Penguin (London 2015). Pbk. 434 pages. £9.99.
It’s the packaging that sells the product, or so they say. This was certainly true with regard to this book as far as I am concerned. Even before I considered buying it, the face of Jan de Leeuw, whose portrait appears on the cover, came to haunt me. I became mesmerised by the penetrating yet gnomic stare of this ‘medieval’ face, which is also so unmistakably modern.
Cleverly, the cover designer does not show us all the face of this portrait from 1436 by Jan van Eyck. Rather, it seems to be emerging from the blackness of the background, moving into full view. But from where? What were his origins, who exactly was this individual, what was his destiny? In fact these are exactly the questions this book sets out to answer – not just about this individual, poised and waiting to engage in a conversation about identity and origins, but the ‘individualism’ which he encapsulated.
Larry Siedentop – a distinguished Oxford historian of ideas – tells us that the word ‘individual’ appeared in France and England in the fourteenth century, just before de Leeuw’s era. The appearance of a new word, like the appearance of a heavenly body to astrologers of old, is surely indicative of a new reality. As Siedentop writes of this period, ‘The identity of the individual – of a status which creates a space for the legitimate exercise of personal judgement and will – had broken through the surface of social life by the fifteenth century.’
But why at this particular time? Siedentop’s central contention is that it is the result of the cumulative influence of Christianity, with its emphasis on the individual as a moral agent. Also as a perhaps unintended consequence of the work of medieval canon lawyers, who developed a legal system based on the assumption of moral equality: ‘By the twelfth century a sense of jus (justice) was emerging that was not far removed from the modern sense of a right.’
The challenging thesis of Siedentop is that this profound moral and intellectual development preceded the conventional view that the emergence of individual human rights was a result of new Renaissance attitudes and the post-Reformation attempts to resolve religious disputes during the Enlightenment. This latter narrative, he contends, was largely driven by anti-clericalism which wilfully diminished the preceding contribution of the church and Christianity. His challenge is in claiming that, ‘Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that made the West what it is.’
Siedentop pursues his thesis with great erudition, but what drives him is not just academic interest but that ‘the perception of a profound conflict between secularism and religious belief has been reawakened’ in our time, polarising societies (notably the USA) with the destructive potentiality of a new ‘civil war’. This, he contends, is the result of a wilful misreading of history that fails to grasp that secularism emerged from Christianity, is a unique consequence of Christian beliefs, and that: ‘Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world.’
This is a challenging view, which one might first be tempted either to dismiss or diminish. But Siedentop makes an analogy for his attempt to root the language of rights and modern political discourse in medieval innovations in canon law to the origins of modern science in Aristotelian physical theory in the medieval universities. His analogy is perhaps more telling than he thinks. Though modern science did indeed arise from these roots, it was only when it set aside biblical paradigms of thought that real progress became possible.
In the fifteenth century profound social changes led to a radically new understanding of the ‘ontological status’ of man, which was to express itself first in the traumatic search for justification that catalysed the Reformation, and then the search for an alternative moral order grounded on individual rights that constituted the Enlightenment. It was only with the crumbling of belief in a God-ordained order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that a new understanding of humanity emerged which was truly inclusive, secular and modern.
Clearly, for whatever reasons, in the times that Jan de Leeuw lived a fundamental change was under way that redefined our understanding of humanity, a change we are still struggling to understand and the ramifications of which much of the world still cannot come to terms with. Siedentop has made a valuable and timely reappraisal of the roots of this drama in a book which is beautifully written and a pleasure to read.
Dominic Kirkham’s book From Monk to Modernity was published by SOF in 2015.