This post won’t explore your growth into a mature adult or address Darwinian categories like pre-hominids. It will, however, make the claim that the modern idea of personhood is hardly an adult concept. Historically, it’s relatively young. And before we conceived of ourselves as persons this way, the world was full of “pre-personids,” as I’ll call them. As I use the term, and only I use it, pre-personids are image bearing people who live in a social construct with no categories for individual legal, relational, or vocational identity, or for their independent personhood. Each individual is not a person as we see persons. Rather, they are defined by their place in the whole.
Pre-personids go way back. Humans have been around since the beginning, but our concept of the person took ages to evolve and, according to Larry Siedentop, wouldn’t have if not for Jesus and his servant Paul. Before the reality of the Incarnation and Atonement was kneaded into the fabric of western culture, law, and social identity, the individual was not a person in the way we see ourselves or others.
As we might imagine, the idea of “person” came in fits and starts, some of which make awkward reading for moderns
Identity, such as it was conceived, was bound by one’s civic station and family heritage and then sealed by legal status and social norms. Siedentop charts that slow evolution in his book, Inventing the Individual. As we might imagine, the idea of “person” came in fits and starts, some of which make awkward reading for moderns looking back at the gestation of our personhood.
Here’s an example.
We are told that in AD 792 Charlemagne, wishing to secure the allegiance of his subjects and to restore a stable empire for ‘the Christian people,’ asked for an oath of allegiance from every man. What is startling about his action is that he expected the oath to be sworn, not only by freemen, but by slaves on royal and church estates as well! Such a request would have been inconceivable in antiquity, a world in which slaves could be defined as ‘living tools.’ In 802 Charlemagne asked for another oath, this time requiring the oath to be taken by ‘all men’ over the age of twelve, apparently extending the range of self-assumed obligation. Nor was that all. The language of his later edicts at times pointed beyond gender differences, with phrases such as ‘every Christian person’ and ‘absolutely everyone, without exception.’ Charlemagne’s oaths implied that slaves and women had souls as well, a moral capacity making their oaths and their loyalty worth having. .
Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual (p. 153, Harvard University Press).
Ironically, when modern readers process a moment in history like that one, they face challenges that only someone steeped in the personhood that grew out of Christianity could feel.
First, it’s likely they’ll need to work through the retroactive scandal of a ruler demanding, not even campaigning for, absolute fealty. That’s just not acceptable in the 21st Century, thankfully. Second, they’d probably also need to have the point pointed out. If a King is going to demand obedience, of course he’d demand it from every single person. But that was not the case at all. Until the 8th Century it was not expected that the pledge of a slave, or a woman, or an adolescent was either necessary or meaningful. Including individuals in those social stations represents a newly emerged vision of the independent “is” and agency of everyone.
And there’s the irony. Twelve-hundred years later that vision is so entrenched that the modern reader no longer understands where their own sense of self came from and cannot appreciate its precious newness as a social, legal, and moral category. It’s fashionable, even for Christians, to make much of the Church’s culpability in all things Western Civ. May God have mercy. We deserve the scrutiny. But any inspection done by a fair person will see more, I’d say much more, than faults. In this case, that person could see where their sense of self and the individual’s rights came from.
