work our way down to current English usage. We will skip over the word in its Middle English and French forms and go right to the Latin. The word comes from expressionem, a noun of action, which in turn comes from exprimere. This is a compound verb formed from premere and the preposition ex. Premere means to press and so the the meaning is literally to press out. (Thus the Italian espresso; of interest to Americans who have recently learned to drink coffee that has been pressed-out.) From this came the increasingly metaphorical to stamp or to be stamped, to copy or portray, and finally to represent or manifest. The Romans used it in the second sense in reference to sculpture and painting and in the third sense to words and sentences. In English the nominal expression still carries the more literal meaning in cooking (“the crushing of the coconut for the expression of the oil)” but it is more commonly used in the last sense. Thus the OED gives as its second entry, representation, manifestation.

What we learn from this is that by saying that the purpose of art is expression, Clark has already placed music in an unfavorable position. For though sculpture and painting are more often than not a representation of some concrete object (a bust of Napoleon) or an abstract object (Dürer’s Melencolia), what is music a representation of? The only two things that come to mind are perhaps emotions and events. Thus the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth can be said to represent joy and the fourth movement of his Sixth represent a storm. (Holst’s Planets may be used as a counterexample, but what he trying to represent, whether successfully or not, is the feelings or atmospheres of the planets, not the planets themselves.) But this is a stretch. For while the Sixth does sound something like a storm, the Ninth does not really sound like joy – what does joy sound like, after all? Better to say that it is joyous and leave it at that.

Why all the bother over the definition of expression though? We all know what (1) means and it appears innocent enough. My answer to this is, yes, it does appear innocent enough, but in this case, appearances are deceiving. If care was taken when reading through the argument, it will have been noticed that in (4) Clark closely connects, perhaps even identifies, expression with meaning. Thus Clark appears to use expression in the sense of representation (and, as pointed out above, this in itself tips the scales against music), but really means by it something more radical. His meaning, given our study of the word, is possible since expression can mean representation and representation can mean stands for. From stands for it is a short hop to means from which we derive the verbal substantive meaning. But notice that he has stretched the metaphorical meaning of expression close to the breaking point and is so far removed from the literal pressing-out that there is no obvious relation between the two. The unwary will read (1) in its normal sense and so skip to the more controversial premises. But they will have fallen for the trick: Clark has just slipped the rabbit in the hat. More will said about this below

The second word that Clark leaves undefined is art. This is intentional since he states elsewhere, “art itself is defective in intelligibility.” Though awkward, he seems to mean that art is not (fully?) intelligible and therefore art is not (fully?) definable. The parenthetical words are important since without them, Clark’s essay would be self-contradictory. If art were unintelligible, per se, he could not possibly rank the different arts as he does. So let us assume that he holds the more modest and defensible thesis that art is not fully intelligible. This leaves open the possibility that it is at least partially intelligible.

So assuming art is partially intelligible, what kind of thing is it? Clark obliges with an answer that, he admits, is not very helpful. “There is no good objection against classifying art as a form of expression.” Though not a definition, it at least places art in a category; it is a species or subset of “forms of expressions.” We have already seen that Clark is up to some mischief with the word expression, put let us ignore that for now and allow him to use it in any (lexically possible) sense he likes. It may be useful at this point to come up with other disciplines or fields that would, on a broad understanding of the word, also count as “forms of expression.” A few come readily to mind: science, mathematics, history, and theology. Mathematics can be defined, for example, as the representation of numbers, points, lines, angles, surfaces, and solids by means of symbols. Similar definitions can be given for science, history, and theology. The question is, what separates art from these other “forms of expressions”? That art and, say, mathematics are distinct is not the question. What makes them distinct is what we want to know. One may be tempted to say that they differ in aesthetic content. Art is concerned with the beautiful while science is concerned with something else, say truth or, in Clark’s view, utility. But this way is not open to him. For one, he admits that art need not be beautiful. “The ugly can also be artistic.” At a deeper level, though, Clark believes that beautiful is undefinable. Plato, he says, was unable to give an definition of it and so, he implies, it is hopeless for mere mortals do any better. Since beautiful is undefinable it surely cannot be used as the criterion that distinguishes art from mathematics.

And even if Clark did think that the beautiful could be used as a criterion, this would not, by itself, distinguish art from math. For many, mathematics is concerned with objects of highest beauty.

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.” (B. Russell, “The Study of Mathematics” in Mysticism and Logic, 60.)

Perhaps, then, art differs from these other fields in having emotional content. Clark sees that this will not do. “This would imply that classical art is not art.” At this point, Clark could claim that the four examples given are not really forms of expression. This would, of course, be arbitrary, but even if we allowed him this, he could not reasonably deny that ejaculations such as “urgh!” and “garn” are forms of expressions. How then do ejaculations and art differ?

Clearly, Clark not only fails to give a definition of art, but he also has no way of distinguishing it from other human activities. Moreover, since math is also a form of expression, it would appear that he is also committed to saying that its purpose is expression. After all, this is what he explicitly says of art — art is a form of expression therefore art’s purpose is expression. Thus, not only is he unable to distinguish math from art, but he confuses their purposes. Furthermore, if art and math have the same purpose (expression) and, as he asserts in (2.3), man’s most valuable expressions are rational and intellectual, then it follows directly that math is more valuable than art. The same could be said for history and science. This is, in fact, does correspond to Clark’s view of the relative values of these subjects. But notice that his whole hierarchy is derivable from vague definitions and questionable propositions concerning teleology. In essence, Clark defends his structuring of human activity — math, then science, then history, then art — by fiat. Clark here, and, incidentally, in many of his other writings, is more guru than philosopher.

Moving on to the last problem with (1), the phrase, the purpose of, is troubling on at least two counts. The first is that it assumes a single purpose. Clark here draws from Plato, who thought every concept stands for one thing, and perhaps from Aristotle, who believed everything has a single purpose or end. After Wittgenstein, though, most contemporary philosophers are leery of such assumptions. What, for example, is the purpose of clothes? The answer is that clothing does not have just one purpose. Clothing covers our nakedness, it protects us from the elements, it signifies our social status, and perhaps other things as well. The same can be said of art. In fact, men who have thought about art have said as much. C.S. Lewis, following the classical and medieval traditions, contends that art has two (legitimate) purposes: entertainment and instruction. (Calvin, by the way, held basically the same view. See Inst. XI 12.) Whether he is right or not is beside the point. For Clark to asset that art has one purpose is already to beg an important question.

The other problem is that Clark assumes that art must have a purpose. But is this necessarily so? Asking this does not entail an endorsement of the cant about art for art’s sake. One can, after all, create a work of art with no particular purpose in mind without being committed to any avant-garde theory of aesthetics. My boys enjoy drawing pictures of knights and dragons. If I were to ask them what the purpose of their drawings was, I am sure they would be at a loss and meekly reply, “we like drawing knights and dragons.” The same can be said of much, perhaps most, art. Why did the ancient Germans and Celts etch rectilinear shapes on their shields and swords? Was it to express something about the world or about themselves? Or did they simply like to draw such such figures? Who knows? It would hardly be surprising, though, if it were for the latter reason. (There is something deep inside man that compels him to make beautiful things.) But whatever the case, their work stands or falls on its own merits. Knowing what their purpose was, assuming they had one, would neither elevate nor diminish the value of their art in the eyes of any modern critic.

The point is that asking what the purpose of art is is probably not be the best question. But then to answer this question, especially in the tendentious way that Clark does, and proceed to order the arts in a hierarchy according to that your answer, is fatuous; and perhaps even evidence of megalomania.

Premise (1), thus, has problems along many lines. Perhaps Clark will do better with his other assertions.

Since I produced (2.1) to make Clark’s argument work, I will not offer an analysis for fear of being accused of misrepresenting him. I will note, though, that this premise, or something like it, is necessary, and that, though reasonable, is not obviously true. Indeed, I believe good arguments could be produced against it.

The next premise, recall, is God created man as essentially a rational being (2.2). As it stands it is ambiguous. It can mean that rationality is an essential part of man; it is a sine qua non. But it can also mean that rationality is the essence of man; it is the sine qua non. To make his argument work, we must take this premise in the second and stronger sense for if rationality were just one aspect of man’s essence it does not follow that his most valuable expressions are merely rational.

The notion that man has only one defining property is, prima facie, implausible. It is implausible for reasons similar for saying that a thing has only one purpose. Here an illustration is helpful. Take woman. The ability to bear children is part of the essence of woman, but her “complete” essence is not exhausted by fecundity. Woman is reflective and passive. She is Femininity as opposed to Masculinity. More could be be said, but this is sufficient for the point. To name one thing as the defining property of woman is almost certainly an oversimplification. The same could be said for man (in the gendered sense) and perhaps most other natural kinds as well (lions, oak trees, planets).

That rationality is an essential aspect of man is uncontroversial. The problem with Clark’s view is that he asserts that rationality alone is essential to man. Or, better said, rationality alone is what distinguishes man from the beasts. This brings us to the heart of the matter. In his book, In Defense of Theology, Clark argues that the image of God is identical to reason. All the other aspects or marks of this image – personality, spirituality, rectitude, morality, authority, immortality, and creativity – are subsumed under it. This is no place for a discussion of the imago dei and I leave it to the reader to consult the Church’s auctores. (See Aquinas, S.T. 1a. QQ. 77-82; Calvin, Inst. I xv; Turretin, Inst. V x; Bavinck, R.D., v. 2 V.12.; compared to such careful and comprehensive accounts, Clark’s discussion comes off superficial.) Still, something must be said about Clark’s view, since it has crucial implications for his theory of art.

If reason is the image of God, Clark must account for morality in terms of it. And this is precisely what he does.

“Since moral judgments are a species of judgment, subsumed under general intellectual activity, one result of the fall is the occurrence of incorrect evaluations by means of erroneous thinking. Adam thought, incorrectly, that it would be better to join Eve in her sin than to obey God and be separated from her. So he ate the forbidden fruit.”

Moral judgments are indeed judgments, but this does not imply they are subsumed under general intellectual activity unless “general intellectual activity” is understood so broadly that it includes the will. This is how Jonathan Edwards’ conceived of the intellect (though he would not put it in these words), but Clark does not follow Edwards. Rather, he (Clark) seems to believe that the will follows the dictates of the understanding. On this account man’s will is not necessarily corrupted since it is the reason that commits the sin (or makes the mistake) and the will has no choice but to follow its directives. Because the will is compelled to choose sin it is not culpable for the sin. And if it is not culpable, it would not necessarily be corrupted. Also notice that this view makes nonsense of the notion of a separate faculty of the will. If the will has no choice, it is not a will.

I realize that this summary dismissal does not pertain to all who hold an intellectualist view of man. St. Thomas and Calvin were both intellectualists and they had the resources to fend off these criticisms as they presently stand. But Clark is no Calvin and no Saint. Nothing in his article from which this quote was taken, offers a successful counter to these arguments (“The Image of God in Man,” JETS, vol 12, p. 4, 1969).

But suppose Clark were to give a fuller account of sin and defend his intellectualism. There are other aspects of the imago that he ignores. I will give just one example. That reason does not exhaust the image is seen also in man’s creative abilities. Man, like his Creator, is able to realize new worlds and new beauties. Not, of course, in the same way that God creates them. Man creates in a derivative way. All his raw materials come from God and he is unable to actualize his creation as God actualizes His. But after all the necessary qualifications have been made, the fact remains that man creates. Or, to borrow from Tolkien, man sub-creates. Tolkien captures an aspect of the imago that Clark completely fails to recognize.

“The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalisation and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent. . . . The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power – upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. . . . we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such ‘fantasy’, as it is called, new form is made; Faërie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”

Sub-creation is not a power of the intellect, but of imagination. Or if one prefers to posit the unity of man’s faculties as Edwards does, imagination is an aspect of the intellect or understanding that is distinct from reasons. This power or faculty sets men apart from the beasts just as much as reason. “[W]e make in our measure and in or derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” Surely, reason is not to be identified with the image of God.

All this to say is that man has an aesthetic nature as well as a rational one. These are, of course, related to one another and man’s aesthetic faculty does not, in principle, conflict with his rational one. (Though man’s sinful nature does often bring discord between his creative and his rational activities, just as brings discord into every aspect of human experience.) Still, man’s aesthetic nature is distinct from his rational nature. Questions of primacy are beside the point. Let the rational faculty be primary and his aesthetic faculty secondary if you like; the aesthetic side of man is still there. This is sufficient to show Clark’s view of the imago is too crabbed.

The strong reading of (2.2), thus, must be rejected. Man essence is not merely rationality. And so the conclusion from (2.1) and (2.2) does not yield (2.3). At best we can conclude that

2.3′ Some of man’s most valuable expressions are rational and intellectual.

This weakened form of (2.3) together with the problems of (1) noted above, show that the inference to (3) is doubly flawed. Without (3), though, the inference to (5) goes by the board; and without (5) so does (6). Thus, Clark’s entire serious of arguments are all failures. Clark has in no way demonstrated that music is the lowest form of art.

But let us extract Clark’s assertion (4) – that music is not very expressive; it has no definite meaning – from his argument and consider it on its own. The first clause strikes us as absurd, especially if we take the word expressive in its loosest sense. What is, we want to ask, more expressive than music? Of course Clark thinks that second clause is merely a gloss of the first. To ask whether something is expressive is, basically, to ask whether it is meaningful. And to the question, “what does this or that piece of music mean?” we are left stumped.

There are at least two ways to answer Clark. The first is obvious. We can reject the pairing up of expressive and definite meaning and thereby remove whatever plausibility his first clause had. The second way is to take Clark’s bull by the horns and answer him on his own terms. Wittgenstein shows us the way. In his discussion of pain-behavior and pain, he famously said , “Sie [Schmerzen] ist kein Etwas, aber auch nicht ein Nichts!” (“[Pain] is not a something, but not a nothing either!”) We can answer Clark in kind. Music has no particular meaning, but from this it does not follow that it is meaningless. It does not mean something, but it does not mean nothing either. The heavens, after all, declare the glory of God, yet there is no speech in them. And while a kindly gesture, such as Mr. Knightly asking Harriet Smith to dance, cannot be fully articulated in language, it can nevertheless be very meaningful, as it was in this case for Emma Woodhouse.

Before the defender of Clark accuses me of equivocating on the word in the last example, he should note that I am merely following Clark’s usage of the word. For had Clark used meaning and expressive as synonyms for having propositional content, his statement would not only be nearly tautologous, but nonsensical. “Music does not have very much propositional content; it has no definite propositional content.” But to say music does not have much propositional content is like saying bourbon does not have much syntax. On the surface, both are true, but at a deeper level both are hopelessly enmeshed in ludicrous category mistakes.

And yet we still want to know what the meaning of music is. I will have something positive to say about this at the end, but for now let us leave off with the, admittedly unsatisfying, words of Aaron Copland. “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’”

So much for the meaning of music. What about Clark’s assertion that music is the lowest form of art? To attempt to defend music from such calumnies is a fool’s errand. For one thing, Music is perfectly capable of defending herself. The quotations at the beginning of this article bear ample testimony to this. Men have always recognized music as a high art. Recognized is the right word. Like the canon of Scripture, it is for men to recognize the value of music not establish it value. But it is folly in another sense. To argue that music is a high art (in my opinion the highest, though sharing the laurel with poetry) is to attempt the impossible. One can no more argue that music is higher than, say, sculpture, than one can argue that the rose is more beautiful than the daisy. All one can do is point and say, “look! listen!” If one does not see it (or hear it), there is nothing more to be said. But this, of course, does not mean there is no correct answer.

Wittgenstein makes a similar point, though coming to the question from a different angle.

“If someone were to ask: What is valuable in a Beethoven sonata? The sequence of notes? The feelings Beethoven had when he was composing it? The state of mind produced by listening to it? I would reply, that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation: If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No, no! That does not interest me – it would not be the exact thing I was looking for.”

No theory can explain music’s value just as no argument can demonstrate its value.

[Some philosophers have attempted to argue that music is the highest form of art. Schopenhauer said that all the arts except music are brought under human concepts or ideas and thus were concerned with representation of phenomena. Here he is an orthodox Kantian. Music, though, is an expression of the will and so, here he departs from Kant, comes closest to the things as they are. Hegel organizes the arts in three increasingly subjective (and thus, for him, exalted) categories: symbolic, classical, and romantic. While symbolic art points, however vaguely, beyond itself, the classical arts (represented best by sculpture) realize the ideal in themselves. Romantic art, made possible by Christianity, recognizes the infinite value of the individual and subjectivity and so moves beyond classical beauty and harmony to pure subjectivity and the tumult of self-consciousness. Of the forms of art particularly appropriate to the romantic style (painting, music, and poetry), music ranks just below poetry since it is more subjective than painting and, a fortiori, other arts such as sculpture and architecture. This is so because it abandons not only sight and touch, but the dimension of space altogether.]

Coda

Man has always explained the work of the great artists in terms of genius or wit (moderns) or the gods (ancients). This is supremely reasonable since such work calls for an explanation. How were mere mortal able to produce such wonders? Never mind that these explanations explain nothing. We can no more analyze the “faculty” of genius than we can sketch the character of Calliope. And even if we could, we would only be kicking the problem down the road – how did Genius acquire his genius or what was the name of the goddess who exhaled her sweat breath into the Muse? The purpose of such “explanations” is, of course, not to explain but to recognize; to recognize we stand in the presence of something magical, something almost miraculous. The artist has taken raw materials such as stone, pigments and canvas, bare-boned stories of the past, and sounds from vibrating strings and reeds, and, by some sort of alchemy, turned them into sculptures, paintings, poetry, and music.

After a good performance or recitation of a great work (during the performance we ask no such question; we are wholly swept away by it and have entered another world – or at least another plane) we ask ourselves, how was that possible? How could Beethoven have sat down at his piano and compose (one wants to say conjure) the Adagio of the Fifth Piano Concerto or Mozart the Sull’ aria duet? (If this is too high brow, how could the unknown composers from Celtic lands have given us their folk tunes?) How could Homer, left to his own resources, have given us Hector and Andromache at the Scaean Gates (Il. VI) or Dante his vision of Beatrice and the sun (Par. I). No human knows the answer. The movie Amedaus captures something of this in the great scene where Salieri recounts his reaction to reading the score of Mozart’s Wind Serenade.

“Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse – bassoons and basset horns – like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly – high above it – an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.”

In great music that is what we hear – the voice of a god. And its effect on us is to produce longing, Sehnsucht, Hoffnungssehnen, or whatever one wishes to call it. Music does not merely express emotion that we then enter into. It shows us there is something more, something higher, something beyond ourselves that is more desirable than any of what Homer called the glorious gifts of the gods – meat, wine, gold, sleep, Venus, even music itself. But it only hints. It does not show us what it is and does not guide us in the way.

We have considered Schaeffer the philosopher in part 1, now we will consider Schaeffer the historian.

The next paragraph begins by asserting that while Rome was great, it could not answer the “basic problems that all humanity faces.” We are still not told what these problems are, but rather than ruining the suspense, he changes the subject and moves to the Greeks. The Greeks, he tells us “tried first to build their society upon the city-state, that is, the polis. . . . But the polis failed since it proved to be an insufficient base upon which to build a society.” As it stands, this is a hopelessly vague claim. What, for example, does he mean by fail? Does he mean that the Greek city-states failed to maintain their independence? If so, then it follows that every tribe, city, nation, or empire that has ever been conquered or absorbed by a foreign power have also failed. Does he mean that the Greek city-states no longer exist? If so, then since Saxon England and the old Confederacy no longer exist, they too failed. Does this entail that these Christian nations did not have an “adequate base?

Another problem is his foundation metaphor. The metaphor is concerned with the relation of buildings to foundations; buildings which sit upon unsound foundations tend to collapse. Fair enough. Now since Schaeffer identifies the polis as the foundation and Greek society as the building he should rather have said, “The polis (the foundation) was inadequate, therefore Greek society (the building) failed.” But this is a very different claim and one that is, on almost any criteria, false. The Greek city-states may have lost their independence, but Greek society continued fundamentally unchanged until about the fourth century A.D. when Christianity became the dominant religion. Schaeffer confuses a change in government with a change in society. About the only significant change that Greek cities experience under Roman domination was that the tax man spoke a different language.

Since Schaeffer nowhere states that Greek society failed – a claim that would necessitate him defining in what sense it failed (morally, economically, politically, socially, militarily) and then providing evidence of its failing – it is probably best to ignore the metaphor altogether. But then what are we left with? One thing that seems clear is that Schaeffer criticizes the Greek polis itself; that there is something inherently unstable about it. But now we must ask what he means by polis. Is he thinking in terms of territory? Is a city-state unstable in ways that larger nation-states and empires are not? Or is he referring to the polis’ government as opposed to other forms of government? Since Greek city-state were typically either democracies or oligarchies, is he saying that these kinds of governments are unstable while others, say monarchies or republics, are not?

He perhaps gives us a clue where he writes, “All values had meaning in reference to the polis.” This may mean that he is thinking of the polis in terms of ethics and aesthetics. If this is what he is driving at, his criticism turns out to be that the polis cannot provide answers to central questions of morality, beauty, and meaningful human life. This is, from a Christian point of view, no doubt true. But what does this have to do with the failure of the polis? Macedonian and, later, Roman armies conquered the Greeks. It was the inability of the independent cities to come together to fight their common foe that led to their ruin. Their lack of a transcendental foundation for values was not the cause – at least in no obvious way. This lack, moreover, did not render them incapable of great victories earlier in their history. Think of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. And let us remember, Macedonia and Rome had no better foundation for values than they had and yet they defeated the Greeks cities. As a piece of historical analysis, Schaeffer’s account of the failure of the polis is superficial.

Schaeffer next turns to the main subject of the chapter, Rome. The Romans of the Republic period, he tells us, “tried to build society upon their gods.” (He also says the Greeks did as well, seemingly taking back the previous discussion of the polis.) After a tedious discussion about the finite nature of Roman gods – “But these gods were not big enough because they were finite, limited” – and, apropos nothing, the mention of a vulgar statue of Hercules and the eruption of Vesuvius, he finally gets down to business.

“[Because the Roman gods were limited], they had no sufficient reference point intellectually; that is, they did not have anything big enough or permanent enough to which to relate either their thinking or their living. Consequently their value system was not strong enough to bear the strains of life, either individual or political. All their gods put together could not give them a sufficient base for life, morals, values, and final decisions. These gods depended on the society which had made them, and when this society collapsed the gods tumbled with it. Thus, the Greek and Roman experiments in social harmony (which rested on an elitist republic) ultimately failed.”

No criticism is possible until we understand just what his argument is. But Schaeffer’s tortured writing style keeps getting in our way. Let us ignore the stuff about Roman gods not being “big enough” (as if they were in want of growth hormones) and meaningless expressions such as “experiments in social harmony” and tangential material such as “elitist republic” and try to get at the core argument. It seems to be structured as follows.

(1) The Romans had finite gods.
(2) Finite gods provide no “sufficient reference point intellectually.”
(3) Thus, the value system of the Roman Republic could not bear the strains of life, ‘individual or political’.
(3.5) Thus the Roman Republic failed

Premise (1) is both intelligible and uncontroversial. The trouble begins with premise (2). What does Schaeffer mean by an intellectual reference point? His gloss of this premise may be helpful. “[Romans] did not have anything big enough or permanent enough to which to relate either their thinking or their living.” But try as I may, I cannot tease any meaning out of this sentence. There seem to be three things or four things under consideration – Roman men, Roman gods, Roman thought, and the Roman way of life. The Roman men presumably tried to relate their thoughts and their way of life to their gods, but their gods were simply too finite (“not big enough”) and no relation could be established. This seems to be the gist, but I have no idea what it means. This is not to say I have no idea of what Schaeffer is trying get at. He no doubt wants to give a transcendental argument showing that Roman paganism does not provide the necessary preconditions for human experience. But wanting to give such an argument and actually giving one are two different things. And it is hardly reasonable to expect the reader to do the heavy lifting for him.

As it stands, (3) does not follow from (1) and (2) since (2) is unintelligible and, of course, (3) does not follow from (1) alone. The first argument is thus abortive. If we ignore argument and turn to the second – that is, the move from (3) to (3.5) – perhaps something can be salvaged. The first thing we want to know is what the Roman value system was. Since the Rome, like modern America, had more than one system of values (there were Epicureans, Stoics, Eclectics, and so on) it is necessary to know which one Schaeffer is criticizing. Schaeffer, unfortunately, does not tell us. What he probably has in mind, though, is Roman paganism. Pagan values (we really cannot speak of a pagan “‘value system” since paganism is notoriously messy and unsystematic) are what broke under the “strain of life.” So we can rewrite (3) as follows:

(3′) The values derived from Roman paganism could not bear the strains of life, “individual or political.”

But this is awkward. Men not values are burdened with life. What he really means is:

(3”) Men who held values derived from Roman paganism could not bear the strains of life, taken either as individuals or as a political body.

Is this true? Let us focus on individual men. Ancients and moderns alike have had to put up with life’s burdens, but as far as I know, the number of nervous breakdowns and suicides were no higher in the Roman period than at any other period, including the modern one – and this without the help of psychoanalysis and Prozac. The Romans appear to have tolerated life’s strains reasonably well. Schaeffer’s claim is not supported by the evidence. Furthermore, many of the virtues that Roman paganism prized were those that inured men to troubles of life – fortitude, temperance, perseverance. Even if Romans were particularly susceptible to being crushed under life’s burdens, it seems hardly fair to blame this on their values. Not at least without argument. But argument is precisely what Schaeffer fails to give us.

Let us take another tack. Perhaps Schaeffer thinks that all the evidence that is necessary to establish the weakness of Rome’s values is the fact that the Roman Republic fell. In other words, there is a direct cause and effect relation between Roman values and the Republic’s fall. But there are numerous problems with this argument. First off, Roman values did not change with the transition from a republican form of government to an imperial-bureaucratic form. Augustus advocated old-time virtues as much as Cicero or Cato and the Roman people looked upon this with favor. Second, the form of this argument is invalid. Just because a system of government changes does not imply that the cause was a weakness in the nation’s values. There are any number of factors that might play a determinative role. In the case of the fall of the Roman Republic, the causes more likely had to do with the inability of the Senate to adapt to the new realities of a far-flung empire and its weakness in dealing with demagogues such as the Gracchi, Sulla, and eventually Caesar. Details aside, if this argument were valid, it could be applied to any nation or state. Thus the defeat of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal could be laid at the feet of the Boer “system of values”; in other words, the values of reformed Christianity. Third, this argument is circular. The main argument, recall, was that since Roman values were weak, Rome fell. The reformulated sub-argument is that Rome fell, therefore Roman values must have been weak. This, of course, is clearly unacceptable.

Since this is the centerpiece argument of Schaeffer’s first chapter, let us not yet abandon hope of finding something of substance. Another argument that could possibly be pieced together from the text is the following:

(4) If a state derives its values from finite gods, it will eventually fail.
(5) The Roman Republic derived its values from finite gods.
(6) Therefore, the Roman Republic failed.

This is a valid argument and if we assume that the second premise is true – it clearly is in some sense, however vague the claim may be – all we have to do is determine the truth of the first premise. Now, if we assume that fail means something like cease to exist, the consequent turns out to be true. Every state in history has failed except the two hundred or so that exist today – and all of these will certainly fail given enough time. Since the consequent is true (states eventually fall), the conditional is also true and so it is immaterial what statement is plugged into the antecedent. (If you do not understand why this is the case, review your elementary logic textbook.) Thus,

(4′) If a state is located in the northern hemisphere, it will eventually fall

and

(4”) If a state fails to promote the personal hygiene of its citizens, it will eventually fall

and

(4”’) If a state does not crown Tarzan its king, it will eventual fall

and, more germane,

(4””) If a state derives its values from an infinite God, it will eventually fall

are equally true. It turns out that while this argument is sound, so are the arguments where (4) is replaced by (4′), (4”), (4”’), or (4””). The argument is, in other words, trivial.

Let us make one last attempt to piece together an argument.

(7) If a state fails, it is due to an “insufficient” value system.
(8) The Roman Republic failed.
(9) Therefore, the Roman Republic had an “insufficient” value system.
(10) The value-system of the Roman Republic was paganism.
(11) Therefore paganism is an “insufficient” value system.

Both the first, (7)-(9), and second, (9)-(11), arguments are valid. Since (8) is true, everything turns on (7) and (10). As it stands, (10) is sloppy for the reason mentioned above and because the Roman value system was pagan, not paganism. But let us not quibble and give (10) to Schaeffer. This leaves us with (7). Ignoring the vagueness of “insufficient value system,” the first problem is one that has previously been noted: the problem of ascribing the failure of a state to its lack of a transcendental moral foundation. It is fatuous to claim that Babylonia fell to Persia, for example, because Babylonia had an insufficient value system. Both had equally insufficient value systems and so no real historical work is accomplished by making such a claim. But this criticism can be broadened. Take other states that have failed such as the Holy Roman Empire or Saxon England or the Southern Confederacy. This gives us, respectively:

(8′) The Holy Roman Empire failed

and

(8”) Saxon England failed

and

(8”’) The Southern Confederacy failed.

Together with (7), we can conclude that each of these states had an insufficient value system. And by (9)-(11) we can further conclude that Christianity itself is an insufficient value system. This is a conclusion that Schaeffer, no doubt, would not wish to endorse.

The only way out of this fix, aside from abandoning (7), is by special pleading. The Holy Roman Empire (and Saxon England and the Confederacy), one could argue, did not really have a Christian value system. Such an argument would be a tall order. But even were it shown that these states were Christian in name only, there are many more examples of failed Christian states that would have to be dealt with. In the end, one would have to argue that there never has been a Christian state. Such a conclusion, though, would render the entire of notion of Christendom meaningless. For my part, I will stick with Christendom and toss out (7).

The Roman Empire, as opposed to the Republic, is the next target in Schaeffer’s sights. Aside from some tedious narrative (“After Caesar’s death, Octavian, later called Caesar Augustus, grandnephew of Caesar, come to power. He had become Caesar’s son by adoption.”) and disputable opinions which he, as is typical, asserts as facts (Virgil’s Aeneid is said to be a glorification of Augustus and his rule), his argument is quite simple: “But a human god [the emperor] is a poor foundation and Rome fell.” Before analyzing this argument, we should pause to at least admire Schaeffer audacity. It took Gibbon a lifetime of study and hundreds of pages to come to his conclusion about why Rome fell. Schaeffer takes just one sentence.

This first objection that comes to mind is that the assertion is vague. There is, after all, a large gulf between the propaganda about divine emperors and the claim that these divine emperors were the foundation of imperial Rome. Most took this claim with tongue in cheek, including most of the emperors themselves. (Vespasian said on his deathbed, “I think I am about to become a god.”). Some, of course, took the imperial cult more seriously than others, but the vast majority of educated men saw it for what it was: a crass public relations stunt.

The most obvious objection, though, is that Rome fell during the period when “non-divinized” Christian emperors were ruling. Indeed, the pagan argument of the day was that Rome had stood unconquered for almost a millennium under her old gods and it was not until Christianity became dominant that the barbarians were able to rout the legions and sack the city. This argument was taken seriously enough by Augustine who answered it in one of the great monuments of Christendom, The City of God.

Schaeffer does mention that Christianity became the official state religion in the fourth century, but dismisses this with a wave of the hand – “the majority went on in their old ways.” Once again, though, we have typical Schaefferian ambiguity. Does he mean that the majority were still pagan or that the majority still believed the emperors to be divine? If the former, this statement is irrelevant since his argument is that Rome fell because it had a human god as its foundation. If the latter, the statement is false. The imperial cult was all but dead by the time of the last (western) Roman emperors. Thus no matter how the statement is interpreted, it does not save his argument.

Schaeffer is tedious and, I am afraid, so is this review. I will comment on one more paragraph and end this sorry business.

“It is important to realize what a difference a people’s world view makes in their strength as they are exposed to the pressure of life. That it was the Christians who were able to resist religious mixtures, syncretism, and the effects of the weaknesses of Roman culture speaks of the strength of the Christian world view. This strength rested on God’s being an infinite-personal God and his speaking in the Old Testament, in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, and in the gradually growing New Testament. He had spoken in ways people could understand. Thus the Christians not only had knowledge about the universe and mankind that people cannot find out by themselves, but they had absolute, universal values by which to live and by which to judge the society and the political state in which they lived. And they had grounds for the basic dignity and value of the individual as unique in being made in the image of God.”

Though vague and loosely constructed, this sounds something like a presuppositional argument. What is missing is the epistemology necessity of Scripture. More objectionable than the poorly executed apologetic is the misstatement about the Christian martyrs. The early Christians did not maintain their holy profession because their world view could answer questions that paganism could not. They made the good confession because our Lord’s grace upheld them. This is Paul’s testimony. ‘At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me . . . Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me’. There is nothing here about world views or absolute values or grounds of human dignity. Such things are wholly inadequate for the Christian in times of trial. The Lord stood by the Paul and so he stood. The Lord stood by the holy martyrs and so they stood. While one’s world views is important, no Christian ever died for his world view.

Schaeffer spends the rest of the chapter talking about Fellini flicks, the load capacity of Roman bridges, his favorite Roman ruins (“I love Avenches”), the cruelty of Rome (but was there no nobility and beauty?), the reason for the persecution of Christians, the poor quality of late Roman art, and Roman economics. It is dull reading and littered with ugly prose (“Culture and the freedoms of people are fragile”). More to the point, nothing is added to support his central thesis.

Enough. We have seen that the first chapter of How Should We Then Live? is vague, ambiguous, trivial, and meandering. Some of Schaeffer’s sentences even lack meaning. When not simply pontificating, his arguments are muddled and the reader is forced to reconstruct them. But even when reconstructed in the best possible light, they are generally unsound and easily refuted. Schaeffer displays little grasp of epistemology, his understanding of Roman history is amateurish, and he is either theologically confused or disingenuous. In fine, this is a bad book in almost every conceivable way.

C.S. Lewis once said that marking good essays and bad essays is easy, it is the those that fall in between that are the real trouble. Good papers require little comment; bad papers require too many and so the best policy is to send the student back to the drawing board. (For those that fall between it is necessary to show the student that while his work was not bad, neither was it first rate.) This is true of grading, but it is not true of book reviews. When it comes to writing a review of a bad book that has come to be regarded as a good book, a great deal of commentary and analysis is called for in order to demonstrate that it is indeed bad. This is tedious business for both the reviewer and the reader of the review. But if the labor results in debunking the bad book that postures as good book, something worthwhile will have been accomplished. At the very least it should save a bit of precious space on the book self for more deserving works.

The bad book I wish to debunk is Francis Schaeffer’s magnum opus, How Should We Then Live? In order to properly carry out this unpleasant task, I will have to confine my review to only a portion of the book. In fact, I will comment on one chapter only. This may seem unfair at first since a book, one may reasonably argue, cannot be said to stand or fall on such a small number of pages. No doubt this is generally true. Almost all books, even some of the great ones, have weak sections. Think of the last two books of Paradise Lost. The soundness of a book, unlike bridges and chains, cannot be determined by the weakest point or link. But there are exceptions to this rule. One of these exceptions is that the pages reviewed are representative of the whole.

This leads me to the second purpose of this review. It can be viewed as an exercise in what modern colleges call “critical thinking.” In most critical thinking courses the teacher will often take a piece of writing and criticize it for the instruction of his students. He then hands out further reading and tells them to go and do likewise. It is my hope that this review will motivate some to carry on the project to continue through the rest of Schaeffer’s book and so benefit from the exercise of discovering fallacies, ambiguities, infelicities, confusions, muddles, and even rank nonsense. I assure you, it will provide plenty of grist for this mill.

Let us begin the review with the subtitle, “The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture.” (The title itself seems to have been cribbed from William Morris’s essay, “How Shall We Live Then.” This may be coincidence, but Schaeffer has a history of failing to acknowledge those who have influenced him.) This subtitle is highly misleading. Ask anyone with a moderate education about the rise of western thought and culture and he will almost certainly say something about the Greeks. The Greeks were the starting point for so much of our (western) thought that it would be tedious to mention all the fields they opened for us – epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, the plastic arts, mathematics, logic, philosophy, history, psychology, astronomy, medicine, grammar, geography, harmonics. Yet Schaeffer does not begin his tale of the rise of western thought with the Greeks, but with the Romans. (This is not quite true; he does discuss and dismiss the Greeks in a single paragraph.) But in almost no sense of the word rise can Rome be said to have caused the rise of western culture. The Greeks were vastly more important than the Romans. Indeed, the greatest contribution Rome made to the west was that it had the good sense to preserve much of the Greek learning. Thus if the very people who were responsible for the rise of western thought and culture are almost wholly ignored, how can the subtitle be viewed as anything but false advertisement?

Such criticism may appear nitpicking. And so it would be if it did not illustrate one of the major failings of the book. This kind of misleading and inaccurate language is found throughout the book. Again and again Schaeffer uses words in a slovenly and vague manner. The subtitle is only the first of many examples.

Before turning to more substantial matters, a few factual errors in the chapter should be noticed at once. On page 24 he commits two blunders. He asserts that the Scots were “too tough to conquer” for the Romans. Aside from the fact that the Romans referred to the Irish as Scots not the inhabitants of what is modern day Scotland – the Romans called them Caledonians and later Picts – the Romans did indeed conquer Caledonia under Agricola. (See Tacitus, Agricola, 25-38.) Now if what Schaeffer means is that the Romans did not permanently subdue and occupy Caledonia, he is correct, but the reason for this was not that the Caledonians were “too tough,” but that they did not consider Caledonia worth the effort. It was strictly a dollar and cents decision.

On the same page there is a note that explains two photos of a statue found on the facing page. The statue is of a warrior dying of a wound to the torso and the note refers to it as “The Gladiator.” Schaeffer presents this as evidence of Rome’s cruelty. But the statue is actually a Roman copy of a Greek work and the figure is not a gladiator, but a Celt. The statue, in other words, has nothing to do with either Romans or gladiators. What is more, anyone with the slightest bit of sensibility can immediately see that the Celt is portrayed sympathetically. The type of death he faces may be cruel, but the artist was highly sensitive to his suffering. A people or culture that produced art like this could not have been fundamentally cruel.

But enough of these preliminaries. Let us now turn to text itself for close inspection. Our troubles begin with the opening paragraph. We are told in the first sentence, “There is a flow to history and culture.” This type of awkward language is, as we shall see, typical of Schaeffer. Its awkwardness is made explicit when we take the same basic sentence and replace ‘history’ with something more concrete. “There is a flow to a river” or “There is a flow to a sewer system.” While these sentences are understandable, no native English speaker would likely, outside poetry, utter them. More natural is “Rivers and sewers flow.” So rather than “there is a flow to history,” Schaeffer should have better said “history flows.” Once it is put into good English, though, we see right away that the statement is a platitude. For whatever history is, it must have some kind of ‘flow’, some movement or change to it. Why then bother to state this in the opening sentence? Why state it at all? Schaeffer must think he is saying something more. And by reading on, one can piece together what this might be. He seems to mean that history is like a river in the double sense that history not only flows or moves but that its flow is channeled in a certain direction. History, like a river, follows a certain course. Though perhaps controversial, this is at least clear and reasonable. Why then does he not say what he means?

Schaeffer next tells us what makes the channel of history. ‘This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people’. Apart from the mixed metaphor – trees, mountains, teeth and numbers have roots, not streams – the sentence is vague. By using the word people he is in danger of setting the reader down the wrong path. We immediately think of people as common people, as opposed to the nobility or the intelligentsia, and are tempted to counter that it is not common people who make history, but certain kinds of people – kings, conquerors, philosophers, prophets, and so on. But Schaeffer is not pushing an egalitarian view of history. What he means by people is simply human beings and the emphasis of the sentence is not human beings but human thought. The context of the first couple pages makes this clear. Thus history is ultimately the product of human thought and not merely the product of human action. Or, perhaps better, though history is the study of human actions, these actions are always grounded in human thought. Human thought, in other words, is the ‘wellspring’ or main source of history.

This, of course, is a controversial statement and calls for elaboration if not defense. All kinds of things have been put forward as the prime mover of history – economic forces, social forces, even natural forces. But if we leave these things aside and consider man in general, it is not at all obvious that it is his rational faculty (or, as Schaeffer calls it in the next sentence, his ‘thought world’) that determines most of his actions. Plato thought the appetite and not reason dominated most men. Hume believed the motive force of most human behavior was habit. Our experience shows that there is truth to both these rival views. For many men, if not most, reason is simply a useful means to satisfy appetite or a means to justify habit.

At a deeper level, the view of history Schaeffer presents is on all fours with humanism. Whether man’s reason or will or appetite dominates is not the point. The Scriptures teach that God’s decree and his works of providence are the “well springs” of history. Man’s faculties, though important, are secondary. Schaeffer, a presbyterian minister, presumably believed this. Why he fails to mention the first principle of Christian historiography is difficult to fathom. It is no good to defend him by saying he is playing his cards close to his chest, waiting to reveal them at the right moment. First off, it is one thing for an author to hide some of his cards until the opportune time, it is quite another thing to pretend he is playing a hand he has not been dealt. And second, Schaeffer never gets around to laying down his cards. Nowhere in the book does he present the Christian view of history.

He seems to make another theological blunder in the very next sentence: ‘People are unique in the inner life of the mind’. I say seems since this sentence is ambiguous. It may mean that individual people are unique in that they each have a different mental life. This does not fit the context though. More likely he means that human beings alone of all creatures have faculties for understanding and imagination. But this, of course, is not true. Angels are at least as rational as man and are probably even more creative. And lest anyone should throw up the fairness flag and defend Schaeffer’s statement on the ground that he is dealing with human history, it should be remembered that angels have played a significant role in our history.

Schaeffer next explains what he means by the “inner life of the mind”: “what they [humans] are in their thought world determines how they act.” Unfortunately, this explanation is also ambiguous. Let’s pretend we know what a “thought world” is and concentrate on the first part of the clause. The most natural reading of “what they are in their thought world” is “how men conceive of themselves” and so the whole clause comes out to, “the way in which a man conceives of himself determines his actions.” Apart from the fact that this is not always true (most men have any number of false conceits about themselves), this natural reading does not fit the context. What Schaeffer seems to be trying to say is something like, “what a man values most determines how he acts.” While there is some truth to this, it is far too strong as it stands. A man may value a healthful diet, for instance, and yet end up eating most of his meals at MacDonalds. What is true for men is also true for societies. Romans valued discipline, order, temperance and courage. A quick glance at Tacitus reveals that many if not most Romans of his day exhibited none of these virtues. What a man or what a society is ‘in their thought world’ does not necessarily determine how he or they act. If we learn anything from history, it is that other factors contribute to man’s behavior just as much, if not far more so, than his “thought world.” Fear of the whip (or the Human Resources Department) is for some men, a more important source of motivation than their “thought world.” Men may prize reason, but many of their actions are determined by factors that cause them to ignore and even work against it.

Schaeffer’s next move is to introduce the concept of a presupposition. Presumably, these are in some way related to a “thought world.” But what kind of things are they? “By presuppositions we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic world view, the grid through which he sees the world.” Such compounding of definitions should put the reader on his guard. Why give three when only one is called for? But we must take what we are given and so let’s take them one by one. The first is obviously wanting. Ask most men how they look at life and they will answer with words such as, “optimistically,” “humorously,” “morosely,” “ambivalently.” They will, that is, think the question is about what attitude they take toward life. Since whatever presuppositions turn out to be, they are certainly not attitudes, this definition misleading at best. The second definition is a bit more promising. Leaving aside the adjective – which seems to be a throw away since the notion of a non-basic world view is probably incoherent – presuppositions are indeed related to a world view. So far so good. But what then is a world view? Is it a basic attitude towards life? We already dismissed this. Is it what presuppositions make up? This may be true, but, due to its circularity, is unhelpful as a definition. Is it something else? If so, what? Obviously something more needs to be said. Schaeffer takes one last stab: presuppositions are ‘grids’ through which we see the world. At first blush this appears to be better. Students of Van Til will, no doubt, be familiar with such language and so naturally fill in the details. Unfortunately for the reader innocent of Van Til’s work, all he has to go on is a metaphor – and a vague one at that. Presuppositions are in some way like a sieve; some things pass through while other things are kept out. But what kind of things are filtered and how this filtering works is not explained. Thus as a definition, this proves abortive just as the other two.

So much for the definitions. Schaeffer seems to have realized that he was skating on thin ice and so he tries another tack by giving certain characteristics of presuppositions. “Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists.” This is a difficult (and ugly) sentence and so let us try to unpack it. First off, what is meant by “that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists”? There are at least two possibilities. The first is that men form beliefs about what exists. The other possibility is that men form beliefs about things he already assumes to exist. A man believes, say, in trees, and forms certain beliefs about them – they bear leaves, have roots, and so on. This interpretation of the clause has to do with predication. Which of the two is correct is anyone’s guess.

The phrase “rest upon” also is vague. This metaphor is usually given an epistemological sense and is roughly equivalent to “is supported by” or “is justified by” or “is warranted by.” Thus my belief that Celts sacked Rome in 390 BC rests upon Livy. That is to say, I justify my belief that Celtic tribes sacked Rome in 390 BC by making reference to certain passages in Livy. But however we understand the second part of the sentence (whether it is concerns existential claims or predication), an epistemological interpretation of “rest upon” turns the whole thing into nonsense. To say, “Presuppositions are justified by beliefs about what kinds of things exist” is to state the matter all backwards. The arrow of justification is pointed in the wrong direction. Beliefs are justified by presuppositions not vice versa. If presuppositions were justified by non-presuppositional beliefs, they would not be presuppositions in the first place.

How then are we to understand “rest upon” if not in an epistemological sense? It appears Schaeffer wants to say something like “are concerned with” or “are about.” The problem is that “rest upon” means neither of these things. Thus we are forced to conclude that Schaeffer has either used the wrong words or that the sentence is so confused that it is unintelligible. Out of charity we will assume the former and rewrite the sentence as “Presuppositions are concerned with certain kinds of beliefs . . . ” To now bring in the rest of the sentence, the beliefs that presuppositions are concerned with are either existence claims or predication. This is passably intelligible and at least allows for us to evaluate Schaeffer’s claim. And what we see at once is that it will not do. I believe that there is cereal in my pantry (an existential belief) and I believe daffodils are yellow (a “predicational” belief). But these beliefs cannot be presuppositions. For whatever presuppositions turn out to be, they cannot be about such mundane things as cereal boxes in pantries and the color of flowers. Presuppositions run much deeper than this.

No matter if this is no good, Schaeffer gives us another characterization. “People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world.” Aside from the horrible alliteration (does Schaeffer have no ear for the English language?), here we have grids and world again, but now with the twist that grids play an active role. Originally presuppositional were looked through, now they are laid down (like railroad tracks), and brought forth (like witnesses at a trial) into the external world. This new description makes it sound as if presuppositions have some sort of telekinetic powers. But this aside, Schaeffer gives us a metaphor that is inconsistent with his previous metaphor. And so, far from explaining what presuppositions are, he only adds to the confusion.

Things are obviously not going well and so he makes one final attempt to set things straight. “Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions.” This is probably the best characterization yet, but it is still too vague to be of much help. In what way do they give us values? More importantly, what kind of thing is able to do this? We were previously told that they are like filters, now we are told they are like foundations. But filters and foundations are two very different kinds of things. How can they be like both? It is, of course, possible that they operate like filters in one sense and foundations in another. Both may be true, but in what sense are they both true? And as for being the basis of our decisions, do presuppositions really provide the basis for, say, my wife’s decision to cook bacon and eggs rather than oatmeal for breakfast? Obviously Schaeffer means certain kinds of decisions. But what kind of decisions does he have in mind? Important decisions? This is too vague. Ethical decisions? This is true in some sense, but as it stands, is not precise enough. Often times presuppositions play no role in our ethical decisions. One may, after all, “presuppose” some kind of ethical system that obliges him to stand up to bullies. But other factors (fear or indifference) may intervene and cause a failure of nerve or will.

Schaeffer spends the next paragraph asserting that man’s thoughts are the most important factor in determining his behavior. Indeed, he gives the impression that they are the only factor that determines his behavior, but we have dealt with this already. After his bit about catching presuppositions like catching measles, he tells us that men of “more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what world view is true.” This seems to imply that there is a distinction between presuppositions and world views, contradicting his earlier statement that presuppositions are identical to world views. Perhaps this is just sloppy and so we will pass over this without further comment. What we want to know now is how ‘people with more understanding’ go about determining which world view is true. If presuppositions are like “grids” that men look through (assuming we know what this means), how is it possible to test them against the world? Would this not necessitate taking off the grid and comparing it with the world? This seems hardly possible since presuppositions, we were previously told, are the foundations upon which man judges what is true? Van Til, of course, has given us the answer to this difficult question. But Schaeffer does not seem to realize the weight of this problem, let alone provide us with an solution. What he does say, in one of his more awkward sentences (“When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’.”), is that there are only few basic world views. By this he seems to imply that the problem of determining which is true is attenuated by the fact that there are only so many options. What then are these options? In order to answer this question, we must study, says Schaeffer, the “flow of the past.”

This leads to his general thesis:

“To understand where we are in today’s world – in our intellectual ideas and in our cultural and political lives – we must trace three lines in history, namely, the philosophic, the scientific, and the religious. The philosophic seeks intellectual answers to the basic questions of life. The scientific has two parts: first, the makeup of the physical universe and then the practical application of what it discovers in technology. The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists. People’s religious views also determine the direction of their individual lives and of their society.”

Though the first sentence is barely intelligible, what Schaeffer seems to be trying to say is that in order to understand modern culture we must understand what led up to it. And this historical understanding must concentrate on the history of philosophy, science, and religion. Schaeffer next offers something like a definition of philosophy. Philosophy is the attempt to answer the basic question of life. But this is un unhelpful. Biology could just as well be so defined. And just what are these basic questions of life? Schaeffer gives no examples and so the reader is left on his own. One innocent of philosophy would likely think of questions such as, “what career path should I follow?” “where should I live?” “whom should I marry?” (If this seems fatuous, ask somebody this question and see what kind of answers you are given.)

His characterization of the “scientific” is little better. Here he gives not a definition, but an analysis. He begins, “The scientific has two parts.” This sounds meaningful, but what is the adjective standing in for? The scientific line in history? The scientific method? The scientific approach to knowledge? Perhaps he simply means science. Let’s try some of these and by tweaking his sentence a bit. “The first part of the scientific line in history is the makeup of the physical universe.” This crosses over the borderline of intelligibility and so clearly won’t do. How about, “The first part of the scientific method is the makeup of the physical universe”? This is no better. The same goes for the remaining two. It seems something more radical than tweaking is necessary to make this sentence meaningful and so it is probably best to scrap the sentence altogether and start over. He probably means something like, “One of the main goals of science is to discover the physical makeup of the universe.” The second half of the sentence is even worse. “The second part of the scientific is the practical application of what it discovers in technology.” This, of course, has all the problems of the first half with the addition of an ambiguity. Does technology result from the discoveries of science or, rather absurdly, does science make discoveries by looking at the products of technology?

When he gets to religion, the third leg of his historical tripos, Schaeffer prudently refrains from giving a definition and leaves the reader to his own resources. But even so, his statement about religion is problematic. Read literally – and how else are we to read it? – it says that religion itself, without reference to anything else, determines the “direction” of men. If this is the case, why then bother bringing up philosophy or science at all? Obviously he does not mean what he has written, but rather something like religious beliefs play an important role in man’s individual and corporate actions.

Schaeffer next explains why following these “lines” is useful and what period of history he will begin to trace them.

“As we try to learn lessons about the primary dilemmas which we now face, by looking at the past and considering its flow, we could begin with the Greeks, or even before the Greeks. We could go back to the three great ancient river cultures: the Euphrates, the Indus, and the Nile. However, we will begin with the Romans (and the Greek influence behind them), because Roman civilization is the direct ancestor of the modern Western world. . . Roman law and political ideas have had a strong influence on the European scene and the entire Western world. Wherever Western civilization had gone, it has been marked by the Romans.”

Once again, Schaeffer’s prose skirts dangerously close to the meaningless. Reread the first sentence. At a glance it looks somewhat intelligible, but this is due to the imagination and sympathy of the reader. We think we know what he is getting at and so fill in the details. Upon inspection, the main problem is the word, as. He uses it as a conjunction meaning something like while. Rewritten the sentence (skipping over the bit about dilemmas and flows) comes out, “While we learn lessons from history, we could begin with the Greeks.” But this is hardly intelligible. We might as well say, “while we eat our dinner we could begin with the soup” or “while we are touring New England we could begin in Vermont.” Once dinner or a tour of New England has already begun, asking where to begin is nonsense. So let us scrap the conjunction and rewrite the sentence while keeping as much of the original wording as possible. “In what follows we shall attempt to learn lessons from the past and one place we could begin is the ancient Greeks, or even older civilizations.” Still ugly, but at least intelligible. Now we are ready to bring in the rest of the sentence. The lessons that Schaeffer wants us to learn from history concern “the primary dilemmas which we now face.” Since a dilemma is a choice between two undesirable alternatives, the sentence can be rewritten as, “In what follows we shall attempt to learn lessons from the past about the primary choices we face in the modern world, where each choice comes down to two undesirable alternatives, and one place we could begin is the ancient Greeks, or even older civilizations.” Though intelligible, Schaeffer could hardly have meant this. But we are not yet done. One final touch remains. The way in which Schaeffer wants us to learn such lessons from the past is by ‘considering its flow’. We have previously glossed flow to mean “following a certain course” and so we are now in a position to piece together the entire sentence.

“In what follows we shall attempt, by considering the course history has followed, to learn lessons from the past about the primary choices we face in the modern world, where each choice comes down to two undesirable alternatives, and one place we could begin is the ancient Greeks, or even older civilizations.”

This is, I am afraid, a faithful translation of the original. Since it is still convoluted and since Schaeffer almost certainly meant problems instead of dilemmas, let us try again, this time rewriting the entire paragraph.

“A study of history may be helpful in coming to understand the problems of the modern world. We could begin with the Greeks or even begin with the ancient river cultures. It is perhaps best to begin with Rome, though, since the modern west descends directly from it. Of course to understand Rome we have to understand something about the Greeks, and so we will actually begin with Greeks. (But not really since I will summarize and dispatch 500 years of Greek history in the next paragraph.) Understanding Rome is important because its laws and politics have had a great influence on western nations. By the way, please forget what I said in the previous paragraph about philosophy, science, and religion. Law in politics are more important than those kinds of things.”

Before moving on to the history of Rome, Schaeffer’s next major section, I have saved my favorite sentence for last. “Wherever Western civilization has gone, it has been marked by the Romans.” We, of course, know what Schaeffer means, but notice how the ambiguous syntax presents us with the ludicrous image of western civilization going on a tour, much as a circus or rock and roll band, where at each venue it is witnessed by men in togas who by all accounts should have been dead centuries ago.

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