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{"id":15848,"date":"2014-04-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=829"},"modified":"2014-04-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T00:00:00","slug":"inventing-the-individual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/04\/inventing-the-individual\/","title":{"rendered":"Inventing the Individual"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Larry Sidentop\u2019s\u00a0Inventing the Individual <\/a> is intellectual history of the old school, the broad-sweep, big-idea type.\u00a0Jeffrey Collins thinks that for all the dangers the book works (TLS <\/i>review). It is \u201ca thoroughly interesting and fundamentally convincing book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key development, Siedentop argues, was the \u201cChristian revolution\u201d that gave a central place to \u201cequal individuals\u201d in Western thought and institutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Christianity marked a sharp break from the classical past. In Collins\u2019s summary, Siedentop \u201cpresents a world of suffocating hierarchy, saturated with assumptions of natural rank, with ancestor worship, and with patriotic cults of the \u2018father land.\u2019 In a world of \u2018graduated essences and purposes,\u2019 where \u2018nature and culture belonged to a single moral continuum,\u2019 reason itself was the possession of born elites. Christianity detonated this ancient order. The Gospels and Paul\u2019s epistles separated nature from culture, presenting a moral world (imperfectly realized, to be sure) of equal individuals. Master and slave, Jew and Gentile, father and son emerged reborn as individual souls sharing a common fate and endowed with equal moral status.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, Gnosticism \u201cso treasured by radical-chic biblical scholars of a sceptical bent, are here presented as rearguard warriors for a pagan code of natural elitism.\u201d It was the orthodox who developed \u201cthe radical social implications of the new Christian egalitarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along the way of telling his story, Siedetop rehabilitates the Gregorian Reformers whose aim was \u201cto protect the university morality (and sacramental life) of Christianity in an era of imperial disintegration. Not seeking a theocracy, the emboldened papacy aimed rather to preserve its own autonomy from warrior princes and feudal lords.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He even rehabilitates the bete noire of anti-modernism, William of Ockham: He credits the nominalists with achieving the full flowing of Christian egalitarianism. This disagreement largely implicates differing evaluative judgements about the relative importance of individual freedom on the one hand and ethical foundationalism on the other. Siedentop privileges the former. . . . The great Franciscan, in his view, unshackled human reason from the exterior world, and associated it with \u2018individual experience and choice,\u2019 rather than \u2018a timeless nature of things.\u2019 Neither divine nor human will could be bound by a \u2018Greek necessity\u2019 of natural ends and reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Grand intellectual history in the old style may not be dead after all.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"