The Parochialism of Anachronism

Part of an ongoing conversation:

A reader has been asked somewhat peevish questions in recent days about the academic freedoms allowed to scholars in the medieval university system in and after the Thirteenth Century. The purpose of the questions is unclear: he seems merely to be unable to fathom that anyone should object to modern speech codes, modern political correctness, and modern thought police.

Being a modern thinker, he has no way to put his arguments into a dialectical or logical order, since modern thinkers have no argument whatsoever aside from ad hominem tu quoque or making accusations. So he seeks to accuse Christendom during the first dark ages of having less academic freedom as we who  suffer in the current dark ages enjoy.

The questions have been about the legality of arguing in favor of atheism, but the reader cites no sources, quotes no laws, and seems to be unaware that as an ordinary part of the regimen of scholars in those days (see Thomas  Aquinas) arguments for and against atheism were routinely debated and discussed.

 

Another reader, Stephen J., with perhaps a bit more knowledge of history, offers gallantly to take up the thread of the argument, and with more success. He asks a penetrating question:

Purely for devil’s advocate purposes, wasn’t refusal to acknowledge the supremacy of the Emperor cult a crime in the Roman Empire? I seem to recall that was part of why the Empire had such trouble with the Jewish lands.

Presumably a Roman atheist philosopher so committed to his atheism that he would deny the divinity of the Emperor, along with all other claimed divinities, would then be guilty of a crime. (Whether a pre-Enlightenment atheist would be likely to consider that level of behavioural consistency enough of a moral imperative to endure state punishment over is another question.) While technically it’s the defiance being outlawed, not the atheism per se, the effect might be argued to be much the same.

Your argument has the advantage of being aware that other men of other times thought as they did, not as we do, on these topics. Yes, denying the divinity of the Emperor in a theoretical conversation between philosophers in Athens may or may not have been against the written law, refusing to throw a pinch of incense on the altar for the Emperor was treason, and treason is always a capital crime.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.