Inventing the Individual Quotes

“The Jewish sense of time was different. It was unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universal that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity chagned "the name of the game". Social rules became secondary. They followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in "two cities" at the same time.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Yet if Paul and Augustine conjured up a vision of moral freedom, it was the twelfth-century canonists who converted that vision into a formal legal system founded on natural rights.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Reason ceased to be something that used people, and became something people used.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Where Augustine struggled to bring an awareness of the action of grace into the humdrum life of his parishioners, Pelagius and his followers attacked the hypocrisy of a society which had officially adopted Christianity but which remained saturated with traditional pagan beliefs and practices – a society in which ‘giving’ often became a vehicle for the pride of the rich, in which the cult of the family and the paterfamilias remained powerful, and in which slavery and torture were still publicly unchallenged.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Augustine does not deny the reality of free will. Rather, he tries to clarify the conditions that make ‘true’ freedom possible, the conditions in which good or just intentions can become effective. For so often our habits trap us in previous decisions: ‘If you want to know what I mean, start trying not to swear: then you will see how the force of habit goes on its own way.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Paul’s ecstatic awareness that the centrality of the will was matched, in the absence of grace, by a weakness of the will, overwhelmed Augustine.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Only the pride of the intellect could suppose that the human will can be completely self-determining. The incarnation revealed that something more is needed. ‘My mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.’ Augustine’s conception of the self became a subtle mixture of autonomy and dependence.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“That intense account of Augustine’s relations with himself and with his God (the Confessions takes the form of a long prayer) has led some to attribute the birth of the individual to Augustine. For he portrayed ‘the will’ as the indispensable middle term between ‘reason’ and ‘appetite’. He embedded the will in our conception of the self. Certainly there is an almost incredible self-consciousness in his writing.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“In the name of a religion that claimed to challenge the values of the elite, upper-class Christians gained control of the lower classes of the cities.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“7 The popular – it is tempting to say democratic – roots of the Franciscan movement and its resistance to hierarchy help to explain one of its most surprising consequences: the development of argument about natural rights.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“For example, to regard Aristotle’s definition of slaves as ‘living tools’, or the presumption in antiquity that women could not be fully rational agents, merely as ‘mistakes’ – symptoms of an underdeveloped sense of justice – scarcely advances comprehension of the past. After all, radical social inequality was far easier to sustain and more plausible in societies where literacy was so restricted.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“That temptation became all the greater because of the unprecedented prosperity enjoyed by the West after the Second World War. We have come to worship at the shrine of economic growth.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make this or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to "equal liberty". Is this indifference or non-belief? Not at all. It rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with a responsibility of one's actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the "blind" following of rules ... This is also the central egalitarian moral insight of Christianity ... Enforced belief was, for Paul and many early Christians, a contradiction in terms”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“As the historian Carl Becker once remarked, in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) the eighteenth century ‘denatured God and deified nature’.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“More than anything else, I think, Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. They followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Ockham’s Razor – the principle that the best explanation is one that does not multiply assumptions needlessly – took its toll of confidence in Aristotle’s physical theory.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Ockham’s Razor – the principle that the best explanation is one that does not multiply assumptions needlessly”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“A thinker like Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris in 1395, deemed individual moral agency – rather than the systems of theologians over-impressed by the achievements of ancient philosophy – to be the introduction to God. Gerson considered that the concept of God elaborated by theologians such as Aquinas, seeking to emulate Aristotle, had departed from the God proclaimed by Paul, the biblical God who spoke through Abraham and the prophets, before taking on human form in the Christ. For the biblical God was a God who transformed motives and action. The experience of such a God was always available to those with faith. And that experience of motives transformed was just as real as experience of the physical world.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Yet liberalism rests on the moral assumptions provided by Christianity. It preserves Christian ontology without the metaphysics of salvation.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“But what I am maintaining is that as an historiographical concept the Renaissance has been grossly inflated. It has been used to create a gap between early modern Europe and the preceding centuries – to introduce a discontinuity which is misleading.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“The roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defence of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights; and, finally, the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Ockham’s defence of both natural rights and the limitations of human reason sprang from his belief in the omnipresence of God’s freedom. If we were to put this defence in contemporary scientific terms, we might say that Ockham took up his stand on the principle of indeterminacy. He would have welcomed evidence of a ‘big bang’ at the beginning of things and the difficulty of capturing space-time in a single, unified theory. In our time, freedom has moved cosmology beyond a mechanistic model of the universe.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“As we have seen, he drew attention to the difference between ‘reasons’ for human actions and the ‘causes’ of external events.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Even Aristotle’s account of virtue as ‘moderation’ or the austere ethic of Stoicism carried messages different from that of Christianity. ‘Virtue’ understood as proud self-control and a will regenerated by humility through belief in human equality are not the same thing.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“That is the background to the principle of explanation associated with his name: ‘Ockham’s Razor’. It calls for economy in explanation, avoiding the introduction of unnecessary entities or terms. Sharing with other nominalists the belief that ‘it is futile to work with more entities when it is possible to work with fewer’, Ockham argued that ‘a plurality must not be asserted without necessity’. And, with more than a little sarcasm, he used his ‘razor’ to remove Aristotle’s ‘final causes’:”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Duns Scotus lays it down that ‘an act is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy unless it proceeds from the free will’.1 For him, freedom is a prerequisite for moral conduct.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Canon law helped to give a new direction to the European mind. Its systematic character and the procedures required for administering it stimulated an analytical frame of mind, leading, inexorably, to the emergence of philosophy as a discipline distinct from theology. It was not just that new standards of precise argument were encouraged. The egalitarian foundation of canon law raised questions which led to challenges to assumptions inherited from the corporate society of antiquity.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“The elaboration of canon law was central to this process. Canon law became, in that way, the original vehicle of modernity. Harold Berman is right to describe it as ‘the first modern Western legal system’ and to argue that ‘the papal revolution’ is an apt description of what resulted.1”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism