Between the Cross and the Crown
Latin Christianity and the Genesis of the Western Moral Revolution
This summer, I wrote, commenting on British historian David Starkey’s dismissal of the thesis of popular classicist Tom Holland’s book Dominion, that modern liberal values around individual and human rights were the consequences of the Christian moral revolution. As promised, I’ll now give my views on this debate.
While Dr. Starkey is one of my personal favorite historians, he has allowed his focus on English particularisms to lead him down a rather inadequate logical path with the idea that Western conceptions of rights were not mediated and tutored by Christianity. Specifically Western or Latin Christianity, that is, the Roman Catholic Church and its northern offshoot, the Protestants.
The Latin post-Roman tradition developed differently from that of the Greek speaking later-Romans because the West was overrun with barbarians who lacked the intellectual, linguistic, and political sophistication of the ancient Mediterranean world that gave rise to Christianity. They were simply out of their element, and this lack of cultural depth and familiarity would lead to errors and distractions, which the Latin Church would need to correct - repeatedly - over the centuries. But it also meant that unlike the East with the Eastern Roman Empire - Byzantium - as the model for the leaders of migrating barbarians to copy as they civilized, there was no great metropolitan state for the Western peoples to copy, and despite the efforts of Charlemagne, the Franks failed to create a replacement Roman Empire that could wield the West together like old Rome. In fact, it was up to old Rome to sort out “Europe.” It was up to the Papacy.
