What is characteristic about historical writing in recent centuries? It is an inclination to minimise the moral and intellectual distance between the modern world and the ancient world, while at the same time maximising the moral and intellectual distance between modern Europe and the middle ages. that inclination first appeared, we have seen, in the Italian renaissance, with its admiration for antiquity and hostility to the ‘scholasticism’ of the universities and the church. But it was in the eighteenth century, especially among the French philosophers that this inclination developed into a passionate anti-clericalism, which reshaped the understanding of European history.
The School of Athens by Raphael
1: Zeno of Citium 2: Epicurus 3: unknown 4: Boethius or Anaximander 5: Averroes 6: Pythagoras 7: Alcibiades or Alexander the Great or Pericles 8: Antisthenes or Xenophon 9: unknown or Fornarina as a personification of Love (Francesco Maria della Rovere?) 10: Aeschines 11: Parmenides or Nicomachus 12: Socrates or Anaxagoras 13: Heraclitus (Michelangelo?) 14: Plato (Leonardo da Vinci?) 15: Aristotle (Giuliano da Sangallo?) 16: Diogenes of Sinope or Socrates 17: Plotinus? 18: Euclid or Archimedes (Bramante?) 19: Strabo or Zoroaster? (Baldassare Castiglione?) 20: Ptolemy R: Apelles (Raphael) 21: Protogenes (Il Sodoma or Timoteo Viti)
An overriding temptation for many eighteenth-century historians was to present the ancient world as ‘secular’, and in that way provide a point of contact with European states in which the role of the church and of the clergy was contested and being redefined. In Protestant countries this had long been under way, but by the eighteenth century even Catholic countries were involved, as the expulsion of the Jesuits from several of them reveals.
Understanding the ancient world as secular - with citizens ‘free’ from the oppression of priests and a privileged, dogmatic church - became an important weapon in the arsenal of political argument. in the same way, the conception of the medieval church as aspiring to, if not always achieving, a theocratic regime in which thought was titled by ’superstition’ and clerical self-interest provided another weapon. Neither of these conceptions was baseless. Yet both were, I think, more wrong than right. for each overlooked something fundamental, something radically inconsistent with their account of the past. so let us review what we have discovered.
So instead of an antiquity free of religion, priesthood and superstition - a ‘secular’ inspiration for modern Europe - we find on closer examination that the family, tribe and city were each a kind of church. Each had its own rites, a worship with very elaborate requirements. ‘Faith and purity of intention counted for very little, and the religion consisted entirely in the minute practice of innumerable rules . . . ‘ Because of that, the constant fear in each association was that some detail of ritual requirement might be neglected and the god of the association offended. hence the need for frequent rites of purification and expiation. these became the duties of the civic magistrates in both Greece and Rome.
Altogether, the most distinctive thing about Greek and Roman antiquity is what might be called ‘moral enclosure’, in which the limits of personal identity were established by the limits of physical association and inherited, unequal social roles. This moral enclosure is illustrated by the Greek term describing anyone who sought to live outside such associations and such roles: such a person was called an ‘idiot’.
More than anything else, I think, Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasising the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. they followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time.
We can see this breaking out of moral enclosure everywhere in the New Testament. In particular, we can glimpse the merger of Judaism and Greek philosophy in St Paul's conception of the Christ, a conception remarkable for its universalism. For Paul, the love of God revealed in Christ imposes opportunities and obligations on the individual as such, that is, on conscience. The Christ thus becomes the medium of a new and transformed humanity. In one sense, Paul’s conception of the Christ introduces the individual, by giving conscience a universal dimension. Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history?
In contrast to some later Hellenic philosophy, the New Testament assertion of a basic human equality ceased to be a speculative stripping away of social conventions, an exercise which had at times served chiefly to demonstrate the superiority of the philosopher to local prejudice. Instead, this stripping away revealed the need for a moral response to the individual freedom implied by equal standing in the eyes of God. Jesus’ insistence that ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ (as the early church often proclaimed) was designed to invoke such a response, to create an individual will. Thus, to earlier speculations about equality, the New testament added the duty of reciprocity - the obligation ’to love thy neighbour as thyself’.
That is why I argued in an earlier book, Democracy in Europe (2000), that the Christian conception of God provided an ontological foundation for the individual, first as a moral status, and then, centuries later, as the primary social role. ‘the interiority of Christian belief - its insistence that the quality of personal intentions is more important than any fixed social rules - was a reflection of this. Rule following - the Hebraic “law” - was downgraded in favour of action governed by conscience. In that way, the Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society.’ Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.
In Democracy in Europe, i suggested an analogy to understand what Christian beliefs introduced into the world. It is an analogy with an argument in Marxism - the distinction Marx drew between a ‘class in itself’ and a ‘class for itself’. Marx meant that a class could exist objctively - identified by income or occupation - without necessarily having any consciousness of itself as a class. He illustrated this by contrasting medieval peasants with the townspeople of burghers, the ‘bourgeoisie’, who became conscious of themselves as a class by struggling against feudal privileges. So I the applied this distinction to the role of Christianity.
This was the revolutionary promise of Christian beliefs.Christianity took humanity as a species in itself and sought to convert it into a species for itself. Thus, the defining characteristic of Christianity was its universalism. It aimed to create a single human society, a society composed, that is, of individuals rather than tribes, clans or castes. The fundamental relationship between the individual and his or her God provides the crucial test, in Christianity, of what really matters. It is, by definition, a test which applies to all equally. hence the deep individualism of Christianity was simply the reverse side of its universalism. The Christian conception of God became the means of creating the brotherhood of man, of bringing to self-consciousness the human species, by leading each of its members to see him or herself as having, at least potentially, a relationship with the deepest reality - viz., God - that both required and justified the equal moral standing of all humans.
It is hardly too much to claim that this framework of ideas provided the original constitution of Europe. It is a framework that can be glimpsed as early as Augustine’s famous work, the City of God. For Augustine, following Paul, belief in the moral equality of men created a role for conscience, and that set limits to the claims of any social organization. This is the source of the dualism that has distinguished Christian thinking about society and government, a preoccupation with the different claims of the sacred and the secular spheres. It rests on the conviction that we ought to recognize and respect the difference between inner conviction and external conformity, a distinction which would not have served any function or perhaps even been intelligible in much of the ancient world.
But if Christian beliefs provided the ontological foundation for the individual as a moral status and primary social role, why did the latter take more than a millennium to develop? We should not be surprised by this fact. There were many other causes at work. the implications of moral intuitions generated by Christianity had to be worked out against prejudices and practices sometimes as old as the social divisions of labour.
That, in turn, involved learning how to create and protect a public role for conscience, first of all by forging a conceptual framework that could be deployed to criticize existing social practices. It was smoothing that took centuries. And it involved fierce controversy, frequent back-tracking and frustration. It is that process we have been examining.
We do not have to suppose that the process was always self-conscious. Nonetheless, outstanding minds among the clergy clung to one framework of ideas, even during what I have called the ’schizophrenic’ Carolingian period, when there was an unstable mixture of ancient and Christian thought and practice. the framework emerges in the voice of a leading Carolingian churchman, Agobard, the archbishop of Lyons:
There is neither Gentile or Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ . . . Can it be accepted that opposed to this unity which is the work of God, there should be an obstacle in the diversity of laws in one and the same country, in one and the same city, and in one and the same house? It constantly happens that of five men walking or sitting side by side, no two have the same terrestrial law, although at root - on the eternal plane -they belong to Christ.In this urgent voice from the ninth century we can still hear the moral heart of Christianity beating beneath the surface of social conventions.
This brings us to another historical ‘moment’. For just as modern historical writing has often underestimated the role of religion in the ancient world, so it has failed to draw attention to a remarkable development during the so-called ‘middle ages’. this was the moment when the idea of natural rights emerged and began to provide a new conceptual tool for criticizing established social beliefs and practices, including, eventually, even the church as an institution. Historians of social and political thought have usually located such a moment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This ‘early modern’ period is the period when it is conventional to say that the doctrines of liberalism and secularism first raised their heads, not least because of the needs of nation-states struggling with bitter confessional conflicts arising from the Reformation.
The conventional interpretation also relates the emergence of liberalism and secularism to a new scepticism bred by the interest in and sympathy with antiquity. The increasingly sceptical turn taken by the humanist movement at the end of the fifteenth century saw a writer like Machiavelli draw on Roman sources when interpreting the events of his own time, an interpretation that gave less attention to Christian beliefs and more attention to the failures of the church as an institution. Borrowing the idea of an inexorable historical cycle drove out worries about individual salvation. Corruption of the citizenry, their loss of civic spirit, came to seem more important than the Christian idea of virtue. The clergy, suspected of manipulating beliefs to their own advantage, were often charged with ‘weakening’ the citizens valour.
So humanism became increasingly associated with ant-clericalism, at about the same time as religious wars resulting from the Reformation provided further motive for secular authorities to intervene, in order to establish a framework that might contain the violence unleashed by confessional differences. Taken together, these trends suggested that the emergent secularism or proto-liberalism had little to do with the moral intuitions generated by Christianity, but rather that their inspiration should be located in antiquity and paganism. Suddenly, ’superstition’ was associated more with the church than with paganism.
The trouble with this view is that it ignores the fact that, by the fifteenth century, there was already operating in Europe a theory of justice that did, indeed, have roots in ancient ‘pagan’ philosophy. But it was a doctrine that had for several centuries been reshaped by Christian moral intuitions - by, put most simply, the golden rule of ‘doing unto others what you would have them do unto you’, with its strikingly egalitarian underpinnings. That doctrine was the doctrine of natural law. Long before the fifteenth century it had been revived and revised by canon lawyers in the universities of Bologna, Padua, Paris and Oxford.
How was this doctrine revised? It was revised , as we have seen, by being turned into a theory of natural rights, rights which belong to the individual as such, rights which are in that sense pre-social and ought to serve as a criterion of legitimate social organization. Drawing on Roman law, and under the patronage of the papacy, canon lawyers from the late eleventh century began to create a system of law for Christians founded on the assumption of moral equality. this system was to privilege the conception of what has been called ‘subjective rights’, that is, rights inhering in the individual, starting with the claim to freedom. That claim amounted to a rejection of the ancient assumption of natural inequality.
Brian Tierney shrewdly observes that ‘the idea of subjective rights has become central to our political discourse, but we still have no idea of the origin and early development of the idea’. Tierney argues that Gratian’s Decretum: ‘The human race is ruled by two (means) namely by natural law and by usages. Natural law is what is contained in the law and the Gospel by which each is commanded to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he does not want done to himself.’ Tierney shows how canonists following Gratian constantly moved between two senses of the word jus - between jus understood as objective law (whether divine or human in origin) and jus understood as individual subjective right:
A decisive shift of meaning and emphasis occurred in the twelfth century. For some of the Stoics and for Cicero there was a force in man through which he could discern jus natural, the objective natural law that pervaded the whole universe, but for the canonists jus natural itself could be defined as a subjective force or faculty or power or ability inherent in human persons.Where the Stoics had construed natural law to refer to a cosmic order of things, the canonists, of the twelfth century construed it to mean free will or power, an ‘area of licit choice’ for individuals justified by the nature of human agency.
Thus, by the twelfth century a sense of jus was emerging that was not far removed from the modern sense of a right.
Why have these origins of the theory of natural rights not been appreciated sooner? The answer, I suspect, turns on the hostility shown by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists to what was going on in the universities of their day. The blanket condemnation of ‘scholasticism’ (understood as an obsession with Aristotle and logic) led to quite different forms of enquiry being bundled together and confused. Theology, civil and canon law, logic and physical theory suffered under the same term of opprobrium, which became a stock-in-trade of eighteenth-century historical writing.
Yet we can now see that not only did an identification of anomalies in Aristotelian physical theory in the universities pave the way for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revolution in physics, but the origins of natural rights language which became central to modern political discourse can also be traced back to innovations in canon law during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The identity of the individual - of a status which creates a space for the legitimate exercise of personal judgement and will - had broken through the surface of social life by the fifteenth century. Equality was no longer consigned to the arrangements of ‘another world’, to an afterlife in which unjustifiable (that is in the sight of God) inequalities of status and treatment would disappear. The papal claim of sovereignty, embodied in a legal system founded on the assumption of moral equality, had thus achieved more than the papacy either imagined or intended. It had generated a new conception of society, a conception which had, in turn, created unprecedented moral needs in the population at large. That is the most striking thing about the fifteenth century. Such needs were seizing the popular mind. They took the form of new claims in both the religious and secular spheres, claims anticipating the Reformation.
What at least some of the conciliarists grasped was that the moral intuitions generated by Christianity were transforming the traditional idea of ‘authority’. Embodied in the legal system created by canonists, and inspiring secular rulers to create comparable systems based on the claims to ’sovereignty’, the introduction of an underlying equality of status - the invention of the individual - was turning the source of authority upside down. Increasingly it was to be found ‘below’. in human agency and conscience, rather than ‘above’ in coercive eternal ideas.
Why is all this important? It reveals how Christian moral intuitions played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism. Indeed, the pattern by which liberalism and secularism developed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century resembles nothing so much as the stages through which canon law developed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The sequence of argument is quite extraordinarily similar. The canonists, so to speak, ‘got there first’.
The sequence began with insistence of equality of status, moved on to the assertion of a range of basic human rights, and concluded with the case for self-government. Thus, from Hobbes’s insistence on basic human equality, in preparation for defining sovereignty in terms of ’equal subjection’, through Locke’s defence of human freedom by identifying a range of natural rights, to Rousseau’s making the case for the sovereignty of the people and self-government, each of these three steps in modern political thought had its counterpart in the evolution of medieval canon law.
To be sure, there remains an important difference between the two traditions of thought. The pauline moral source is frequently asserted in canon law, whereas developing liberal thought often conflated assumptions about God and nature. As the historian Carl Becker once remarked in The heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) the eighteenth-century ‘denatured God and deified nature’. The foundation for the claim to liberty became ‘human nature’ and personal conscience. Yet the conception of human agency relied upon - and elaborated by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century - continued to have a markedly Christian impress.
What, then, has led to a ‘war’ between religion and secularism, a struggle which can plausibly be called a ‘civil war’ because of the moral roots shared by the two sides? Why do Europeans feel happier referring to the role of ancient Greece and Rome than to the role of the church in the formation of their culture? The answer can be found in the way secularism has come to be understood - and misunderstood - in Europe.
Attitudes towards secularism were shaped by anti-clericalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The French Revolution, in particular, had a decisive effect on attitudes. It created two hostile camps. On the one hand were followers of Voltaire, who sought to écrasez l'infâme, as they described the authoritarian and privileged church of the ancient regime. On the other hand were those, such as Joseph de Maistre, who saw the separating of church and state as nothing less than an ‘insurrection’ against God, public denial of beliefs which had shaped Europe.
Of course, the last two hundred years have overlaid the hostility between the two camps. The religious camp has come, by and large, to accept civil liberty and religious pluralism. The anti-clericals have - with the exception of hardline Marxists and writers such as Richard Dawkins - given up on the attempt to extirpate religious belief. But the old antagonism still lurks under the surface. the visceral reaction of the French left to the prospect of acknowledging the Christian roots of Europe has its counterpart in much church rhetoric deploring the growth of ‘Godless’ secularism. Even Benedict XVI, a most learned pope, was not free of this habit. he called for an understanding between religions in order to combat secularism.
This is Europe’s undeclared ‘civil war’. And it is as tragic as it is unnecessary. It is tragic because, by identifying secularism with non-belief, with indifference and materialism, it deprives Europe of moral authority, playing into the hands of those who are only too anxious to portray Europe as decadent and without conviction. It is unnecessary because it rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of secularism. Properly understood secularism can be seen as Europe’s noblest achievement, the achievement which should be its primary contribution to the creation of a world order, while different religious beliefs continue to contend for followers. Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world , ideas and practices which have often been turned against ‘excesses’ of the Christian church itself.
What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty’. Is this indifference or non-belief? Not at all. It rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. it puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.
Raphael, St Paul Preaching in Athens
This is also the central egalitarian moral insight of Christianity. It stands out from St Paul’s contrast between ‘Christian liberty’ and observance of the Jewish law. Enforced belief was, for Paul and many early Christians, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms - a contrast to the early spread of Islam.
When placed against this background, 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. Rather, secularism identifies the conditions in which authentic beliefs should be formed and defended. It provides the gateway to beliefs properly so called, making it possible to distinguish inner conviction from mere external conformity.
Nor is this just a hypothetical understanding of secularism. This is the way secularism has traditionally been understood in the United States. It has been understood as a condition for authentic belief pre-supposed by Christianity. In contrast to views formed by Europe’s ‘civil war’, secularism in the United States has been identified with moral intuitions generated by Christianity.
Why has this not been the view in Europe? For centuries a privileged , monolithic church which was almost inseparable from an aristocratic society, confronted Europeans. So the church became associated in the popular mind with social hierarchy and deference, even at times with coercion, rather than with the moral equality and role of conscience that provide, in fact, the foundation of its beliefs.
A kind of intellectual incoherence - especially noticeable in Catholic Europe - was the consequence. Religiously minded people struggled against the claims of civil liberty as threatening the church, while those who defended liberty looked upon the church as their enemy. Both sides failed to appreciate the extent to which promoting secularism in Europe amounted to turning the moral intuitions generated by Christianity against a privileged, coercive role for the church. By contrast, the United States has largely escaped from this ‘civil war’. The absence of both a monolithic church and aristocracy in the United States meant that Americans instinctively grasped the moral symmetry between secularism, with its prized civil liberty, and Christianity, accepting that secularism identifies a necessary condition of authentic belief. At times Muslim commentators themselves perceive that symmetry when they speak of ‘Christian secularism’.
What will happen to its ‘civil war’ now that Europe is faced with the challenge of Islam? Will Europeans come to understand better the moral logic that joins Christianity with civil liberty? It is important that they do so if they are to counter the argument that European secularism is a form of non-belief or indifference. Their self-understanding is at stake. If Europeans understand ‘secularism’ in the terms favoured by its critics - as mere consumerism, materialism and amorality - they lose touch with their own moral intuitions. They forget why they value freedom.
And what of the United States? There is no room for complacency. The rapid growth of Christian fundamentalism - in part, no doubt, a reaction to threat of radical Islam - may now jeopardise the traditional American understanding of secularism as the embodiment of Christian moral intuitions. In the Southern and Western states especially, ‘born-again’ Christians are coming to identify secularism as an enemy rather than a companion. In struggling against abortion and homosexuality, they risk losing touch with the most profound moral insights of their faith. If good and evil are contrasted too simply, in a Manichaean way, charity is the loser. The principle of ‘equal liberty’ is put at risk.
It is a strange and disturbing moment in Western history. Europeans - out of touch with the roots of their tradition - often seem to lack conviction, while Americans may be succumbing to a dangerously simplistic version of their faith. On neither side of the Atlantic is there an adequate understanding of the relationship between liberal secularism and Christianity.
Failure to understand that relationship makes it easier to underestimate the moral content on liberal secularism. In the Western world today, it contributes to two temptations, to what might be called two ‘liberal heresies’. The first is the temptation to reduce liberalism to the endorsement of market economics, the satisfaction of current wants or preferences without worrying much about the formation of those wants or preferences. In doing so, it narrows the claims of justice. This temptation reduces liberalism to a crude form of utilitarianism. The second temptation is best described as ‘individualism’, the retreat into a private sphere of family and friends at the expense of civic spirit and political participation. This weakens the habit of association and eventually endangers the self-reliance which the claims of citizenship require. Both of these heresies focus on the second word of the core liberal value - ‘equal liberty’ - at the expense of the first word. They sacrifice the emphasis on reciprocity - on seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves - which we have seen to be fundamental to inventing the individual and which gives liberalism its lasting moral value.
If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?
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