Larry Siedentop > 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

“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 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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Clement was aware that the new emphasis on descent made a contrast with the traditional Platonic imagery of a rational ascent, of climbing a mountain that led away from unreliable sense experience to certain knowledge, for at least a few. So Clement quotes from the Gospel of John in order to present the Christian God as the ground or foundation of individual being:”
― 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

“And here I must let Brown have the final word: ‘So the City of God, far from being a book about flight from the world, is a book whose recurrent theme is “our business within this common mortal life”; it is a book about being otherworldly in the world.’16”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Origen argued that Christian morality offered a better foundation for public power: ‘The more pious a man is, the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the line and kill all the enemy troops that they can.’14”
― 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

“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

“There were hundreds of such monasteries across his empire. In fact, monastic foundations were displacing the ancient city as the primary model of human association”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“The first major change took place within the patriarchal family. Primogeniture came under attack and gradually gave way, with the consequence not only that younger sons inherited and became full citizens, but also that junior branches of the ancient families or gentes became independent.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“By claiming a monopoly of legal authority, sovereigns deprived many traditional attitudes and practices of legal status. What royal commands did not positively enjoin or forbid, defined – at least potentially – a sphere of choice and personal freedom.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“Benedict takes pains to shield the monastic community from the social distinctions of the outside world. Patronage and favour for particular monks are forbidden. Monks are to wear the same clothes, eat the same food and do the same tasks.”
― 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

“What is the difference? The urbs is the physical location, the place of assembly and worship. But the civitas is the moral nexus, the religious and political association of the citizens.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“In reply, Basil turned the distinctions of Greek philosophy against its latest defenders: They should not be asking us whether we know God’s essence; they should be enquiring whether we know God as awe-inspiring, as just, or as merciful. And these are the things that we confess that we do know. If on the other hand they say that God’s essence is different from these attributes, they must not produce spurious arguments against us on the basis of the simplicity of that essence. For in that case they have themselves admitted that his essence is something different from every one of his attributes. His activities are various but his essence is simple. Our position is that it is from his activities that we come to know our God, while we do not claim to come anywhere near his actual essence. For his activities reach us, but his essence remains inaccessible.8”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

“The right response to the mystery is humility, a constantly renewed innerness, not a reassertion of the belief that superior minds can leave behind the common lot of mortals.”
― 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