Clearly, the family – past, present and future – was the basic unit of social reality. (Location 247)
New highlights added August 6, 2025 at 10:53 AM
This book, by contrast, will take moral beliefs as seriously as possible, by looking at a series of ‘moments’ when changed beliefs began to impact on social relations over a period of nearly two millennia. (Location 109)
We must imagine ourselves into a world of humans or persons who were not ‘individuals’ as we would understand them now. (Location 156)
Since the sixteenth century and the advent of the nation-state, people in the West have come to understand ‘society’ to mean an association of individuals. Until recently that understanding was accompanied by a sense of difference, a sense that other cultures had a different basis of organization, whether that was caste, clan or tribe. But in recent decades the Western impact on the rest of the world through capitalism, the spread of democracy and the language of human rights has weakened such a sense of difference. Globalization has made it easier to project an individualized model of society – one that privileges individual preferences and rational choice – onto the whole world. (Location 157)
The writer who has best succeeded in making that leap into the minds of the peoples settling Greece and the Italian peninsula several millennia ago was a French historian, Fustel de Coulanges. His book The Ancient City (1864), one of the most remarkable books of the nineteenth century, reveals how prehistoric religious beliefs shaped first the domestic and then the public institutions of Greece and Rome. It exposes the nature of the ancient family. (Location 192)
The city that emerged was thus a confederation of cults, an association superimposed on other associations, all modelled on the family and its worship. The ancient city was not an association of individuals. (Location 386)
Fustel de Coulanges illustrates the nature of the ancient city by noticing that the ancients made a distinction we do not make. They distinguished the urbs from the civitas when referring to the city. What is the difference? The urbs is the physical location, the place of assembly and worship. But the civitas is the moral nexus, the religious and political association of the citizens. And in unusual circumstances that association might survive the destruction of the urbs. That, for Fustel, is the significance of the story of Aeneas, as told by Virgil. By preserving the sacred fire of Troy, after the sack of the city, Aeneas has preserved the moral basis of its association – which is to say, its gods. His quest thereafter is really their quest. It is they who identify their new home as Rome, and their will that prevents him settling anywhere else, even in Dido’s Carthage. The epic, then, is not about one man’s struggle, but about the successful struggle of the gods of Troy to become the gods of Rome. (Location 473)
Note: Distibction between urbs and civitas, and the moral, cultural etc nexus of community, the political and religious association.
The long period of aristocratic ascendancy in Greek and Italian cities, founded on the family and its worship, had already reduced kingship to a religious role, stripping kings of political authority. The reason for this is clear enough. Kings had frequently made common cause with the lower classes. They had formed alliances with clients and the plebs, directed against the power of the aristocracy. (Location 536)
Note: Huh? Not evidenced in any way here
It was a class that enjoyed being seen in a heroic pose, stripped for action. The ancient taste for nudity was no mere accident. Nudity expressed a sense of social superiority – the superiority of citizens who rose above mere domestic concerns, seeking glory for themselves through the city, and for the city through themselves. To be seen naked was to be seen as superior to the meretricious and even sordid wants of women, merchants and slaves. (Location 574)
Note: No explanation as to why
Wider participation in the government of the city, and the importance of public debate which resulted, had formidable intellectual consequences. New skills were fostered, skills required for careful argument and effective persuasion in the assembly. Logic and rhetoric thus came into existence as public disciplines. (Location 615)
Yet these developments had an important unintended consequence. Reason or rationality – logos, the power of words – became closely identified with the public sphere, with speaking in the assembly and with the political role of a superior class. Reason became the attribute of a class that commanded. At times reason was almost categorically fused with social superiority. So the assumption grew that reason could command – even when, paradoxically, it involved defining an immutable order or ‘fate’. (Location 620)
In the physical world, the assumption emerged as a belief that purposes or ends (what Aristotle called ‘final causes’) governed all processes and entities. In that way, relationships within the non-human world were assimilated to reasons for acting in human life. (Location 626)
Note: Reason as the ability to justify publicly? (rhetoric, in other words) or reason as a technology for connecting internal life and action? At a quotidian level surely reason already operated? Eg I will not go out because it looks like it is going to rain.
no, he says “public disciplines” the page before. (of logic and rhetoric)
Out of its own resources, reason could guarantee action. (Location 631)
Yet even today it remains a matter of controversy whether Greek philosophers had a distinct concept of the will. If they did, it seems to have developed relatively late. What is more immediately striking is that Homeric Greek, the Greek of the Iliad and Odyssey, did not even have a word for ‘intention’.3 (Location 635)
Note: This seems rather linguistically determined
By identifying rationality with social superiority – by taking for granted the deference of inferiors, of a domestic sphere – the ancient world had less need for a doctrine of the will. It had less need to posit a separate event or faculty preceding action in every person. The notion of human agency was shaped by the structure of society. Some were simply born to command and others to obey. Hence there was no ontological gap between thought and action. (Location 638)
Thus commerce became associated with ‘giving in’ to appetites – with refinements, sensual pleasures and a narcissism that subverted civic spirit. Commerce became the enemy of simplicity. It became almost a synonym for decadence. Commerce, along with the taste for luxury it promoted, turned men into quasi-women. (Location 682)
The original sanction of the gods of the city gradually took refuge in the idea of logos. But if debates in city assemblies promoted abstract argument at the expense of domestic worships and civic gods, the weakening of the Greek city-states after the Peloponnesian War and the rise of Macedonian power – reducing formerly proud city-states almost to colonies – gave the idea of logos an even more powerful impetus. The logos which had been embodied in the city and its laws began to make way for a logos embodied in a universal rational order, in what would be called ‘natural law’. (Location 809)
The distractions of the senses, vagaries of desire, the snares of imagination (Location 846)
Note: Great definition of art
Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will. His will was not something that could be fathomed by reason. It could not be deduced from first principles. Nor could it be read in the book of nature. Scripture alone mattered, because it was the record of God’s commands and promises. Historical events – the medium of God’s will – were privileged over deductive reasoning. The Jewish God refused to be pinned down: ‘I will be who I will (Location 887)
Note: Time and agency
Is it fanciful to trace this sense back to the experiences of a nomadic people in the desert, aware that wind blowing across the sand transformed their landscape from one day to the next? (Location 898)
Note: :( YES!
nomadic past provided a different simile for the Jews’ monotheism. God’s will was like the wind shifting the desert sands. Nothing could resist it. (Location 903)
Note: :(
The experience of submitting to a remote Roman ruler may well have contributed to such philosophical preoccupations among learned members of the citizen class. (Location 914)
Note: Like the desert wind/sand religion point this feels both casual and overstressed. By what mechanism?
Withdrawing from accustomed roles into the self – a kind of inner exile – was often the result. (Location 917)
Note: Again what is the dramatic mechanism by which this happens
drama of the polis was losing its hypnotic hold. Instead of acting out parts written by their prescribed ‘natures’, people had little choice but to identify themselves in another way. (Location 917)
Note: Interesting ! You have to write yourself differently! Some resources no longer available to you! The environmental niche changé
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. It was a remarkable turnabout. For making obedience precede understanding, rather than follow from it, amounted to an intellectual revolution. It was a revolution that overturned the basis of the claim to superiority of the citizen class. (Location 919)
Note: Clever turn to christianity! It does feel rather “led” tho
It might, indeed, look as if Jewish habits of thought were about to triumph completely over Graeco-Roman habits of thought, as if, in a battle between the idea of agency on the one hand, and that of rationality on the other, agency was about to drive rationality from the field. Did not the Jewish idea of ‘law’ correspond more closely to everyday experience – and help to cope with it – than ‘reasons’ founded on nature? Yet no such complete victory of Jewish thinking took place. And it did not take place at least in part because of the vision of a young Jew, Saul of Tarsus. (Location 930)
In effect, Paul’s vision of a mystical union with Christ introduces a revised notion of rationality – what he sometimes describes as the ‘foolishness’ of God. It is a foundation for a rationality reshaped through faith. (Location 986)
Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus amounted to the discovery of human freedom – of a moral agency potentially available to each and everyone, that is, to individuals. (Location 998)
The argument that all humans can become ‘one in Christ’ – and that through him all may share in the righteousness of God – reveals Paul grafting a new abstractness onto Jewish thought. It is an abstractness that would foster Christian understanding of community as the free association of the wills of morally equal agents, what Paul describes through metaphor as the ‘body of Christ’. (Location 1008)
When human action had been understood as governed entirely by social categories, by established statuses and roles, there was no need for another foundation for shaping intentions. But introducing the assumption of moral equality changes that. It obliges Paul to look deeper into the human agent. Suddenly there is a need to find a standard to govern individual action and a force within each person to act. (Location 1024)
That gap marks the advent of the new freedom, freedom of conscience. But it also introduces moral obligations that follow from recognizing that all humans are children of God. (Location 1028)
Yet the individual freedom implied by the assertion of this primary role did not mean that Paul dissolved traditional social bonds without replacing them. His was not an ‘atomized’ model of society. (Location 1033)
For his understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection introduced to the world a new picture of reality. It provided an ontological foundation for ‘the individual’, through the promise that humans have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group. (Location 1056)
That is how Paul turns the abstracting potential of Greek philosophy to new uses. He endows it with an almost ferocious moral universalism. (Location 1065)
Often, it is true, ‘I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’.12 Yet through the gift of faith, human actions can cease to be bound by mere habit. For Paul, only in the Christ are wisdom and power joined. Only through faith are the human capacity to act and the faculty of reason reconciled. ‘For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.’13 (Location 1072)
Note: Logos
But if thought depends upon language, and language is a social institution, how can rational agency have a pre-social foundation? That is the dilemma Paul’s argument comes up against. For Paul, the gift of love in the Christ offers a pre-linguistic solution, through a leap of faith – that is, a wager on the moral equality of humans. Faith in the Christ requires seeing oneself in others and others in oneself, the point of view which truly moralizes humans as agents. So Paul’s solution – a paradoxical one, to say the least – is that human autonomy can only be fully realized through submission, through submitting to the mind and will of God as revealed in the Christ. That act of submission is the beginning of ‘a new creation’. (Location 1085)
‘Ockham’s Razor’ insists that explanations should always be made in the simplest terms possible, avoiding the multiplication of entities. (Location 1183)
But were they really alone? The martyrs claimed to be acting in the name of a more important relationship, a relationship that underpinned their wills. Apparently they had found something within themselves more precious than social conventions or conformity. But that was not all. The interior conviction that marked them out was something that disregarded gender, class and status. Martyrdom illustrated the exercise of an individual will, founded on conscience. It made that will visible. (Location 1333)
Note: This detached from duty
However, by the end of the third century one section of the urban elites embarked on a different course for dealing with the emperor and provincial governors, a course which drew on their Christian beliefs and enabled them to become the spokesmen of the lower classes. A new rhetoric served their bid for urban leadership. It was a rhetoric founded on ‘love of the poor’. Drawing on features of the Christian self-image – the church’s social inclusiveness, the simplicity of its message, its distrust of traditional culture and its welfare role – ‘love of the poor’ made possible, Brown argues, a regrouping within the urban elites. It was a rhetoric that reflected and served an alliance between upper-class Christians and the bishops of cities, who were themselves often men of culture or paideia. This new rhetoric was put to use ‘in the never ending task of exercising control within the city and representing its needs to the outside world.4 It was a kind of Christian populism, which served notice on the emperor and his servants that the bishops were now an indispensable factor in urban government. (Location 1377)
As hermits or anchorites became cenobites – that is, as asceticism became communal – Christian beliefs began to generate a new conception of ‘community’, an utterly new form of social organization. (Location 1568)
Note: 4thC
Little wonder, then, that monasticism was acquiring a group identity, both in the eyes of the monks and for outsiders. The first striking thing about that new identity was that its basis lay in voluntary association, in individual acts of will. (Location 1582)
