A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Learning to Live)

by Luc Ferry

It is difficult at first to grasp the immense novelty of Christianity, not merely in relation to Greek thought, but even more so perhaps in relation to the Jewish world. Because Christianity placed so much weight on conscience, on the spirit over the letter, it imposed almost no jurisdiction over everyday life. Rituals such as eating no fish on Fridays are mostly modern, dating back no further than the nineteenth century and having no origins whatsoever in the Gospels. You can read and re-read the Gospels, and find next to nothing about what you should or should not eat, how and to whom you should get married; there are hardly any rituals required for proving to yourself and others that you are a good and committed believer. While the lives of Orthodox Jews and Muslims are filled with duties to be carried out in civil society, Christianity left everything up to the individual as to whether something is good or not. This attitude smoothed the passage to democracy, and the arrival of secular rather than religious societies: as morality was essentially a matter of internal conscience, it had less reason to come into conflict with external conventions. It mattered little whether one prayed once or a hundred times daily, or that one was forbidden to eat this or that: all laws, more or less, became acceptable if they did not infringe the spirit of the Christian message.