Francis Schaeffer, in his classic work How Should We Then Live, and Allan Bloom, in his classic The Closing of the American Mind, established themselves as two of the most seminal thinkers of the late Twentieth Century. Both of them saw the coming demise of western culture, but each viewed this demise through a different lens. Were these views mutually exclusive?

Schaeffer and Bloom also agreed that the academy in the west had been greatly affected by this drift. Schaeffer asserted that the university was once the hallmark of Christian influence, the repository of the Christian worldview that sustained society and culture. Its demise had begun in the Enlightenment with the dethronement of revelation and the ascendancy of human reason. Bloom, however, argued that the university was actually the product of the Enlightenment, and that the Enlightenment was a victory for human rationality over the forces of religious dogma. The fall of the university was due to the initial influence of the thought of Rousseau, which found its fulfillment in the German connection, whose thinkers took the findings of philosophical naturalism quite seriously, and sought meaning within the depths of human irrationality.

Perhaps the greatest point of difference between Schaeffer and Bloom was in their respective views of antiquity. Schaeffer saw Greco-Roman philosophy as a contaminating influence in medieval thought. The gods of antiquity were little more than glorified humans, and the city and the state were insufficient for the salvation of man. These cultures failed because they were based on the wrong presuppositions. The reemergence of Plato and Aristotle in, for example, the thought of Thomas Aquinas began to corrupt the Christian consensus, ultimately leading to the Enlightenment and the abandonment of this consensus altogether.

Bloom, on the other hand, claimed that Socrates and his philosophical progeny are the glory of human thought, the paradigmatic figures and the true lights to which we must continually return to reorient ourselves to the way things are supposed to be. Our demise is due to our selling out to naturalistic science and relegating the ancients to historical irrelevance. We may study them in order to learn how people thought in that historical era, but our progressive historicism will not allow us to see in them any applicability to our current circumstances. We have outgrown the greats.

Finally, Schaeffer and Bloom both agreed that we now live in a two-tiered world, with true knowledge allegedly occupying the lower tier of naturalistic science, and religion and morality allegedly occupying the upper tier of personal taste and opinion. To live true to reality, so we are told, we must confine ourselves to the lower tier where there is only pessimism, hopelessness, and death. We may, if we wish, take an irrational leap of faith into the upper tier in an attempt to create meaning without reason, but we will find no knowledge there. Schaeffer’s antidote for this intellectual poison would be a return to the Bible, whereas Bloom’s solution would be a return to a foundational study of the ancient Classics.

Schaeffer’s and Bloom's views are not mutually exclusive. It is not either/or, but both/and. On the one hand, the Christian worldview has been strong enough to absorb the thought of the ancients such that the contribution of these great men has been preserved throughout history. On the other hand, the ancients have provided the Church a philosophical vocabulary that has enabled Christianity to communicate effectively to an unbelieving world. The discerning integration of philosophy and theology can only serve both well.

Blessings,

Arnie Gentile