By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 434.
Does it still make sense to still talk about the West in what some call a “post-Christian world”? Larry Siedentop, emeritus fellow of Keble College, Oxford, asks, “Can the West still be defined in terms of shared beliefs?” Professor Siedentop answers his own question with a weak “yes.”
His answer is qualified because those who live in nations once described as part of Christendom seem to have lost contact with their cultural heritage and certainly with their moral bearings. Yet it remains a fact that Western culture is founded on a set of shared beliefs that are manifestly Christian in their origin. In Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Siedentop shows how certain key notions, important to the secular mind, were developed under Christian tutelage.
In a sweeping historical review of Western culture, Siedentop argues that it was Christianity that created the liberal ideas of “moral equality” and “natural rights,” principles that the modern state takes for granted without reference to their origin and defense.
His narrative begins by contrasting pagan antiquity with the advent of Christianity. The most distinctive feature of Greek and Roman antiquity, he claims, is what may be called a “moral enclosure” in which the limits of personal identity are established by the limits of physical association and inherited social roles. Anyone who sought to live outside such associations and such ideas was called an “idiot.” In contrast to the class distinction taken as natural in pagan society, Christianity insisted on the moral equality of the person, quite apart from any class or social role that he may occupy.
It is this moral belief, Siedentop maintains, which constitutes a departure from the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as “everything in its place,” that is the ultimate source of the social order that has made the West what it is. Natural rights and relations of equality became understood as antecedent to both positive and customary law, largely as a result of medieval canon law.
Drawing on Roman law, under the patronage of the papacy, canon lawyers, in university settings such as Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford, from the late 11th century began to create a system of law for Christians founded on the assumption of moral equality. Canonists, basing their arguments on the “equality of souls in the eyes of God,” advanced the notion that there is a moral law (natural law) superior to all human law.
Gratian, a monk of Bologna, published in 1140 a systematic study of canon law known as the Decretum, which rapidly became accepted as authoritative. During the rest of the 12th century hundreds of commentaries on the Decretum were written across Europe. In the words of Brian Tierney, upon whom Siedentop draws, “The works of those Decretists, most of them unpublished so far, contain the most sophisticated thought of the age on problems of church and state.”
Whereas the Stoics construed natural law to refer to the cosmic order, the canonist of the 12th century construed it to mean jus, the modern sense of right. The doctrine of natural rights developed from Gratian to Ockham. In an aside, Siedentop relates that during the late 12th and 13th centuries, nearly all the leading Popes were not only theologians but also canon lawyers.
The skeptical turn taken by the Renaissance humanists of the 15th century saw writers like Machiavelli ignore their immediate predecessors when drawing on Roman sources to interpret events of their own day, interpretations that gave less attention to Christian intellectual achievement than to the failures of the institutional Church. As result humanism became increasingly identified with anti-clericalism. Suddenly, superstition became more associated with Christianity than the paganism revived by the humanists.
In a section entitled, “Christianity and Secularism,” Siedentop writes, “Attitudes toward secularism were [further] shaped by the anti-clericalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The French Revolution in particular had a decisive effect on attitudes. It created two hostile camps: Voltaire on one side, De Maistre on the other. Those who wished to extirpate religious belief denied the Christian roots of Europe and in doing so led to the identification of secularism with non-belief.” To the contrary, Siedentop insists, “Secularism does not mean non-belief or indifference. It is not without moral content. . . . Certainly secularism is not a neutral or ‘value free’ framework, as the language of contemporary social scientists at times suggests.”
It is the overarching theme of Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism that, secularism, properly understood as civil liberty and moral equality, is Christianity’s gift to the world. Siedentop’s sweeping historical chronicle of the origin and development of these notions it itself a gift.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America.)
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