Greece, Rome, and the Bill of Rights (7 page)

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Authors: Susan Ford Wiltshire

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Chapter 2
Law, Individual, and Church in the Middle Ages
Scire Deum satis est, quo nulla scientia major.
It is enough to know God, than whom there is no greater knowledge.
If an ordinary person in Europe in the early Middle Ages were asked, "To whom or what do you belong?" the answer would probably be "to the Church." Personhood by virtue of membership in a group, conceived by the Greeks and elaborated by the Romans, was now embraced by medieval Christianity.
In what might be called a "wholeness" theory of society, the social, personal, and religious components of a Christian's life could not be separated. The Church's claims of direction over the lives of its members were both corporate and individual, both public and private. The body of citizens,
corpus civium
, of the classical Roman world was now transformed into the body of Christ,
corpus Christi
. Neither historical situation permitted a notion of individuality apart from the group.
Both Greek philosophy and Roman law were pressed into the service of the Church in the medieval period.

 

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Although they required many transformations to accommodate Christianity, they represented a continuity with the classical past that never was entirely broken. The challenge of combining the classical tradition with Christianity was enormous:
An immense task lay ahead of the medieval man. The present had to be secured, the past reconquered. The lesson of Roman law was that the greatest of all legal systems had been based purely on reason and utility; the lesson of Aristotle, that the State is the highest achievement of man and the necessary instrument of human perfection. How could a Christian community be taught the elementary duties of good life and fellowship? How could Roman law be accepted as the universal law of Christendom? How could Aristotle, a pagan philosopher, be adapted to the Christian view of life?

1

The story of the evolution of rights in the Middle Ages may be approached from four perspectives: the role of Stoicism, the transformation of the theory of natural law, the union between the Church and Roman law, and the individual as subject in medieval society.
Stoicism in the Middle Ages
Stoicism was the Greek philosophy most adaptable to Christianity, just as earlier it had been the philosophical system most congenial to Roman culture. Stoic influence permeated theology and law, the two primary projects of the Middle Ages. For Christian intellectuals, the Stoic inheritance provided patterns and insights to enrich their efforts to forge connections between their past, present, and future.
2
In medieval law, its greatest influence was the incorporation into Roman law of Stoic natural law theory.
By combining the previously antithetical notions of nature and law,
physis
and
nomos
, and then by merging that combination with a divinely ordered universe, the Stoics had posited a worldview easily open to Christianization. What had been a contradiction in fifth-century

 

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Greece became a philosophical system in the Hellenistic period and a handmaid of the "law of nations" in the Roman Empire. Now, with natural law as godparent, Stoicism was ready for baptism.
The appeal of Stoicism in the Middle Ages lay in its promise of certainty, universal harmony, and a method of understanding the troubles of the world. If everything happens according to divine Providence, then we need only endure events and accept everything that happens with a spirit as unruffled as possible. Although this is not essentially a Christian doctrine, it came to sound like one, and people acted consistently as if they believed that it were.
Both Stoicism and medieval Christianity attempt to make a forbidding universe more friendly. Both emphasize morality, the ideal of human community, the importance of personal ethics, and a persistent yearning for harmony and unity.

3
Because of these affinities, Stoicism attracted more adherents than any other system except Christianity, including many who professed Christianity, and affected human institutions more than any other Greek philosophy.
4
It was the only philosophical system that directed its message toward all human beings without distinction, offering internal liberation whether one's external conditions were free or slave, Greek or barbarian, even male or female.
5

Stoicism passed into the Middle Ages through the works of other writers in addition to Cicero. The Roman Stoic Seneca (c. 4
B.C.
A.D.
65) was held in especially high esteem. Augustine refers to Seneca frequently,
6
as do John of Salisbury, Alain de Lille, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas.
A case study in the early appropriation of Stoic thought is provided by Ambrose, the bishop of Milan [c. 340397]. Marcia L. Colish shows that Ambrose, unlike a number of the Church Fathers, did not feel the need to agonize over Tertullian's question, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?"
7
He simply appropriated Stoic ideas for his own ends. For example, in the
De fuga saeculi
Ambrose holds that there is a natural law inscribed on the

 

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human heart and a written law inscribed on the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Human beings fulfill the natural law when they voluntarily obey God's commandments.

8
When all of his works are taken together and his use of Stoicism is taken in context, it is clear that Ambrose is not trying to prove the superiority of Christianity or even to bring Stoicism systemically into accord with the Gospel. In the field of ethics, which is his primary interest, Ambrose simply draws on Stoic ideas and formulae as ways of posing and arguing issues.
9

The most difficult obstacle for Christianity in appropriating Stoicism was the materialistic basis of Stoic philosophy. The universe and everything in it, even divine Providence itself, was considered by the Stoics to be actual and material rather than abstract or ideal. Medieval Christian writers dealt with this materialism in various ways. Influenced by Cicero and Seneca, Lactantius interpreted biblical texts in the light of Stoic materialism almost unconsciously. By the fifth century
A.D.
, however, Stoic materialism itself had softened, perhaps owing to the impact of Neoplatonism.
10
Stoicism had to be reconciled with Christianity in another important respect. Where Christianity speaks of original sin, Stoicism holds that the moral life is not imposed on human beings from the outside but that we are born good and inclined toward goodness. Furthermore, everyone can grasp by intuition the basic principles of morality, even without special knowledge or training. Moral life is the same everywhere and for everyone. By instinct and hard work, rather than by perfect faith, all human beings can aspire to moral perfection.
11
This is aided by the Stoic notion of conscience. Seneca sounds not a little like Benjamin Franklin when he says that he examines himself every evening to review how well he had done that day.
12
What persisted, however, was the aspect of Stoicism that contributed so profoundly to the natural law theory that would ultimately inform the Bill of Rightsnamely, the conviction that nature is not irrational but coincides with universal reason. Further, this reason is synonymous

 

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with Divinity. Even when covered over with Grace and Faith, the Stoic origins of this idea persisted, never to be lost from sight altogether.

13

Natural Law and the Church
Early in the twentieth century, Ernst Troeltsch proposed that natural law came as an alien element from the ancient world into the teachings of Christianity, providing a social and political program lacking in the Gospel.
14
Troeltsch's argument is persuasive. The teachings of Jesus have little to do with hierarchy, political power, or institutional organization. Rather, they urge that it is a good thing to give away one's cloak and that the earth is meant for the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers. The sociopolitical infrastructure for a dominant Christian culture in the Middle Ages was provided instead by two legacies from the classical past: Stoic natural law, which contributed the theory, and Roman law, which contributed the practice.
The two Church Fathers primarily responsible for appropriating the pagan idea of natural law for Christian purposes in the early medieval period were Ambrose and his great pupil, Augustine (354430). Together they took the natural law tradition they inherited from Cicero and established it in a permanent place in the Church. Eventually the Church Fathers came to use
natural law
simply as a general term of approbation for whatever ideas they were forwarding at the time.
15
In time, natural law became synonymous with church doctrine, offering something to everyone and at the same time providing ideas with the protective covering of immutable truth. A. P. d'Entrèves addresses both the formal continuity and the transformation of the doctrine by the Church Fathers:
As far as the "formal" continuity of the notion is concerned, there is no doubt that medieval natural law is the progeny of the Greeks and the Romans. To medieval eyes the idea of the law of nature appeared surrounded by the glamour of the Roman

 

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