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.
Your point is well taken, sir, and you touch the nub of the controversy. If it were treason that was being punished when an atheist refused to offer incense to the Emperor, then it is only tangentially a Freedom of Expression issue.
As you can see, the question of ‘free of expression’ is not a useful legal category in which to place the laws and customs of the classical Roman world. In a similar manner, the Romans were acutely conscious of their bloodlines, clan, family, and their descent from Venus through Aeneas: and they owned slaves. However, to argue either that they were or were not ‘racists’ in the modern sense of someone adopting the Darwinian view of the various skin colors of man represent different gradations of evolutionary supremacy, so that the Slavic races should serve the Aryan races, or the Negro serve the Spanish, is to attribute to the Romans a whole set of thoughts and attitudes utterly unknown to their world. Roman slaves could be doctors, for example, or Gladiatorial fighters, or killed onstage as actors in a stageplay in a scene where the character dies. Say what you will about the antebellum South, their version of slavery did not fit into that model. Likewise for when a man of the ancient world or the medieval world spoke or did not speak.
The Enlightenment was a political and philosophical reaction to a specific historical problem, namely, how did the civilized world of Christianity get along with itself in light of the success of the Reformation, such that, for the first time since the Crusades, there was no longer a single organic institution, one universal Church, governing and guiding the spiritual business of mankind, but instead various nations now claimed their sovereign was also Supreme Pontiff, and to disobey was treason? The wars of succession turned into wars of religion, and Catholic and Protestant hated and fought each other with indefatigable hatred, Christian killing Christian in the name of Christ. The Enlightenment proposed a truce: the Catholic Church would be granted no secular power in an Enlightened country, and the sovereign would no longer claim to be Supreme Pontiff, nor to have any authority whatever to decree matters of Christian faith and doctrine. Christianity, in other words, was privatized.
But this solution has no meaning outside of the historical conundrum it was meant to support. This, for example, is why the faithful Muslim sees no reason and has no desire to embrace the official national agnosticism of the Enlightenment. The Shiite versus Suni civil wars date back to Omar, and so, unlike Christianity, there is no Church and has never been a Church, no Supreme Pontiff, for Popes and Parliaments and Princes to quarrel over, and no one to propose a cease-fire to quell that quarrel. As I said, the First Amendment is a cease fire between the various denominations of England in the endless wars over who gets to define Church dogma. But the Muslims have no institution anything like a Church, no priesthood, no hierarchy, and no one like Henry VIII claiming that authority in the name of the secular power. That is why Mohammedanism cannot coexist with the First Amendment cease fire: in the face of a world where the spiritual and secular power has never been distinct, the cease fire on our side is merely unilateral disarmament.
Likewise for the freedom of expression so beloved and abused by champions of the First Amendment, like Larry Flint and Hugh Hefner. The use of the government to censor the press was an Reformation problem which had never before existed in the world. Kings of old did not make decrees on which thoughts were and were not permitted to be published. Book burning is an attempt to smash a certain tradition of thought or argument, and this only has meaning in societies where thought and argument is the basis for denominational and factional conflict, and, again, denominational conflict has only meaning in societies where the denomination is the basis of society, that is, in Christendom during the Reformation. The conflicts over the heresies in the first ten centuries of the Church, even with some imperial power involved, did not have the same character and do not belong in the same legal categories.
Likewise again for the death of Socrates. A First Amendment in Athens might well have saved his life, but, aside from Socrates, who would have needed the protection of such a statute? How often did the Demos of Athens police speech for content? What need did they have?
The Postmodern thinkers attempting pathetically to heap up praise for the current generation eagerly wish to point to our laws and customs as being a solution to a problem they see as endemic to mankind, a unique solution. Even the name ‘enlightenment’ is a absurd arm-breaking gesture of patting-oneself-on-the-back. In reality, the sins of man run fairly constantly throughout all ages, and some happy generations who have less of one usually find they have more of another, and so crowing about the one of which one’s peer happily have less is naive at best, folly at worst. It is the parochialism of the ahistorical.
It is sad to live in an generation that routinely congratulates itself on its freedom, for example, for Lesbians to marry each other, but which does not imagine and cannot believe that earlier generations enjoyed more freedoms in other areas or of other kinds, perhaps more to their liking, and certainly to mine.
(I am always gratified to see a modern thinker baffled when his discovers that in the so called Dark Ages, people had more festivals, holidays, and time off than we have now. They are likewise baffled to discover that earlier generations had more liberty in any area. That goes against the narrative of social evolution.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
