The the most important lesson that the study of history teaches us is contingency. Things do not have to be as they happened. Take, for example, the answer that our civilization has historically given to the most important question of all: “What does it mean to be human?” Since the Enlightenment, many people in the West have had the impression that it is easy to answer this question, that it is only a matter of observing human behavior empirically in time and space and then some universal maximums from the data. to withdraw. This is our modern belief: that we can read the truth about ourselves in the nature book as we read a story in a book.
The main example of this is the preface to the Declaration of Independence, written in the high meridian of the Enlightenment by one of his most glowing thoughts:
We believe that these truths are self-evident, that all people were created equal, that they were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For Jefferson, and for those of us who live by his words today, it is’ self-evident ‘that’ the masses of mankind have not yet been born, with saddle on their backs, nor any few beneficiaries living on “Most people have not thought of such people. The idea that we are all equal, unique personalities, each with unparalleled dignity and inviolable rights, is’. a rare and relatively parochial idea.The world once existed without it (as many of the world still exists today) and could easily do it again if we forget where the idea came from and what has sustained it for so long.
We can trace the origin of the word “person” back to the ancient Greek word prosopon, which means ‘mask’. It was initially used in Greek tragedy. Actors wear the physical prosopon of the role they played in a dramatic production. But it soon gained political and social significance, especially in Roman society. The Latin word for prosopon is persona, from which our English word is derived. According to Roman custom, the person’s social and legal role was in the community. This role varied wildly from person to person, from nobleman to senator to shopkeeper to servant, and it did not keep all people equal as the word “person” does now. It is thought that different social stations are almost different kinds, which have nothing in common, and no one thought that they had an individual existence except the role they played in the state. For example, Roman slaves were usually mentioned I do not have a person: literally, “have no person” or “not a person”, because their social functions were so bad and helpful. Who they really were as ‘people’, as we now understand the word, did not matter at all.
The Greek dramatic and Roman political uses of the word have one important thing in common. In no case is the unique person behind the mask or the social role assigned to him considered in the slightest sense. Metropolitan John Zizioulas puts it this way: “Many writers have represented [ancient] Greek thought is essentially ‘impersonal’. In its Platonic variation, everything is concretely and ‘individually’ ultimately referred to the abstract idea that constitutes the ground and final justification thereof. ‘
As they saw it for themselves, people in the ancient world actually only existed to the extent that they participated in some major project, whether on stage or in the city, which was their ‘basic and final justification’ . While Zizioulas continues to write, “identity – that vital component of the concept of man, which makes one man different from another, which makes him who he is – [was] guaranteed and provide by the state or by some organized whole. For this reason, the historian Larry Siedentop writes that in the ancient city ‘there was no idea 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 at all, it was only with reference to some organized collective.
The advent of Christianity has overthrown this old order of the ages, which has prevailed more or less unquestionably since the dawn of civilization until the first Passover morning in Jerusalem about 2000 years ago. The proclamation of the first Christians – that God became man – erased the perception of personality that prevailed in the ancient world. If Jesus is a ‘persona’, as the apostolic and patristic fathers of the Church claimed, and he died and was raised as a representative of the whole race, then we are all more than society and the state would of we make. There is a gap 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; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Or, as Siedentop puts it:
Faith in Christ enables Paul to see the rise of a primary role equal by all (“the equality of souls”), while conventional social roles – whether father, daughter, official, priest or slave – become secondary to that primary role. To this primary role, an indefinite number of social roles may or may not be added as the characteristics of a topic, but it no longer defines the topic. It is the freedom that brings Paul’s conception of Christ into human identity.
It is almost impossible for us to get a sense of how earth-shattering the millennial aftershock of Easter was to our civilization. We are all in our moral feelings and basic worldviews of Christianity to such an extent that we cannot see it from the point of view of a pre-Christian society without a tremendous imaginative effort. We can not feel the farce, blasphemous madness of a criminal in our legs, a I do not have a person, with a mighty ruler in the way Jesus speaks to Pilate near the climax of John’s gospel. As for the crucifixion, theologian David Bentley Hart is correct in writing that,
try though we can, we will never really be able to see Christ’s broken, humiliated and doomed humanity as something that is obviously despicable and ridiculous; we are rather, in a very real sense, destined to regard it as the mystery of our own humanity: a sublime fragility, at once tragic and magnificent, pitiful and wonderful.
The necessity of all that we think well and value about ourselves and our society on the sorrows and triumphs of this one man, in whose shadow we have all lived for the past 2000 years, we evade throughout. We forget that in a historically demonstrable way in the West we owe our sense of universal universal humanity entirely to Jesus of Nazareth and his church. Even the smallest details of the Easter story, such as the tears of St. Peter after his betrayal of Jesus, point to the radical discontinuity of the Christian revolution of what came before to an extent that we are completely blind to today. As Hart movingly remarks:
What is obvious to us – the wounded soul of Peter, the profoundness of his devotion to his pastor, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ’s impending death forever excludes the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal – is very clear because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, arose from Peter’s tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is undoubtedly a decoration of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its seriousness, broadens the embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, we are all, even unbelievers, ‘Christians’ in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late Antiquity, however, this story of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic error; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of sympathy of a well-bred man, and his grief might not have possessed the kind of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone’s attention. . . . . It is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion.
As Siedentop tells in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, during the intervening centuries between the first Passover and today, a long, unequal and imperfect attempt was made 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 far less a break with what preceded it, and far more indebted to centuries of Christian moral osmosis: it was not a sudden onset of reason after centuries of forced ignorance. The scholar Brian Tierney notes that as early as 1300 a number of rights were claimed and defended on the basis of the Christian understanding of personality: ‘These would be rights to property, rights of consent to government, rights of self-defense, rights of unbelievers, marital rights , procedural rights, ”and also measures to make these rights enforceable against the positive law. To the extent that we see ourselves as rights-bearing individuals with real responsibilities, we are all cultural artifacts of Easter.
The long cultural aftermath of the resurrection of the Son of God is apparently waning in the West, as evidenced by surveys of American religious practices. Just last week, Gallup released a new study showing that church membership in the United States fell below 50 percent for the first time. Even without hard data as evidence, it would be possible to deduce so much from the state of American society and politics. We are increasingly moving towards a way of dealing with one another that is more like the pagan culture that has supplanted Christianity than anything else. Zizioulas described pagan society as a ‘non-personal’ one in which the individual is ultimately referred to the abstract idea that is the ground and final justification thereof. ‘In America, individuals are finally referred to as the abstract political idea that constitutes their “basic and final justification” in the social order.
We increasingly see each other as flattened avatars of abstract collectives from which we derive our sense of solidity and meaning. We are Republicans, Democrats, anti-masks, anti-waxers, pro-lifers, pro-choicers. The unique and unrepeatable person buried under all these labels, the pre-political person that Jesus delivered to each of us on the cross, is supplanted and suffocated. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that it will survive our cultural abandonment of the faith that brought it to birth. We do have this consolation: even if this priority of personality is in the West’s death knell, he will find his way out of the grave again. None of our failures, whether personal or political, can delay the coming of the glorious city, where Christ comes, where Christ reigns unmoved by the destruction of time, forever old and forever new.