Christianity as mother of western liberalism

Inventing the Individual: the Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop belongs to the genre of the history of ideas, much like Tarnas' The Passion of the Western Mind or Taylor's Sources of the Self. Siedentop, a fellow of Keble College Oxford, gives us an accessible journey through the transformations of the self from the preclassical Western family, through ancient Greece and Rome and the rise of the church in Europe to the sixteenth century.

The theme that runs through the book and gives it its coherence is the transition between the natural inequality of pre-Christian Europe and the equality of persons fostered by the faith. In the pre-classical world, the head of the family, the paterfamilias, or the head of the tribe were the only persons to whom self government was attributed. The position of the paterfamilias was religious, he was the priest of the family who guarded the sacred hearth and presided over appropriate offerings to the gods. All the people in subjection to him were non-persons who were not believed to have minds of their own.

In the classical world of Greece, the only persons who were deemed to be fully human were males who could use the facility of reason. This placed such a person at the top of the great chain of being that determined ones place in society. Women, children, the uneducated, workers and slaves were essentially non-persons since they were not self-determined. They could not be so because action was deemed to spring directly from reason: "there was no ontological gap between thought and action" nothing that we would identify as the will. This does not mean that ancient psychology was fundamentally different from our own, unlikely when we consider our common evolutionary path, but that the culture did not recognise intention as a separate identity to that of reason. Thus while we recognise reason as instrumental, the ancients thought of it as the essence of a person.

Thus one who could not utilise reason could not be a person in the sense that a citizen was a person. This reflected the prioritizing of the intellect and reason by the Greek philosophers. Siedentop calls this "natural inequality" because it conformed to what was understood as the natural hierarchy of beings. A person was completely determined by his position in this hierarchy for life.

With the rise of the polis and the necessity for broader government this hierarchy was maintained with the recognition of citizens as those who were from elite families and who were trained in reason and oratory. Such citizens ruled with the help of divination from the gods, signs in the heavens, oracles, animal entrails or whatever. The machinery of government was intertwined with a great panoply of religious notions. In Greek and Roman culture reason existed side by side with a mythological consciousness that limited an assessment of reality and eventually rang the death knell for these cultures.

Siedentop marks the change that lay at the root of our present understanding of persons not with the Renaissance with its harking back to the thinking of the Greeks nor to the European Enlightenment with its much vaunted rediscovery of reason and empiricism but to the influence of one who is outside of much contemporary history writing: St Paul.

St Paul saw that persons were not determined by their birth or education or position in life or race but that all stood before God as independent souls.

Paul broke with the ancient world when he proclaimed:"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3:28)

Paul demolished the hierarchy of being with reason at the top when he wrote:

"Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." (1Cor 1: 20-25)

Siedentop elaborates: "Paul's conception of the Christ introduces the individual, by giving conscience a universal dimension. Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history?"

You can see how the new religion that overtook the ancient world destroyed that world forever. This realization is the center of the book, the rest is a detailed account of how it came to produce the modern world and our idea of the individual and our understanding of equality, of society consisting of souls, each standing before God.

As the effect of Christianity on Europe deepened, society was transformed by example. The early monastics modeled an interior life of prayer and discipline and self-denial. Where the ancients lauded the man of oratory and action, the early monastics modeled a life of self-reflection, of interiority.

The government of the later monasteries provided an example of democratic government with the higher positions established from below. The emergence of the Vatican as an independent state with courts and administration modeled the establishment of similar mechanisms in emerging nation states. All of these developments relied on Christian egalitarianism, of society consisting of individual souls and the development of the inherent rights of those souls. Indeed, the incarnation of Jesus, in which God came among us as an individual who related directly to individual believers was the "ultimate support for individual identity."

Again and again Siedentop illustrates how the modern world emerged not in spite of the Church but because of it in almost every detail. Compared to the achievements of the Church, those of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were derivative rather than original. For example it was William of Ockham, whose razor we are familiar with, who established the idea of empiricism, that we know through experience and not because of innate ideas implanted by God of the eternal Platonic forms. John Locke was not the originator of the mind as a clean slate. Ockham introduced the idea of contingency in the natural world that showed the necessity of scientific measurement and the impossibility of obtaining knowledge by a priori reasoning.

The account of church history from earliest time to the fifteenth century is a must read for anyone who wants to know how we became to be as we are. His conclusion is that the church gave us our understanding of the self, and secular liberalism. The latter comes as a surprise because many of us in the Church, including myself, have railed for years about the damage done by secular liberalism. A summary statement tells much of the story:

"The roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth century: belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defense of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental or "natural" rights; and, finally the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality."

This is a compelling picture but it does not explain how the gift of the Church of liberal secularism has become such a desert in our time. This is not a criticism of the book, but recognition that more must be said, that today we live within the gift of liberal secularism but stripped of its origin in Christianity. In other words our society can be described as being influenced by Christianity without Christ. We have taken secular liberalism as our salvation and it is so but that has led us to a freedom that looks more and more as a void in which we have lost ourselves. We have taken hold of the outcome of Christianity while, at the same time, refusing its content. Thus, in our freedom we still suffer from what John Carroll has called "the ordeal of unbelief".

This book is a welcome antidote to the mostly wrong popular understanding of the involvement of the Church in our history. That understanding would have it that the original brightness that was ancient Greece transferred to the Roman world produced an admirable civilization that was lost with the rise of the Church. It is thought that the Church suffocated reason and bred superstition. This led to the dark or middle ages until the Renaissance retrieved the humanism of the Greek and the Enlightenment rediscovered reason. This led to the flowering of natural science and the modern world. "The conventional interpretation also relates the emergence of liberalism to a new skepticism bred by the interest in and sympathy with antiquity."

Siedentop demonstrates, with a vast understanding of historical research, that this picture is almost entirely wrong. The Church used reason to build a workable legal system on Roman foundations with the added insight of Christian egalitarianism. It used reason to elucidate theology, at times borrowing from Greek thought and at other times rejecting it to produce the modern world. The Church was the prime enemy of superstition especially that of Greek and Roman religion. It is high irony that modern thinkers accuse the Church of superstition and acclaim the rationality of the Greeks.

Of course there were missteps. The Vatican was on the verge of accruing too much power and had to be checked by secular authorities. In a cruel age men and women were executed for what they believed. The Church's fight against superstition was and is not complete to this day. However, the overwhelming narrative that comes from historical research is that the Church produced the foundation of the societies that we now enjoy that has at its center of freedom and protection of the individual.