Escape from Reason
Francis Schaeffer wrote this philosophical analysis in 1968 as part of his broader effort to diagnose what he saw as the intellectual and spiritual crisis of Western civilization. Working from his L'Abri community in Switzerland, where he engaged with young intellectuals fleeing the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Schaeffer observed how modern thought had seemingly abandoned the possibility of unified truth, leaving people trapped between rationalistic despair and irrational mysticism.
Schaeffer traces what he calls the "line of despair" in Western intellectual history, arguing that philosophy, art, music, and theology all crossed a decisive threshold when they abandoned the classical synthesis of faith and reason. Beginning with Aquinas's separation of nature and grace, continuing through Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism, and culminating in modern existentialism, Schaeffer contends that Western thought progressively fragmented into an upper story of meaning and values divorced from a lower story of facts and logic. This dualism, he argues, has left modern people unable to live as whole beings, forcing them to choose between a sterile rationalism that cannot account for human significance and an arbitrary leap into meaning that abandons intellectual integrity.
The book became foundational to evangelical intellectual engagement with secular culture, offering both a historical framework for understanding modernity's problems and a call to return to what Schaeffer saw as biblical Christianity's unified worldview. Escape from Reason established Schaeffer as a major voice in Christian apologetics and influenced a generation of evangelicals to take philosophy and culture seriously as arenas for Christian witness.
Who should read this: Christians seeking to understand how to engage intellectually with secular thought, particularly those in apologetics, philosophy, or cultural criticism. Those looking for detailed philosophical analysis or nuanced intellectual history should seek more specialized works.