Inventing the Individual

I have been engrossed recently in this book by Larry Siedentop. His thesis simply is that western liberalism and western secularism owe more to Christianity than to any other single cause. The gift of Christianity to the world has primarily been the concept of moral equality. He traces this from Paul through Augustine, to monasticism, what he sees as the Carolingian compromise between tyranny and the care of souls, the Cluniac monastic revival and the papal revolution of the Middle Ages, to one of his big heroes, William of Ockham.

Siedentop's big idea is that Christianity invented the individual, giving space for conscience. It created a world where the individual matters and society had to be organised around him, not around family (though not abandoning the family). Equality rather than inequality was assumed, and in the Middle Ages this broke down feudalism and local interests.

The Renaissance did not contribute to this, says Siedentop. Siedentop sees through the popular view that the Renaissance gave dignity to the individual; instead, he argues, it brought about a cult of the individual but did not add to the value of the individual.

From an evangelical perspective it is healthy to see the argument for a Christian West taken back to the early church and in particular to the Middle Ages, even in some ways to the papacy, instead of all being due to the Reformation.

Secularism is the moral equality insight taken to the nth degree. Siedentop sees this as an opportunity for secularism to see that it has a friend in religion and to recover its moral roots. But this is ambitious; secularism wants to cut its links with religion.

He says:

“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 is 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.

“ 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 suggests the conditions in which authentic beliefs should be formed and defended….This is the way secularism has traditionally been understood in the United States… [In Europe, by contrast,] for centuries a privileged monolithic church which was almost inseparable from an aristocratic society , confronted Europeans…”

All this is a very inadequate summary of a carefully argued and beautifully written book. The scholarship is profound and broad, the case argued cogently yet clearly considering the amount of history covered. It is not always an easy read but it is a very worthwhile one with much to stimulate the mind in many directions as we face a Christian retreat today in the West. What should our attitude to secularism be? What should we be defending? One feels that we should be engaging in arguments far more profound than trying to protect and preserve a crumbling Establishment and its church.

There is much one would disagree with in Siedentop’s applications, not least the idolatry of secularism without God and with no adequate doctrine of sin or salvation. But there is also much one can use in the sense of developing as a weapon the analysis he gives us. He is at least giving a us a clue as to where to start the debate with secularism – one which points out how much secularism owes to Christianity, the tree from which it is now sawing itself as fast as it can.