Siedentop is a fellow at Kebble College, Oxford. In this book, he posits that it was Western Europe’s Christian roots that paved the way to the preeminence of the individual as the hallmark of the liberal tradition. He begins by contrasting modernity with the basis of society in Ancient Greece and Rome. “At its origin the ancient family was both the focus and the medium of religious belief. It was an instrument of immortality, at once a metaphysic and a cult…. A family was a group of persons whom religion permitted to invoke the same sacred fire, and to offer funeral repast to the same ancestors.” Family was very much the basis of separation and the most basic unit of society. French historian Fustel de Coulanges informs, “In the house of every Greek and Roman was an altar; on this altar there had always to be a small quantity of ashes, and a few lighted coals. It was a sacred obligation for the master of every house to keep the fire up night and day. Woe to the house where it was extinguished.” At the state level, Siedentop continues, “The successive worships into which the ancient citizen was initiated left no space for individual conscience or choice. These worships claimed authority over not just his actions but also his thoughts. Their rules governed his relations with himself as well as others. There was no sphere of life into which these rules could not enter—whether it was a matter of dress, deportment, marriage, sport, education, conversation or even ambition…. The king was hereditary high priest of that association of associations that was the ancient city. The king’s other functions, as magistrate and military leader, were simply the adjuncts of his religious authority…. Later, when kingship gave way to republican regimes, the chief magistrate of the city—the archon in Athens, the consul in Rome—remained a priest whose first duty was to offer sacrifices to the city’s gods…. Laws were the necessary consequences of religious belief. There was nothing like the modern notion of sovereignty, of a merely human agency with the authority to create new law. The priests jealously guarded the laws of the city, for the laws were understood to be the work of the gods.” Ancient liberty meant the liberty of the citizen to partake in the political process. It did not serve as a restraint against the State, the masses, or communal tradition. Fustel states, “If we wanted to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.”
Siedentop makes the case that the advent of Christianity was a huge paradigm shift. “Through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.” An important adjunct to the rise of Christianity was the democratization of reason. “Rationality loses its aristocratic connotations. It is associated not with status and pride but with humility which liberates. Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality…. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus amounted to the discovery of human freedom—of a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals.” Paul, himself, states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Christianity broke down the hierarchy of the ancient family. “By transferring religious authority from the father to a separate priesthood, the Christian church removed the religious basis of the paterfamilias.” There was, therefore, an elevation of the woman into a role as an independent individual and not just a cog in the family machine. “By the third and fourth centuries this new role was confirmed in the role of the ‘dedicated virgin’, a role which did not make any sense unless it was assumed that the woman had a mind and will of her own…. Declarations of independence by women seem to have been especially frequent in upper-class families. It is as if the confidence engendered by the superior status of a family was appropriated by some women and put to a new use…. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers.” Christianity also began the long process of breaking down class distinctions, in word if not in deed. “In contrast to the segregated spaces of the ancient city, the Christian population of the cities began to share the same spaces, hearing the bishops’ ex cathedra words in the basilica or principle church, and taking part in the same rites, that is, baptism, the mass and funerals. Processions to the tombs of local martyrs were for everyone.”
The Holy Roman Empire was by no means liberal. However, Siedentop makes the argument that the Carolingians instituted some policies that further nudged the way towards the increased status of the individual. “Charlemagne’s call for a universal oath of allegiance led to the first serious impinging of Christian moral norms on social roles, a precarious attempt to distance the self (or ‘soul’) from inherited statuses, in order to give those statuses a sanction in consciences.” Bishop Theodulf of Orleans would admonish, “The rich get their riches because of the poor. But nature submits you to the same laws. In birth and death you are alike. The same holy water blesses you; you are anointed with the same oils; the flesh and blood of the lamb (the Christ) nourishes you all together.” Siedentop continues, “Charlemagne tried to combine two visions of the foundations of social order in his rule—lordship and ‘the care of souls’. In the course of pursuing the second vision he had created a far better educated and more cohesive higher clergy, a disciplined Christian elite. It was the elite that survived the decay of his empire…. It pursued that vision with determination, struggling against the consequences of increasingly hereditary local lordships, which were helping to destroy centralized government…. The solidarities of an ancient and urban Christianity were making way for a faith with an increasingly individualist bias.”
It was the Christian notion of the soul and a personal afterlife that gave precedence to the individual after death. “Scenes of the passion of Christ and his resurrection—testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality…. But it was not only emphasis on the day of judgement, the new notion of purgatory and wall paintings that drove home a message of hope. Largely illiterate congregations also heard tales of saints’ lives, stories which demonstrated that salvation did not depend upon social status…. The lives of the saints offered a kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited…. They democratized the ancient cult of the hero.”
Another aspect of Christian theism was the concept of natural law. In 1140 AD, Gratian wrote in his Decretum, “Natural law [jus] is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.” It was a restating of the Golden Rule in the context of legalism. “By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, Gratian gave it an egalitarian bias—and a subversive potential—utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything in its place’…. An underlying moral equality was now deemed natural.” Pope Innocent III would expand, “But it may be said that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, “You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference in persons.””
Canon law began to assert itself on society at large and with that came greater rule of law and greater rights for the individual. “Canon law became, in that way, the original vehicle of modernity…. The development of canon law and a hierarchy of courts administering it—with the papacy at the apex—created a system that offered litigants coherence, relative predictability and other benefits. It was a system that stood in contrast to the secular courts, in which the application of customary and feudal law allowed recourse to Roman law only intermittently…. Roman law was distrustful of and, indeed, avoided abstractions…. The habitual turn of the canonist mind was different. It sought to identify the shared features of particular legal decisions and raise them to the level of a concept. Behind the rules it sought to identify principles…. Canon lawyers brought to bear not just legal techniques they acquired from the study of Roman law, but a ‘democratized’ interest in generalization and abstraction, an interest combining knowledge of Aristotelian logic with Christian moral intuitions…. The difference sprang from the new concern that law should be understood as applying to ‘all (souls) equally’. Hence it needed to be systematic.”
Another feature of Western modernity was the push towards urbanization. Initially formed as centers of trade, free cities eventually gained in wealth and autonomy. The urban bourgeoisie slowly asserted their rights against kingship, but, particularly, against local feudal lords. “Only later did townspeople relate their new liberty to the moral equality proclaimed by Christian beliefs. Yet that relationship emerged almost immediately in the language they adopted when ‘swearing the commune’ and defending its interests. It was language of brotherhood. Thus, a twelfth-century Flemish borough charter prescribed: ‘let each help the other like a brother’. This language of equality and reciprocity—of moral transparency—was not the language of the ancient polis, but rather of St. Paul…. Unlike in the ancient city, liberty was being claimed, not merely for the borough, but also for the individuals who lived and worked in it…. The first feature of the borough charters was to secure self-government by lodging final authority in the assembly of all citizens. Secularism introduced a formal equality of status for citizens, who had the right to take part in the assemblies. Popular assemblies had the right to legislate, levy taxes and make war…. Boroughs were usually exempt from feudal services and dues, as well as from royal taxes, except those that had been agreed in advance. Their independence emerges especially in the absence of obligation except by prior agreement.” In 1219, the citizens of Marseilles wrote in a joint proclamation, “It is to Jesus Christ that we owe the development of the laws and advantages of our city.”
Theologians and philosophers also played a large part in advancing the notion of individualism in Western society. “The Franciscans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks of modern secularism. In refining the idea of Christian liberty—separating the idea of freedom from that of justice and making both conditions of morality as well as distinguishing rights of ownership from a right to rule—they prepared a revolution in the understanding of the ‘proper’ ground of all authority.” Ockham and the Franciscans also fought with Aquinas and the Dominicans over fundamental matters of theology. “Was it plausible that a ‘sovereign’ God’s actions be subject to necessity? As we have seen, Ockham and his Franciscan followers thought not. For them, the core of Christian revelation was the ‘grace’ which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding of the role of reason. It was this conviction that turned Ockham and his followers into harbingers of ‘modernity’…. They reconstructed the idea of justice and revised the test for scientific truth…. Taking the moral autonomy of individuals as their weapon, the nominalists broke through a set of assumptions which had confined the structure of society and the pursuit of knowledge within an hierarchical or corporate framework. Ockham replaced those assumptions with the assertion of individual rights (justifying a private sphere of choice) and the verification principle (which made knowledge of the external world always subject to disproof by further experience)…. The nominalists, in effect, began to separate ‘culture’ from ‘nature’—emphasizing the central role of reasons and intentions in the former, while driving explanations in terms of purpose from the latter…. Ockham’s emphasis on faith and freedom confronted Aquinas’ rationalist account of natural law…. First is Ockham’s emphasis on natural rights and liberty rather than on traditional natural law…. Second is his insistence on the difference between demonstrative reasoning and causal explanation, between ‘rational science’ and ‘experimental science’…. Ockham’s understanding of justice emerged as the claim for ‘equal liberty’. Freedom became a birthright, a right founded on the nature of human agency…. Thomists fail to understand what Ockham understood, that the theory of natural rights involves subjecting the ancient idea of natural law to a new distributive principle, the biblical golden rule, with its stipulation in favour of equality and reciprocity. Human autonomy is authorized ‘by God and nature’. The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will…. Individuals cannot alienate their moral autonomy because it is God-given.”
A final piece of the modernization project was the usurpation of authority from feudal lords to the central monarch. For the individual at the bottom of the social order this was not necessarily a loss of rights. “‘Equal Subjection’ to a sovereign was perceived not as loss but as gain…. The church had projected the image of society as an association of individuals, an image which unleashed the centralizing process in Europe…. In the process of centralizing laws, manners and ideas—forging a single society out of what had been separate, parochial societies—the monarchs not only created states, but also the foundation for a ‘public’ or ‘national’ opinion…. If we look at the word ‘individual’ in historical dictionaries of the English or French languages, we will find that it first became current in the fifteenth century. The word ‘state’, with its stipulation of a sovereign authority, became current at about the same time.” The individual’s rise in autonomy was intimately intertwined with the rise of the modern nation-state. Siedentop concludes, “Secularism can be seen as Europe’s noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order…. Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world.”
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