The The most important lesson that the study of history teaches us is contingency. Things did not have to be as they happened. Take, for example, the answer that our civilization historically gave to the most important question of all: “What does it mean to be a human being?” Since the Enlightenment, many people in the West have had the impression that answering that question is easy, that it is just a matter of observing human behavior empirically over time and space and then abstracting out some universal maxims from the data. This is our modern faith: that we can read the truth about ourselves in the register of nature in the same way that we read a story in a book.
The seminal example of this is the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, written on the high meridian of the Enlightenment by one of its most incandescent minds:
We consider these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Freedom and the pursuit of Happiness.
For Jefferson, and for us who live today in the light of his words, it is “evident” that “the mass of humanity was not born, with saddles on its back, nor some favorite shoes and spurs, ready to ride them.” people in most places, most of the time, never thought about human beings like that. The idea that we are all equal, unique personalities, each with an unfathomable dignity and inviolable rights, is rare and relatively parochial. without it (as much of the world still exists today) and could easily do it again if we forget where that idea came from and what has sustained it for so long.
We can trace the ancestry of the word “person” back to the ancient Greek word prosopon, which means “mask”. It was used initially in the context of the Greek tragedy. Actors used the physique prosopon of the role they played in a dramatic production. But it soon acquired political and social significance, especially in Roman society. The Latin word for prosopon It’s persona, from which our English word is derived. According to Roman usage, the persona was the social and legal role within the community. This role varied enormously from one person to another, from noble to senator, from shopkeeper to servant, and did not cover all humans in the same way that the word “person” does now. Different social stations were considered to be almost different species, sharing nothing in common, and it was thought that no one had any kind of individual existence other than the role they played in the state. Roman slaves, for example, were commonly referred to as not habens personam: literally, “not having a person” or “not a person”, because their social functions were so servile and similar to tools. Who they really were as “people” underneath, as we now understand the word, it didn’t matter.
The dramatic Greek and Roman political uses of the word have one important thing in common. In none of the cases is the unique individual behind the mask or who is playing the social role assigned to him considered to be at least significant. Metropolitan John Zizioulas states the following: “Many writers have represented [ancient] Greek thought is essentially ‘non-personal’. In its Platonic variation, everything that is concrete and ‘individual’ is, in the final analysis, referred to the abstract idea that constitutes its base and final justification. “
As they themselves saw, people in the ancient world really existed to the extent that they participated in some larger project, whether on stage or in the city, which constituted their “base and final justification”. As Zizioulas continues to write, “identity – that vital component of the concept of man, which makes one man different from another, which makes him who is he – [was] guaranteed and provided by the state or by some organized whole. ”For this reason, historian Larry Siedentop writes that in the ancient city,“ there was no sense of the rights of individuals against the claims of the city and its gods. There was no formal freedom of thought or action. . . . Citizens belonged to the city, body and soul. ”If the individual had any value, it was only by reference to an organized collective.
The advent of Christianity overthrew this old order of the times, which reigned more or less undeniable from the dawn of civilization until the first Easter morning in Jerusalem, some 2,000 years ago. The proclamation of the first Christians – that God became man – obliterated the conception of person that prevailed in the ancient world. If Jesus is a “person”, as the apostolic and patristic parents of the Church claim, and he died and was resurrected as a representative of the entire race, then we are all more than society and the state would make us. A gap opens up between our identity and our social obligations. The individual sets foot on the stage of human history for the first time. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; because you are all one in Christ Jesus ”. Or, as Siedentop puts it:
For Paul, the belief in Christ makes possible the emergence of a primary role shared equally by all (“the equality of souls”), while conventional social roles – whether of father, daughter, officer, priest or slave – become secondary in in relation to that main role. To this main role, an indefinite number of social roles may or may not be added as attributes of a subject, but they no longer define it. This is the freedom that Paul’s conception of Christ introduces into human identity.
It is almost impossible for us to get a real sense of how the millennial Easter quake was for our civilization. We are all in our moral sensibilities and basic creatures of the Christian worldview to such an extent that we cannot see it from the point of view of a pre-Christian society without tremendous imaginative effort. We cannot feel in our bones the ridiculous and blasphemous madness of a criminal, a not habens personam, speaking to a powerful ruler in the way that Jesus speaks to Pilate near the climax of the gospel of John. As for the crucifixion itself, theologian David Bentley Hart is correct when he writes that,
no matter how hard we try, we will never really be able to see Christ’s broken, humiliated and condemned humanity as something evidently despicable and ridiculous; on the contrary, we are, in a very real sense, destined to see it encompassing the very mystery of our own humanity: a sublime fragility, at the same time tragic and magnificent, regrettable and wonderful.
The contingency of everything we think decent and valuable about ourselves and our society in relation to this man’s sadness and triumph, in whose luminous shadow we have all lived in for the past 2,000 years, consistently eludes us. We forget that, in a historically demonstrable way, we, in the West, owe our sense of universal common humanity entirely to Jesus of Nazareth and his Church. Even the smallest details of Easter history, such as the tears of Saint Peter after his betrayal of Jesus, signal the radical discontinuity of the Christian revolution in relation to what came before, to a point that we are completely blind today. As moving Hart points out:
What is obvious to us – the wounded soul of Peter, the depth of his devotion to the master, the torment of his guilt, the overwhelming knowledge that Christ’s imminent death has forever excluded the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal – is obvious in large part because we are heirs of a culture that, in a sense, was born out of Peter’s tears. For us, this rather small and common narrative detail is undoubtedly an ornament of history, which ennobles it, proves its gravity, expands its embrace of our common humanity. In that sense, all of us – even unbelievers – are “Christians” in our moral expectations of the world. For the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this story of Pedro’s crying would most likely have seemed like an aesthetic error; for Peter, as rustic, could not have been an object worthy of the sympathy of a well-educated man, nor could his pain have possessed the kind of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone’s attention. . . . This is not just a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion.
As Siedentop reports in The invention of the individual: the origins of Western liberalism, the centuries between the first Easter and today have witnessed a long, uneven and imperfect effort to translate the Christian belief in universal human dignity into social and political realities. Contrary to what the enemies of Christianity claim, the Enlightenment was much less a break with what preceded it and much more indebted to centuries of Christian moral osmosis: It was not a sudden impulse of reason after ages of forced ignorance. Scholar Brian Tierney notes that around 1300 several rights were regularly claimed and defended based on the Christian understanding of personality: “They would include property rights, rights of consent to the government, rights of self-defense, rights of infidels, rights of marriage , procedural rights ”and also measures to make those rights enforceable against positive law. Insofar as we see ourselves as individuals with real rights and responsibilities, we are all cultural artifacts of Easter.
The long cultural upheaval of the resurrection of the Son of God appears to be diminishing in the West, however, as suggested by research on American religious habits. Last week, Gallup released a new study showing that the number of Church members in the United States fell below 50 percent for the first time. Even without hard data as evidence, it would be possible to infer the maximum of the state of American society and politics. We are increasingly moving towards a way of dealing with one another that looks more like the pagan culture that Christianity has supplanted than anything else. Zizioulas described pagan society as a “non-personal” one in which the individual “is ultimately referred to the abstract idea that constitutes its basis and final justification.” In America today, individuals are ultimately referred to the abstract political idea that constitutes its “foundation and final justification” in the social order.
We see ourselves more and more as flattened avatars of abstract collectives, from which we derive our sense of solidity and meaning. We are republicans, democrats, anti-masked, anti-vaxxers, pro-life, pro-choicers. The unique and unrepeatable person who lies buried under all these labels, the pre-political person that Jesus delivered to each of us on the cross, is being excluded and suffocated. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that it will survive our cultural abandonment of the faith that brought it to light. However, we have this consolation: even if that primacy of personality is in its death throes in the West, it will find its way out of the grave again. None of our faults, whether personal or political, can delay the arrival of that brilliant city to come, where Christ reigns untouched by the devastation of time, forever old and forever new.