How Christianity Influenced the Development of Individual Rights – Part 2

Equal status under God translated into (more) equal status under law.

This is the second essay in a three-essay series recounting historian Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, which describes how, long before the Protestant Revolution and the Enlightenment, the core ideas of Christianity developed a governing concept of sovereign individuals with unalienable rights.

The notion that individuals could choose to give their lives to the church gave rise to the notion that individual wills could admit of different degrees of culpability, and those concepts crept into the criminal law:

[T]he inwardness privileged by Christian belief and its concern with intentionality did not merely help to shape the doctrines of the church and its legislation. The clergy also sought to introduce that concern into public criminal law, whenever they could. We can see such an attempt to “pin down” intentionality – by distinguishing the intentional element in events from the involuntary – in the provisions of Visigothic legislation. In the seventh century the clergy-dominated Council of Toledo, drawing on Roman law, tried to replace verdicts based on physical combat or oaths sworn by kinsmen with a careful search for evidence … “The chapter, De coede et morte hominum, compared with laws corresponding thereto in other [Germanic] nations, is a very remarkable example. Elsewhere, it is the damage done which seems to constitute the crime, and the punishment is sought in the material or pecuniary reparation. Here the crime is reduced to its true, veritable and moral element, the intention. The various shades of criminality, absolutely involuntary homicide, homicide by inadvertence, homicide with or without premeditation are distinguished and defined nearly as correctly as in our codes, and the punishments vary in just proportion.” … The fourth Lateran Council of 1215 effectively abolished trial by ordeal by forbidding clergy to take part in them.

And as culpability began to vary with the perpetrator’s intent, the value of the lives taken began to equalize under the law:

Moved by their belief in the equality of souls, the clergy began to reject the German custom of assigning different legal values to the lives of men. “The only distinction which he (the legislator) kept up was that of the free man and the slave. As regards free men, the punishment varies neither according to the origin nor the rank of the deceased, but solely according to the various degrees of culpability of the murderer. With regard to slaves, although not daring to deprive the master of all right to life and death, he at least attempted to restrain it, by subjecting it to a public and regular procedure.” Here we see the clergy not only borrowing from Roman law, but also developing it. Later Roman law had already pointed towards more humane treatment of slaves. But in the language of the Visigothic code there is a new urgency: “If no malefactor or accomplice in a crime should go unpunished, with how much more reason should we condemn those who have committed homicide lightly and maliciously! Therefore, as masters, in their pride, often put their slaves to death, without fault on their part, it is right that this licence should be entirely extirpated, and we ordain that this law should be perpetually observed by all. No master or mistress can put to death without public trial any of their male or female slaves, nor any person dependent on them.”

The evolution of respect for the individual can be seen in the history of to whom oaths were administered and the obligations they entailed:

We are told that in ad 792 Charlemagne, wishing to secure the allegiance of his subjects and to restore a stable empire for “the Christian people,” asked for an oath of allegiance from every man. What is startling about his action is that he expected the oath to be sworn, not only by freemen, but by slaves on royal and church estates as well! Such a request would have been inconceivable in antiquity, a world in which slaves could be defined as “living tools.” In 802 Charlemagne asked for another oath, this time requiring the oath to be taken by “all men” over the age of twelve, apparently extending the range of self-assumed obligation. Nor was that all. The language of his later edicts at times pointed beyond gender differences, with phrases such as “every Christian person” and “absolutely everyone, without exception.” Charlemagne’s oaths implied that slaves and women had souls as well, a moral capacity making their oaths and their loyalty worth having. Charlemagne insisted that all people taking the oaths should be able to understand them. For those taking the oaths would, if the oaths were violated, then be liable to stern punishment for “infidelity.” The significance of this condition should not be underestimated. “The oaths were administered in the vernacular of each region. Those who took them could never claim that they had not understood what was spoken on that occasion. Each person was henceforth engaged by his oath to serve Charlemagne “with all my will and with what understanding God has given me.” That emphasis on individual will and understanding represents a momentous moral step. It opened the way to a new understanding of the foundation of social order.

Individuals came to be seen as having obligations to their protectors, but only if their protectors provided them with something of value:

[T]he universalizing of oath-taking … introduces, however precariously, an element of free will into general social relations, acknowledgement of a role for conscience. Charlemagne recommended that all free men should place themselves under a superior or lord, in return for benefits and protection. No doubt local circumstances often made that a practical necessity. Yet by presenting it as an act of will, he introduced a new feature into the relations between rulers and the ruled. Charlemagne hoped to create a social structure that combined hierarchy with at least nominal consent. In his General Capitulary of 806 he insisted “that every free man who has received from his lord (seigneur or senior) the value of one solidus ought not to leave him, unless the lord has attempted to kill him, strike him with a baton, dishonour his wife or daughter, or steal his property.” Subordination was thus mitigated by exchange and a touch of freedom.

The stories of the saints were tales of self-improvement in which an individual could make decisions on their own that would gain them respect and admiration:

Largely illiterate congregations also heard tales of saints’ lives, stories which demonstrated that salvation did not depend upon social status – and that individual faith could triumph over even the most unfavourable circumstances. The Lives of the saints offered a kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited. That freeing of the imagination from inherited social status contributed to new moral intuitions. The Lives of the saints became a remarkable genre. In today’s terms, they combined elements from stories of the Wild West, crime novels and science fiction with morality tales. In effect, they democratized the ancient cult of the hero, for the moral triumph they celebrated was a triumph open to everyone. It did not depend on birthright, gender, bodily strength or mere cunning … The message of hope was reinforced by the recruitment of clergy. The church’s emphasis on celibacy and resistance to clerical marriage prevented the clergy degenerating into a caste. The opportunity for social advancement through a career in the church, even if it was still hedged in by the privileges of birth, weakened the perception that social standing was entirely governed by “fate.”

To be sure, a caste system governed in medieval Europe, and it took the massive depletion of labor caused by the Plague to endow the least-well-off with the bargaining power necessary to break free of caste obligations and pave the way toward a more “free market” system.  But the groundwork for individual rights laid by Christianity was significant in the caste system’s ultimate demise:

At best, we can only recover fragments of identity from the tenth century, fragments that afford glimpses into minds beginning to be liberated from the assumptions of an ancient social order. The pieces were dispersed and disorderly. They were present in some minds far more than in others. Nonetheless, they were sufficiently widespread to prevent feudalism achieving the “staying power” of that ancient society founded on the permanent inequalities of lordship, paterfamilias and slavery. These fragments of identity mark the beginnings of the modern Western world … Government would no longer be conceived primarily as a rule over families, clans or castes. It would be conceived as rule over individuals.

Christians, qua Christians, came to further weaken the feudal caste system:

The statement by a church council in Narbonne in 1054 catches a new mood sweeping across feudal Europe: No Christian should kill another Christian, for whoever kills another Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ.” The proclamation takes no notice of feudal stratification.

That roughhousing knights came to be subject to codes of chivalry marked progress toward checking those in power:

Closely connected with the widespread building of castles, knights were at first probably little more than armed thugs given to pillaging their neighbourhood. Drawn mostly from the class of small landowners, they were “masters” rather than nobles. But the gradual creation of a code of chivalry, which insisted on the loyalty of knights to their lords as well as their duty to protect the weak and unfortunate, amounted to another attempt to moralize what at the outset had been a rather sordid role.

In the next and last essay in this series, we’ll explore how seeing individuals as controlling their own will led to government controlling people less.

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.