The Christian Origins of Individuality

Sir Isaiah Berlin made a career out of writing variations on one big theme, in the form of short essays, long essays, and his celebrated public lectures. This is fine: if it is a good theme, and its influence is widely felt, then all the conditions for a successful academic career seem to have been fulfilled. “Two Concepts of Liberty”, the most important of Berlin’s essays, popularised the distinction between “positive” and “negative” liberty, which was so dear to political thought in the Cold War era. At risk of serious oversimplification, this established the dualism between rights to things and freedom from things. Berlin clearly had more sympathy for negative liberty, while positive liberty became associated with Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and all others who had enough confidence in their own rectitude to kill in the name of freedom. As the French revolutionary St Just had said, “We will force the people to be free.”

Larry Siedentop, a former pupil of Berlin, continues the great tradition of Anglo-American political philosophy with his new book. That tradition is to elaborate and refine answers to the persistent question, “What is liberty?” In this study, he poses a related question of maximum importance: Where did the idea of individualism come from? We can safely assume that Berlin would have approved of both the choice of theme and the accessible style in which it is presented. He might also have been a little surprised by its conclusions.

Siedentop begins by stressing that classical civilisation was not an individualist society—indeed, that it barely had a concept of individualism. There is evidence that Greek ancestor worship was even older than the Homeric gods, and for this reason a more formative influence on cultural mores. Honouring one’s ancestors, and maintaining the fire in the family hearth, were the most sacred tasks. “For the Greeks and the Romans, the crucial distinction was not between the public and private spheres. It was between the public and domestic spheres.”

With the development of the city-state, this corporatist nexus was simply enlarged. And so the ancient city, to use Siedentop’s striking phrase, was a “confederation of cults, an association superimposed on other associations, all modelled on the family and its worship”. It follows that the “ancient city was not an association of individuals”. In a society where all social bonds revolved around the family and its gods, some of the more alien aspects of Greco-Roman society begin to make sense. These include their tolerance of slavery (slaves are not members of the all-important family cult); their belief that an adopted son became literally one’s own son (the very notion of a “biological son” would not have signified); and their property laws, which were unusually protective of the family home—the temple, as it were, of the family cult.

This, as Siedentop points out, is the significance of the Trojan fugitives’ quest to found a new home in Virgil’s Aeneid, the propaganda epic of Augustan Rome. The most important word in that poem is pietas, namely the individual’s responsibility to his gods and—what is virtually the same thing—to his family and his city. The modern word piety is apt to conceal the complexities of its Latin ancestor.

When I studied the Aeneid, my attention was focused mainly on the involved poetic syntax, and I did not truly appreciate the implications of the struggle between Aeneas’s personal passions and his duty to Rome. It was not a representation of the eternal contest between individual will and civic duty, of the so-called “two voices” of Virgilian poetry: rather, it was Virgil asserting the normative beliefs of Roman society against the selfish whims of one man. In Roman society, the individual existed as a component of the family; the family was inexorably tied with state and religion; and there was an end to the matter.

Siedentop argues that the Western liberal concept of individualism, on the other hand, has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition and early medieval society. In one of my few encounters with Larry Siedentop, I mentioned that I was writing a paper on the scientific revolution. His first reaction was to recommend a certain book on medieval science. It is characteristic of him to examine the presumed origins of some phenomenon in the history of ideas, and to push those origins even further back. We could not ask more of the intellectual historian.

The title of the book gives the impression that this will be another study of men with wigs, joint stock enterprises and constitutional monarchies. Recent political philosophy has indeed accustomed us to look back to the eras of John Locke or Adam Smith as the commencing eras of modern liberty and individual freedom. Siedentop, however, locates it much earlier: in the later Roman empire. It is no wonder that the social strictures of classical paganism, mentioned above, declined with the coterminous rise of a large empire with a population and society far outsizing that of the ancient polis. By the third century, there were too many people outside the privileged circle of citizenship, for whom new cults with radical values had a natural appeal. The most important of these cults was Christianity, and its most important interpreter was St Paul.

With his emphasis on salvation through faith and repentance, St Paul championed the individual’s connection with the Absolute, by which “human agency acquires a new independence and dignity”. On his interpretation, religion was no longer a housekeeping matter with assigned duties to privileged citizens; it was the personal bond of God and individual, bypassing the social statics of sex, class, race, and all the rest. Even monasticism promoted individualism by its creation of a society of men or women living a communal life with shared values, entirely of their own volition, under jointly agreed rules, and the leadership of an authoritative but never all-powerful abbot. “By taking individual responsibility so seriously,” Siedentop notes, “the ideas of moral equality and limited government became closely associated.”

The appeal of Christianity and other mystical cults, in a society traditionally dominated by the hierarchical system of the polis, is analogous to the appeal of Islam to Hindus born into the lower castes of Indian society. Like the aristocratic paganism of Greco-Roman civilisation, Hinduism fixed individuals in a hierarchy—not an immutable one, to be sure, but a rigid one all the same. It is hardly surprising, then, that so many Indians of the lower orders turned to Islam, which reasserted the oneness of God and the equality of all humans in submission to Him.

Christian and Islamic societies have seldom been less hierarchical, unequal and class-bound than those of the pagans were: but the point is that inequality and social rigidity have always been regarded by the monotheist thinkers as deviations from the true principles of their faith, whereas the pagans positively endorsed such inequality in their philosophy.

Conversely, early Christianity was the religion of slaves, though not in the sense later intended by Nietzsche. In the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood produced his famous ceramic cameo of a kneeling black slave, carrying the motto, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” in support of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. Never in modern times has there been a more authentic articulation of the philosophy of primitive, Pauline Christianity.

Such was the Church’s ability to sunder bonds and yokes that, in the early years before its social triumph and doctrinal entrenchment, some radical and “proto-Protestants” went well beyond even St Paul’s universal message. Tertullian built on this tradition in his own sacred philosophy, by expanding the realm of individual conscience. But the Gospel of St Thomas went further still in its radical pursuit of women’s rights, arguing that only when woman’s rationality was freed and fully acknowledged could man be free as well (and here the modern reader cannot help thinking of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses). If the family was the atom of Roman society, Christian society uncovered the nucleus within it: the individual and his (or her) soul.

Other motions towards the modern conception of liberty developed by unintended consequences. Thus when Charlemagne insisted that all his subjects, including slaves and women, take an oath of loyalty in their vernacular, he “implied that slaves and women had souls as well, a moral capacity making their oaths and their loyalty worth having”. Ancient Roman law would not have required any contractual undertakings from slaves, any more than we would now feel the need to issue passports to combine harvesters.

Amid its narrative of medieval intellectual history, this book has a strident message for modern society. To treat such principles as individualism as universal values, and to therefore attribute them to all cultures, is simply to homogenise all cultural practices by recognising only marginal or superficial differences. But as Siedentop shows, the concepts of individualism and the nominal equality of all men and women—the “premiss that excludes permanent inequalities of status” which we now take for granted, or at least pay lip service—were specific products of Western culture, and not a natural intuition. In other words, although the equality of souls was a universal doctrine, it did not have universal origins.

To pretend, on the other hand, that all cultures have the same basic and mutually compatible values is to reduce cultural difference to such exoteric non-issues as dress and cuisine. Such an approach is not only unsophisticated, but is, on careful inspection, culturally insensitive. Irony of ironies, because it does little justice to the dynamism of traditions circumscribed by time and place.

Scientists in particular are at pains to point out the sameness of human beings in all places, because that is what they see most in their own research. Steven Pinker did this memorably in The Language Instinct, and Sir David Cannadine recently attempted something similar from the historian’s perspective. But the genius of Siedentop’s study is that it champions the political idea of individualism precisely by demonstrating that it is not a universal, a given, a first principle, a fact of human nature. It is not one of the many things wired into the biological makeup of every human being, but a cultural artefact, and all the more vulnerable for that reason. Of course human beings are the same everywhere, and geneticists cannot lie when they point out, for example, that racial differences signify little or nothing in their line of work. But if cultural practices did not diverge, then there would hardly be any point in studying history. But history does reveal that Western society did not develop the same values as, for example, imperial China and its modern successor.

As the historian Brian Young has observed, the late John Burrow (a colleague of both Young and Siedentop, at the University of Sussex and then Oxford) was a historian with an interest in philosophy, whereas Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher with an interest in history. Hence Berlin’s writings were more impressionistic, which is on the whole a virtue for the essayist; while Burrow’s works were endlessly rich in historical fact and placed movements and ideas firmly in their “historical context”.

Siedentop’s book shares characteristics with both. It narrates the intellectual history of ancient and medieval societies, from Homeric times, through the years of the Church, to the centuries of papal ascendancy and the threshold of the modern era; and perhaps most importantly, it describes how the purely religious notion of the “equality of souls” found its way into legislation and into secular ideas about the “equality of mankind”. But history can only tell us how something came to be what it is. Having been told how their most fundamental values were formed, it will be up to the moderns to decide what to do with them.