Chap wrote: ↑Tue Oct 08, 2024 7:05 pm
I think you may be talking about the values of the 18th century Enlightenment, which tended to be expressed in the context of a much watered down version of Christianity for cultural and historical reasons, but which can manage to exist quite well without a religious scaffolding to hold them up.
There is a case to be made that modern, post-Enlightenment values would not have existed without Christianity to pave the way for them, articulated by
this book review:
Tim O'Neill wrote:Today, the idea that we should care for others, help the weak, give to assist the needy and feel sorrow at the afflictions of the vulnerable and exploited is thought to be normal and obvious. TV ads for charities and aid organisations do not have to argue all humans have a right to dignity by merit of being human, they simply assume we all understand this. So it is difficult for us to imagine how radical it was for people like Gregory and Macrina or the others Holland highlights in this part of his book (Martin of Tours, Paulinus of Nola) to help the helpless purely because they recognised the paradox of a divine Christ as a suffering human being in these fellow humans. Rich people had done good works before. Ancient nobles were expected to endow great public buildings, hold games, races and gladiatorial shows, give free grain and bread to the populace of their city or support centres of learning or healing. But this was because that was seen as reflecting their dignitas and to their glory and esteem. It was not because they saw the people these acts assisted as their equals, equally reflecting the divine and so intrinsically worthy of equal dignity. That idea would have been alien, bizarre and even repellant. The fact that it is familiar, normal and attractive to us shows, as Holland argues, that we are like fish swimming in essentially Christian water. We barely even notice we are doing it.
I don't have the expertise to evaluate whether the claim holds up, and it's based on an implicit counterfactual ("Would there have been an Enlightenment or a concept of universal human rights if Europe had never become Christian?") that reaches so far back in time, changing so many variables along the way, that it feels virtually unanswerable. What is clear is that even if Christianity was a necessary condition, it wasn't a sufficient one. The ideology of human rights emerged more than 1300 years after Christianity achieved regional dominance, and only after Europeans spent two centuries intermittently slaughtering each other over which variety of Christianity was the correct one. And, as you say, that ideology, once established, can hold up without a religious scaffolding.
