Inventing the Individual

I have written elsewhere about whether history is doomed to repeat itself, what lessons we can glean from past heroes, and how different historical periods inform each other. In this article (part one of two) I consider the movement in Western Literature toward the creation of human nature as we know it today, from Homer through Christian Monks. Part two will explore the role that Shakespeare and Enlightenment thought played in creating the individual as we know her today.

Homer Turns the Conscience Outside In

The Iliad centers on Achilles’s rage: “Sing, Muse, of the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles” (Iliad 1.1). Throughout the poem, however, the object of Achilles’s rage shifts, as does his mode of comprehending and recompensing it. While we are told first of Achilles’s rage toward Agamemnon, who wrongfully usurped Achilles’s courtesan, this rage has ceased by book 18 and has officially been repented of through the reconciliation in book 19. There, Achilles’s wrath—his μῆνιν—shifts toward Hector, toward active vengeance rather than passive avoidance.

A word here is needed concerning Achilles’s ‘sitting out’ the war. His choice to dally and to command his Myrmidons likewise appears, to the modern eye, a simple dereliction of duty. Does not Homer specify that Achilles “brought countless woes upon the Achaeans,” his own side (Iliad 1.2)? Yet this oversimplification forgets the embassy to Achilles in book 9, where Phoenix says plainly that no Greek has blamed Achilles (Iliad 9.515–25). Wherein, then, lies Achilles’s flaw—his hamartia, missing the mark—and how does his conception of personal guilt undergird Western morality? These questions will now become our focus.

When Achilles rejects Agamemnon’s offer of reconciliation in book 9, Achilles has ceded his claim to impunity—he has rejected the accepted moral standard of recompense and so stands morally culpable for the first time in the poem (Arieti, 1985). Shame—externally imposed—has no effect on Achilles, though delivered personally by his comrades in arms (Odysseus and Ajax) and by his childhood tutor (Phoenix). Yet Achilles’s moral arc will not reach its zenith until book 18 when he sends his friend Patroclus into battle with orders to withdraw once he started winning.

The gods looked down upon this impossible request to quell glory at its peak. Such a request denigrated Moira (fate) and had to be rejected. When Patroclus dies and Achilles determines demanded action, he shifts the locus of moral imperative from external (shame) to internal (guilt): here, he becomes an individual. Contrast Achilles’s Trojan counterpart, Zeus’s son Sarpedon, who tells Glaucus in book 12, “Let us go, either to win glory for ourselves, or to give it to somebody else” (Iliad 12.328). While heroic nobleness motivates Sarpedon, personal duty to a friend motivates Achilles (Iliad 18.102ff.)

Achilles’s inward moral nexus has founded western moral frameworks since. One cannot conceptualize Western Civilization apart from an internal locus of moral control. Achilles’s guilt originates and typifies what I shall call phrenetic action—action rooted in prudential intention, the sine qua non of moral responsibility in the West. From Platonic conscience (daimon), to Pyrrhic self-mastery, to Epicurean kānon (epistemic discriminatory faculty), to Stoic detached indifference and self-examination, to Jesus’s insistence on doing good despite religious laws, Western Civilization has declared that the fundament of morality, and of knowledge itself, lies within the individual.

Plato and Aristotle: Ethics Requires Knowledge and Intent

For Plato, moral excellence—arête—required knowledge of good and evil (Bobonich, 2010). Knowledge subsumed all virtue, for all virtue had to be understood before it could be aimed for: “Most excellent man, are you…not ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth and for reputation and honor, when you neither care nor take thought for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul?” (Plato, Apology 29d). Flourishing (eudaimonia) thus required both universal and particular knowledge: knowledge of the virtues, and knowledge of their application to specific situations. These spectra of knowledge undergird orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right action) respectively.

Here we see the philosophical underpinnings of Aristotelean phrenetic action, the means to the golden mean. For Aristotle, right belief and right action were necessary but insufficient means to flourishing (Annas, 1993). Flourishing also required the intent to act rightly. By definition, intent lies within the individual. A community or organization might share goals, but whether its constituents truly intend the same outcome cannot be known. A person’s true intentions might even—though not always—be hidden from himself, a fact which has bedeviled phenomenological research (Talbott, 1995). Yet these cases of self-deception lie outside the central ethical questions posed here. The point is that, for both Aristotle and Plato, optimal human existence required continual reflection and action (words and deeds in the Homeric dichotomy) by individuals.[1]

Familial Piety Preceded Individual Conscience

Now let us contrast the philosophical ideals of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle with actual home-life in antiquity. In the Mediterranean world before the sixth century BCE, individual civil liberty did not exist (Fustel, 2001). Citizens’ juridical obligations included assembling, voting, debating, and possibly serving as magistrate (Siedentop, 2017: 28). If in debt, a city might sequester women’s jewels, creditors’ claims, and farmers’ produce.[2] Cities regulated dress,[3] drink,[4] and matrimony.[5] Gymnastics and schooling molded bodies and minds to the city’s purposes.[6] Ostracism punished two crimes: actual and alleged. Aristides, a statesman whom Herodotus deemed “the best and most honorable man in Athens,” faced the latter charge, as Plutarch relates.[7]

As the voters were inscribing their ostraka, it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristides, whom he took to be one of the ordinary crowd, and asked him to write Aristides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristides had done him. ‘None whatever,’ was the answer, ‘I don't even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called 'The Just.' On hearing this, Aristides made no answer, but wrote his [own] name on the ostrakon and handed it back.[8]

Familial piety superseded individual conscience. The paterfamilias served as both magistrate and priest, intermingling civic and religious duty (Siedentop, 2019: 19). The household fire, the ritualistic nexus, required perpetual attendance, its death signifying the death of the last family member. “Family” (oikeios) actually signified “that which gathers near a hearth.” To see how the Jewish philosopher Philo expanded this term, click here [link Philo article].

Familial Piety in Drama and History

Virgil’s Aeneid dramatizes familial piety. Aeneas escapes Troy’s conflagration, the Trojan carries his father Anchises, who in turn carries the household gods, while Aeneas’s son Ascanius carries the household fire. This image encapsulates devotion to the paterfamilias and to pietas, while simultaneously conveying progeny’s purpose: bearing forth tradition. Aeneas’s willful subjugation to the regulations of familial piety—reverencing both father and fire—makes him worthy of founding a new city. (See Bernini’s statue of Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius – kept today at the Villa Borghese in Rome.) Because Latin distinguished the physical from the religious city, Aeneas could preserve one while the other fell to ruin. He preserved the civitas—the moral nexus of political association—despite the destruction of the urbs—the physical locus of worship and assembly.

Livy gives the story of Rome’s founding in terms similarly suffused with religio, a word that principally means “reverence for the gods” and the conscientiousness derived therefrom (Lewis and Short, 1879: “Rĕlĭgĭo”).[9]

Since Romulus and Remus were twins and distinction could not be made by respect for age, they decided to ask the protecting gods of the area to declare by augury who should give his name to the new city and who should rule over it after its foundation . . . Remus is said to have received the first augury, six vultures. This augury had already been announced when twice the number appeared to Romulus. Each man was hailed as king by his own followers. (Livy, History, 1.6–7, trans. Warrior)

Rome’s eponymous founder preferred omens to reason. A Greek would have consulted Delphi, an Samnite a sacred animal, but “being a Latin, and a neighbour of the Etruscans, initiated into the augurial science, he [Romulus] asks the gods to reveal their will to him by the flight of birds”(Fustel, 111–12).[10] Following their founder, Roman priests selected potential consuls via augury. They intoned candidates’ names under the night sky to determine the gods’ will, then citizens voted from the apportioned list. At times, the auguries chose unpopular candidates, but augury trumped conscience. Athenians analogously used lots to determine the gods’ will. In both Athens and Rome, ill-omened days meant postponing assemblies, marriages, and court (Siedentop, 26). Where reason and religion clashed, religion won. 

The Rise of Christendom

Whereas Jesus of Nazareth advocated civic duty (“render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” Mt. 22:21, par. Mk 12:17, Lk 20:25), he preached a philosophy of individual moral refinement and duty to God over and against ritualistic pietistic purity:

But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Mt 6:17–8)

It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person. (Mt 15:11)

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Mt 23:27–8)

The internal and contemplative yet deliberate, dutiful, willful, and active moral refinement that Jesus required contrasted both the Jewish and Greek models. Conscience played a central role in his ethic, but conscience—like right belief and right action for Aristotle—did not suffice. Moral action still required ha davrim Adonai—“the Words of the Lord.” No longer accessible merely through Torah, God’s desires might be seen and understood through worshipful duty and the revelation God granted to the faithful. Hence, the Augustinian paradox: “‘Grant me Lord to know and to understand’ (Psalm 118: 34, 73, 144) which comes first—to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you proceeds calling upon you” (Confessions 1.1, trans. Chadwick). Phrenetic action here becomes a willful act of trusting obedience: prophetic revelatory consciousness is entrusted to all, not simply to the navi’im (prophets).

Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

Contrast again the Christian notion that divine will may be revealed to any willing person with the Greek notion that only some people attain to full rationality. Xenophon, in the fifth century BCE, wrote the following in his dialogue Hiero.

All creatures seem in a similar fashion to take pleasure in food, drink, sleep and sex. But that love of honour does not grow up in animals lacking speech. Nor, for that matter, can it be found in all human beings. The lust for honour and praise grows up only in those who are most fully distinguished from the beasts of the fields: which is to say that it grows up only in those judged to be real men and no longer mere human beings. (Rahe, 1994: 31)

Aristocratic familial structures poured over into society, where, in tandem with household gods’ obsolescence, political power became increasingly remote and unfathomable (Siedentop, 52). Like political power, moral authority appeared increasingly vested in some “beyond” rather than in deductive argument (Diehle, 1982: 10–19). This shift meant that “an act of submission now seemed to be the precondition of knowledge. So it began to appear that obedience led to understanding, rather than the reverse”(Siedentop, 55). Agency battled rationality for primacy as the precondition of proper action, and Jewish agency appeared primed to beat out Hellenic rationality. Whereas Aristotle had chosen “words” over “deeds” in the classical dichotomy, the Greek world—though suffused with immeasurable Jewish influence—selected deeds (Arieti, 2017: 7).

Paul Internalizes the Locus of Control

With willful obedience to natural law, rather than to reason, now firmly undergirding ethics in Mediterranean philosophy, the stage was set for Paul of Tarsus’s entry. Paul insisted on moral equality for all: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Ga 3:28, NASB). Faithful acceptance presupposed a volitional, rather than a permissive will. When Christian ‘love of the poor’ extended to groups outside existing social hierarchies—the destitute, servile, and foreign—they made moral status a “visible social role:” the individual (Siedentop 83). Singular people, rather than groups, became the subjects of religious devotion, seekers of sacraments such as baptism and the Eucharist, for the traditional social groupings were dismantled in the action of accepting social outcasts.

A grand debate in the Early Church arose concerning truth’s nature and provenance. Hellenic philosophy’s deductive reason, reason from causes, had classically offered a more logical alternative to inductive reason, reason from effects. Church Fathers offered a third way: revelation. For Paul, this gateway to God’s will hinged on submission, “a wager on the moral equality of humans,” which paradoxically had a leap of faith as its starting point: human autonomy, for Paul, could be fully realized only in active submission (Siedentop, 65). For third-century Church Father Origin, when God says “perhaps they will hear and repent” (Je 26:3) “he acts as if he did not know the future in your case, in order to preserve your freedom of choice by not anticipating or foreknowing whether you will repent or not” (Wiles and Santer, 1977: 10). The divine will condescends, so Origin, to retain the illusion of human free will.

Constantine, Asceticism, and the Greater Roman Empire

Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D., legalizing Christianity and effectively ending Christian martyrdom. This fact left Christians in a dilemma: in the absence of the possibility to give one’s life for one’s faith, what actions constitute the highest devotion? How can one show the highest love if he cannot ‘lay down his life for a friend’? Christians answered this question with asceticism. Absolute self-denial and the formation and strengthening of the individual will became the ultimate expressions of Christian devotion. Hence, the individual was again strengthened as a central social force and fundament (Chadwick, 1993: 174–83). Solitary self-abnegation epitomized Christian thought, ascetics Christian practice.

But pariahs make poor pedagogues. Theologians might apotheosize absconded ascetics, but they could not learn these paragons’ methods. Hence, apart from the practical concerns raised by a life debarred from others’ productive activities, individualistic asceticism raised the ecclesiastical concern of deserting the deserts’ most experienced instructors. Ascetics realized this fact and slowly argued for monastic communities. Thus, even Anthony of Egypt, arguably the most renowned Christian ascetic, ended his days by reintegrating into Christian society and relating his lessons to young monks (Life of Anthony of Egypt, §91).[11] Indeed, Athanasius of Alexandria self-consciously recorded Anthony’s Life as an instruction manual for monks.[12] Community Rules forming in Asia Minor during the third and fourth centuries would concretize the shift. In the Cappadocian Fathers—Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea—individual asceticism definitively ceded its moral primacy to monasticism.

Concomitant with this theological shift, new egalitarian social goals surfaced, constituting yet another individualizing aim. “‘Therefore brothers, let us be equal, from the least to the greatest, whether rich or poor, perfect in harmony and humility,’ urged one leading monk” (Harmless, 2004: 158). Antony, perhaps the most famous desert father typified monastic individualism in his claim that he needed only God’s creation and the Bible for growth. He had no other books nor knowledge of Greek (the language of high culture) but said ‘My book . . . is the nature of God’s creation; it is present whenever I wish to read His words’ (Brown, 1992: 71). Moral success shortly became measurable by control over one’s will through repudiating desire. When monastic communities became overcrowded, this individualistic ideal became concentrated into small Christian communities, which spread their message far and abroad in the ensuing centuries:

If the martyrs had offered a more democratic model of heroism, the monks could be portrayed as a new type of athlete, an athlete who sought not physical perfection or competitive glory but conquest of the will. The desert rather than the amphitheatre was the setting for victory. The audience was God rather than crowds. An inner voice rather than outbursts of applause was the medium of success (Sidentop 87).

Hence, the conscience had begun its inward turn. While Philip Rieff rightly notes that a true internal locus of control did not burgeon until the post-Christian era of the Englightenment, its seeds had already taken root in the “second world” of Christendom (Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic). Contrary to the pre-Christian pagan world where externalities reigned supreme, the Christian world knew another force which, by apotheosizing the individual believer (the “children of God” and “coheirs” and “ambassadors” of Christ), made the locus of moral control bipartite. This force was faith. Through this “evidence of things not seen,” the things not seen became reified in the mind of the individual, hence graspable. Tellingly, the darkness did not “grasp” the divine logos—κατέλαβεν: to comprehend, grasp, overcome—but the logos illumined humankind: enlightened, enlivened, awakened them (Jn 1.5).

Notes

[1] Peleus, Achilles’s father, hired the tutor Peleus to make Achilles “a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.” Alas, Achilles appears to have preferred the latter. See Arieti and Barrus, 2007 for a discussion of the absence of a discernible difference between the Homeric word for “words” (muthoi) and the fifth-century and later word logos.

[2] Aristotle, Econom., II

[3] Fragm. Hist. Graec. Didot, t. II. p. 129, 211; Plutarch, Solon, 21.

[4] Athenaeus, X. 33. Ælian, V. H., II 37.

[5] Pollux, VIII. 40, Plutarch, Lysander, 30.

[6] Pollux, VIII. 46; Plato, Laws, VII; Aristophanes, Clouds, 960–968.

[7] Herodotus, Histories, 8.79

[8] Plut. Arist. 7; trans. Perrin.

[9] By the time that Ammianus Marcellinus employed the word religio in c. 370 CE, it had come to overlap with cultus to entail both orthopraxy and orthodoxy of a particular group. Hence, referring to the Emperor Julian, he writes, “And in order to win the favour of all men and have opposition from none, he [Julianus Augustus] pretended to be an adherent of the Christian religion [cultui Christiano] . . . offering a prayer to their deity in the usual manner” (Amm. 21.2.4). In the same document, Ammianus employs the same genitive construction with religio replacing cultus: “The plain and simple religion of the Christians [Christianam religionem] he [Constantius Augustus] obscured by a dotard's superstition, and by subtle and involved discussions about dogma, rather than by seriously trying to make them agree, he aroused many controversies” (Amm. 21.16.18).

An ancient debate concerning the etymology of religio  (phonetically rendered rĕlĭgĭo, or, in poetry also rellĭgĭo to lengthen the first syllable) concerned whether it derived from relegere—which would emphasize both gathering together [what is proper] and repeatedly relating [teachings]; thus Cicero N. D. 2.28.72, citing Gell. 4.9.1: religentem esse oportet, religiosum nefas—or religare, emphasizing binding [vice? self-possession?]; thus Servius ad Verg. A. 8, 349; Lactantius 4.28; Augustine, Retract. 1.13), and perhaps Lucretius 1.931; 4.7: religionum nodis animos exsolvere. Lewis and Short point out that, in the latter sense, “religio sometimes means the same as obligatio; v. Corss. Aussprache, 1, 444 sq.; cf. Munro ad Lucr. 1, 109” (Lewis and Short, “Rĕlĭgĭo”).

[10] See Cicero, De Divin., I. 17; Plutarch, Camillus, 32. Pliny, XIV. 2; XVIII. 12.

[11] John W. Coakley and Andrea Sterk, eds., Earliest Christianity to 1453, 15th ed., vol. I, Readings in World Christian History (Maryknoll, Ney York: Orbis Books, 2016), 142–3. The practice recalls Jewish testaments, wherein a patriarch relates blessings and instruction from his deathbed.

[12] Ibid. 131.