Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization.

• Author: Pilon, Juliana Geran
• Position: Book review

Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

Samuel Gregg

Washington: Gateway Editions, 2019, 256 pp.

Since so often "struggle" is shorthand for "class struggle" (without the redundancy), we tend to forget its equally appropriate use in describing efforts to preserve Western civilization, as Australian-born Samuel Gregg does in his book Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. Research director at the Acton Institute and president of the Philadelphia Society, Gregg succeeded in earning a doctorate in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford without abandoning either his Catholic faith or his common sense. His long list of erudite publications include: Morality, Law, and Public Policy (2000); Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded (2001); On Ordered Liberty (2003); The Commercial Society (2007); The Modern Papacy (2009); Wilhelm Ropke's Political Economy (2010); and Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and America's Future (2013). Though all tackle large topics, his latest book seeks to define the very essence of Western civilization--a daunting task, surely, and full of contradictions.

Some find the essence of Western civilization in science and progress, others in resistance to excessive change, while still others blame it for the evils of racism. Though semantics is hardly a popular sport, the twin totalitarianisms of Nazism and communism forced many in recent decades "to consider what the West really stood for, and why these ideologies were antithetical to Western civilization, even though fascism and Marxism were products of Western minds." Could the same culture actually give rise to both the greatest scientists and artists--Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein--and the most vicious monsters who murdered their own countrymen in the name of "justice"?

Gregg believes the answer lies in understanding the ambidextrous complement of reason and faith, their mutual tempering and reinforcement aptly captured by John Donne: "Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right." A one-canned pursuit of knowledge is bound to fail, for knowledge presupposes truth, and truth cannot be attained by either pure empirical observation alone or by blind faith in an otherwise irrational world. Faith-without-reason reduces man to impotence; conversely, reason-without-faith is logically impossible. Ultimately, argues Gregg, it is "the commitment to reasoned inquiry in search of truth" that allows mankind to flourish.

And such inquiry is itself predicated on the primacy of...