How Should We Then Live? Review

How Should We Then Live? review: a powerful argument, not a neutral history

This How Should We Then Live? review begins with the distinction that determines whether Francis A. Schaeffer's book will illuminate or mislead. It is not a detached history of Western civilization. It is an evangelical interpretation of cultural history, written to show that beliefs about God, truth, reason, and human autonomy eventually shape art, institutions, politics, and private conduct. Schaeffer moves from ancient Rome through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, modern philosophy, science, and the arts. Across that enormous range, he argues that the West loses coherence when it abandons the biblical basis that, in his account, can hold reason, morality, freedom, and human dignity together.

That thesis gives the book urgency and unusual unity. It also creates its largest weakness. Centuries of contested history are often arranged around one governing contrast: revelation provides stable truth, while autonomous human reason ultimately produces fragmentation, despair, or arbitrary power. Schaeffer presents that sequence as an explanation of cultural decline. Readers should instead treat it as his theological argument about history. It is neither a neutral consensus nor a conclusion established merely by the number of artists, philosophers, and political events he gathers.

Read on those terms, the book remains valuable. It is memorable, ambitious, and genuinely interested in the way intellectual commitments escape the seminar room and enter ordinary life. Read as a sufficient guide to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, modern science, or twentieth-century art, it becomes too compressed and selective. The best verdict is therefore double: Schaeffer is an energizing guide to worldview analysis and an unreliable substitute for specialist history.

What Schaeffer is trying to explain

The book's real subject is not simply the chronology of the West. It is the movement from ideas to consequences. Schaeffer assumes that people and societies act from deep convictions even when those convictions remain unspoken. A civilization's account of truth, human nature, and moral authority will therefore appear in its laws, images, buildings, music, technology, and political expectations. This is why he ranges so widely. A painting and a constitution are not interchangeable evidence, but for Schaeffer they can reveal related assumptions about what a person is and where meaning comes from.

His historical arc begins with Rome and proceeds through periods that he treats as turning points. The Renaissance receives admiration for artistic achievement but suspicion for what he sees as a growing human-centered autonomy. The Reformation occupies a favored place because he believes it recovered biblical authority while preserving the value of reason and the created world. The Enlightenment then extends autonomy, and later philosophy and art register an increasing separation between rational knowledge and meaning. By the twentieth century, Schaeffer sees fragmentation across philosophy, music, painting, literature, film, politics, and personal life.

The sequence is lucid because the criterion rarely changes. Schaeffer asks whether a culture possesses an adequate basis for truth and value. The danger is that the criterion can become too efficient: a complicated artwork or movement is quickly assigned a place within a preexisting trajectory. The book is strongest when it teaches readers to look for assumptions beneath cultural forms. It is weakest when noticing an assumption becomes equivalent to proving a large historical cause.

This is also why the title's ethical question matters. Schaeffer does not offer history for antiquarian interest. He wants diagnosis to lead to decision. His answer is explicitly Christian: recover biblical revelation, reject the idea that humanity can generate adequate moral absolutes from itself, and live out faith across the whole of culture. A reader need not accept that answer to recognize the seriousness of the question connecting conviction and conduct.

The strength of a book that makes worldviews visible

Schaeffer's greatest achievement is pedagogical. He makes intellectual history feel consequential to readers who might otherwise regard philosophy, theology, and art criticism as isolated subjects. The book encourages a habit of asking what view of reality makes an argument plausible, what view of the human person a policy assumes, and what account of hope or despair a work of art embodies. That habit can survive disagreement with Schaeffer's conclusions.

The breadth also produces productive comparisons. Renaissance art, Reformation theology, Enlightenment political thought, scientific practice, existential philosophy, and modern artistic experiment all enter a single conversation. Specialists will reasonably object that the conversation is too tightly directed, yet general readers can still gain an initial sense of how disciplines interact. Schaeffer refuses the easy separation in which religion is private, ideas are abstract, art is decorative, and politics is merely procedural. For him, each field discloses commitments about reality.

The book also matters as a document in evangelical intellectual history. It accompanied a film project and emerged from Schaeffer's work at L'Abri, the community he founded with Edith Schaeffer. In a 1976 interview, he described himself primarily as an evangelist and explained the project as an effort to address questions across the full range of culture. That self-description helps calibrate the book. Its wide scope is not an accidental failure to become an academic monograph. It is part of an apologetic strategy meant to persuade readers that Christianity speaks to public thought as well as private devotion.

For readers encountering that tradition, the book can be bracing. It grants art and ideas moral seriousness, assumes non-specialists can engage difficult material, and challenges passive consumption of culture. Its denunciation of comfortable, self-protective religion also prevents the argument from becoming only a complaint about outsiders. Schaeffer wants Christian belief to produce intellectual integrity, compassion, community, and visible practice.

Where the historical method becomes too sweeping

The same architecture that makes the book memorable makes it vulnerable. Schaeffer repeatedly treats major figures or movements as doors through which later cultural breakdown enters. Such a structure favors clean transitions and representative symbols, while historical causation is usually more crowded. Economic interests, institutions, technologies, conflicts within traditions, and accidents of reception do not always fit a single history of ideas.

His treatment of the Renaissance is a central example. Schaeffer interprets its humanism as a decisive movement toward human autonomy and connects that movement to later instability. That is a recognizably Protestant apologetic reading, not the settled meaning of the period. Renaissance humanisms varied, classical learning interacted with Christian commitments in multiple ways, and artistic attention to human form or nature does not by itself prove a rejection of transcendence. The book's contrast with the Reformation can therefore clarify Schaeffer's theology more reliably than it clarifies every feature of either era.

The arts expose the same pressure. Schaeffer often reads formal experiment, discontinuity, or dissonance as evidence of philosophical fragmentation. Yet an artwork may challenge convention for many reasons: to discover a new formal integrity, respond to new materials, confront political violence, revise inherited technique, or expand what representation can do. A modern style cannot automatically be reduced to a confession of metaphysical despair. Even sympathetic reassessments of Schaeffer have questioned whether his accounts of Beethoven, Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and later art make the decline thesis do more explanatory work than the evidence warrants.

There is also a problem of selection. A vast survey inevitably omits people, but omissions matter when the included examples seem to demonstrate a near-monolithic cultural direction. Religious modern artists, non-European traditions, competing forms of modernity, and internal disagreements can complicate the story. Schaeffer's evidence often illustrates his framework powerfully; it does not always test the framework against the strongest counterexamples.

None of this requires dismissing the book. It requires using it honestly. Schaeffer should be read as a committed interpreter whose categories can generate questions, not as an impartial authority who has closed them.

Reader fit: who will benefit and who should choose another starting point

The ideal reader is curious about how a Christian worldview critic connects belief to culture and is willing to argue with the book. Evangelical readers can use it to examine an influential strand of their own intellectual inheritance rather than merely repeating its conclusions. Readers outside that tradition can use it to understand why Schaeffer persuaded many Christians that philosophy, art, science, and politics belonged within a unified religious conversation.

It also suits discussion groups. The chapters invite comparison because their claims are large, clear, and consequential. A good group can separate three questions: What does Schaeffer claim? What evidence does he use? What alternative explanations deserve consideration? That approach preserves the book's force without letting confidence replace proof.

Readers seeking a first neutral history of Western civilization should begin elsewhere. So should readers wanting a comprehensive history of philosophy, a balanced introduction to art history, or a current account of science and religion. The book covers each of those territories in service of an apologetic thesis. Its value lies in synthesis and provocation, not disciplinary completeness.

Readers should also know that the prose is driven more by accumulation and assertion than by slow scholarly qualification. Names, periods, and cultural artifacts arrive quickly. That pace can be exciting, but it demands active checking. The right reading posture is neither reverence nor dismissal. It is alert engagement with an author who sees a strong pattern and sometimes mistakes the strength of that pattern for the completeness of the evidence.

How to read the book critically without losing its value

First, distinguish description from interpretation. When Schaeffer identifies a historical event, artist, or philosophical shift, ask where the basic description ends and his theological meaning begins. His meaning may be insightful, but it should not be smuggled in as if it were a date or a catalog fact.

Second, test causal language. When one thinker is said to prepare the way for a later movement, look for the missing links: transmission, institutions, reception, competing influences, and evidence that later figures understood the earlier one as Schaeffer does. Similarity is not necessarily causation, and chronology alone does not establish intellectual descent.

Third, seek counterexamples. If modern art is presented chiefly as fragmentation, look for modern artists whose work pursues order, faith, communal memory, or formal wholeness. If the Reformation is presented as a source of freedom, also examine confessional conflict, coercion, and the long, uneven route toward toleration. If the Enlightenment is presented as autonomous reason, compare its religious, skeptical, revolutionary, and reformist varieties.

Finally, keep the ethical challenge. Schaeffer is right to resist the idea that culture is weightless. Beliefs can shape conduct, institutions can embody moral visions, and comfortable people can use both religion and secular ideals to avoid responsibility. The book's enduring question is not whether every step in its decline narrative succeeds. It is whether readers are prepared to connect what they claim is true with how they use freedom, power, wealth, attention, and community.

Context and alternatives for a stronger reading path

The best companions are books that preserve Schaeffer's scale while changing the method. The Story of Philosophy review leads to Will Durant's highly readable but openly selective portraits of major Western thinkers. Durant also compresses, yet comparing the two shows how different assumptions produce different histories from overlapping material.

For a more explicitly doctrinal philosophical architecture, An Introduction to Philosophy review examines Jacques Maritain's Thomist account of philosophy. Maritain and Schaeffer both reject the idea that thought can float free of first principles, but they stand in different Christian intellectual traditions and assess Thomas Aquinas very differently. That contrast makes an excellent test of any claim that there is a single obvious Christian reading of Western thought.

History of Philosophy review offers another useful comparison: Alfred Weber's survey is itself dated and selective, but reading two large historical maps side by side helps reveal the choices hidden inside chronology. Readers can also browse the broader philosophy and psychology shelf to move from sweeping narratives toward primary philosophical questions and narrower studies.

These alternatives do not replace Schaeffer. They put him in productive company. A wide historical argument is best read against other wide arguments and then checked through specialist work on the periods or artists that matter most to the reader.

Final verdict

How Should We Then Live? remains worth reading because it asks readers to see culture as an arena of consequential belief. Schaeffer's range, moral urgency, and insistence that ideas enter public life explain why the book became influential. He offers a coherent evangelical answer to the problem of cultural fragmentation, and he makes that answer concrete through history, philosophy, science, politics, and the arts.

The book is less successful when coherence becomes reduction. Its historical periods are too varied, its artistic examples too contestable, and its causal sequence too compressed to function as neutral consensus. Schaeffer's theological interpretation should be named as such at every major turn. Readers who do that can receive the book's best gift: a disciplined suspicion that cultural forms carry assumptions and moral stakes. They can also resist its central temptation: treating one compelling pattern as the whole of Western history.

The recommendation is strong but qualified. Read it for worldview analysis, evangelical intellectual history, and serious argument about the relation between truth and conduct. Do not read it alone, and do not confuse its confidence with finality. The book becomes more valuable, not less, when its claims are compared, challenged, and made answerable to the complex evidence they seek to explain.