On the inversion of values - Part 3

The courtroom is dead silent.

I sit at the defence table, staring at the wreckage of my case. The prosecution has dismantled me, laying the Crusades, the transatlantic slave ships, and the Papal Bulls squarely at my feet. The judge reaches for his gavel to deliver the final verdict.

I look down at my phone. A message lights up the screen from my friend Korede, who has been following the trial:

“Do we blame the gas chambers on science? Do we blame robbery on the concept of money? The Church was built by fallen men who brought the very values Rome built its empire on - glory, status, power - into the sanctuary. It is the dirty glass that ruins the clean water. The water isn’t bad in itself”.

I look up at the prosecution. The entire geometry of the room shifts. I stand up.

I tell the jury I concede the history. The Church poured the water of its theology into the dirty, blood-stained glass of human empire. I will not defend the glass. But before the gavel falls, I have one final question for the prosecution. I point to the values the Skeptic and the modern West claim as their own.

“If we are nothing but highly evolved animals, and if the universe is nothing but cold, rational matter… where exactly did you get the moral measuring stick you are currently using to condemn the glass?”

The room goes perfectly still.

C.S. Lewis famously argued that a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.¹ The prosecution has spent hours detailing the crookedness of Christian history. To call it crooked, however, they had to borrow the Christian concept of a straight line. They are judging the dirty glass by the standard of the clean water.

To understand how that happened, we must stop looking at the glass and investigate the water itself. We must investigate the actual moral values we currently take for granted - Compassion, Human Equality, and Social Justice. We call them universal. Are they?

Let us look at the evidence. Enter Exhibit A.

3.1 Compassion

I do not write to claim that compassion as a virtue didn’t exist before Christianity. That would be ludicrous. The cry of a helpless infant invokes a biological drive in a mother to care for the weak. This is coded in our DNA. This drive, however, invites the mother to act selfishly, aligned only with the survival of her in-group, because that guarantees her own survival.

Favour symbiotic relationships. It is only logical.

This biological logic perfectly mirrored the morality of the Greco-Roman world. A popular aphorism in ancient Rome dictated the rhythm of daily life: do good to your friends and harm to your enemies.² This makes perfect sense in a natural world where resources are scarce. When we investigate the greatest moral achievements of the ancient world, we find their compassion strictly bound by this utility.

The Roman Empire boasted a robust welfare system. It was strictly reserved for Roman citizens, designed to prevent bread riots and ensure a steady supply of healthy future soldiers. If you were a sick foreigner or a slave, you were afforded nothing.

Even the brilliant Stoic philosophers, who wrote beautifully about the shared spark of human reason, drew a hard line at the human heart. To a thinker like Seneca, a wise man should help the drowning man, but he must guard himself against feeling pity for him. Pity was diagnosed as a disease of the mind, a weakness that disturbed a man’s inner peace. You help out of duty. You never share the suffering.

To the Roman mind, pity was a mental illness. The early Christians, however, looked at the sick and saw the physical manifestation of their crucified God.

When plague struck the empire and pagan doctors fled to the countryside, Christians stayed behind in the infected cities, risking their own lives to nurse strangers. They took the raw emotion of compassion and forged it into an institution.

In 369 AD, a Christian bishop named Basil the Great built the Basiliad in Cappadocia.³ It is widely considered the first hospital in history. It featured wards for different diseases, housing for the poor, and quarantine sections for lepers. Romans viewed lepers as useless outcasts, best left outside the city walls to die. Christians touched and treated them, simply because their founder touched them.

This entirely unnatural behaviour baffled the ancient world. In the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate tried desperately to destroy Christianity and revive the old pagan gods. He failed. In a frustrated letter to a pagan high priest,⁴ Julian complained bitterly that his religion was losing ground because the Christians were out-loving them:

“The impious Galileans support both their own poor and ours as well; all men see that our people lack aid from us”.

In the ancient world, caring for the useless out-group was biologically and culturally insane. Yet, it won. The Church took the biological emotion of pity and engineered it into a societal infrastructure.

Compassion is only the first piece of the puzzle. The Skeptic might concede the invention of the hospital, but they will fiercely defend our next universal value as a triumph of pure, secular logic.

3.2 Human Equality

Enter Exhibit B.

If there is one dogma the modern West holds sacred, it is the belief that all human beings are created equal. We consider it obvious. We consider it scientific.

Equality is the least self-evident thing in the universe. If you observe the natural world, nature teaches hierarchies, dominance, and the food chain. The strong eat the weak. The big rock crushes the small rock. Put a strong man and a weak man in a room, and natural law dictates that the strong man will dominate the weak one. Aristotle, one of the greatest minds of antiquity, looked at this natural order and logically concluded that some human beings are simply born as “natural slaves”.⁵

So how did we arrive at the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights?

We pulled off the greatest intellectual heist in history. In the seventeenth century, European Enlightenment thinkers grew exhausted by religious wars. They wanted to build a society based on reason, stripping the Church of its political power. They desperately wanted to retain the moral fruits of Christianity, equality, charity, and the protection of the weak, while abandoning its theology.

John Locke, the father of modern liberalism, bypassed science to prove all men are equal. He relied entirely on the Book of Genesis.⁶ He argued that because all humans are made in the image of God - the Imago Dei - no king possesses a divine right to rule over another man. Decades later, Thomas Jefferson took Locke’s theology and gave it a secular paint job. He wrote that it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal.⁷ It is only self-evident to a man who has spent his entire life breathing the air of a Christian civilisation.

This brings us back to the dirty glass.

The Skeptic will fiercely point out the grotesque hypocrisy here. Thomas Jefferson penned those immortal words about equality while owning over six hundred slaves. The Church preached the Imago Dei while issuing Papal Bulls that endorsed the transatlantic slave trade. They are absolutely right. It is an objective moral atrocity.

Notice what just happened. The only reason the modern Skeptic possesses the moral vocabulary to call the slave trade an atrocity is because they are judging the Church using the Church’s own hijacked software. If they judged the Church using Roman logic, the Crusades and the slave ships would just be successful geopolitical conquests.

The Skeptic is using the clean water to condemn the dirty glass.

3.3 Social Justice

Enter Exhibit C.

Look at the modern cultural landscape. The quickest route to moral authority in the West today is to prove you are marginalised. We instinctively rush to defend the oppressed. We tear down the statues of ancient conquerors. We demand justice for the victim. We consider this the absolute pinnacle of enlightened human progress.

Nature abhors a victim. Biology favours the apex predator.

In the Greco-Roman world, a victim was simply a loser. To be crushed meant you were naturally inferior or the gods had abandoned you. Greatness belonged exclusively to the powerful, the beautiful, and the victorious.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood this perfectly. As we heard in his cross-examination, he diagnosed Christianity as a Slave Morality born out of bitter envy - the weak weaponising pity to cage the strong. He was absolutely right about the mechanism. He simply hated the result.

The Church placed a tortured, executed state criminal at the exact moral centre of the universe. By worshipping a crucified God, the West permanently stripped the moral high ground away from the conqueror. It handed the crown to the oppressed.

Today, secular activists march through the streets demanding justice for the marginalised. They fiercely believe they are rebelling against oppressive, traditional institutions. They believe they are tearing down the old Christian establishment. They are entirely mistaken. When a modern activist defends the weak against the powerful, they are enforcing the legacy of the Cross. Modern social justice is simply secularised Christian eschatology.

The investigation is complete. We have examined the evidence. Compassion. Human Equality. Social Justice.

The Skeptic, however, plays one final card. They point away from Europe and look to the East. They cite the deep empathy of Buddhist karuna or the harmonious, cosmopolitan ideals of Confucianism. They ask a looming, unavoidable question: Would the West have inevitably blossomed into this progressive, egalitarian shape without the Christian roads it travelled? Is human history just naturally bending toward justice?

It is a brilliant question. It is also a historical trap.

History is not a laboratory. We cannot run a clinical trial on human civilisations. We cannot create a control group of the Roman Empire, remove the Wrecking Ball of the early Church, press fast-forward for two thousand years, and see if a purely secular Europe eventually invents the Geneva Conventions and universal healthcare entirely on its own.

We only possess the singular, bloody, complex timeline that actually played out.

In the timeline we occupy, the raw emotion of empathy exists universally. The infrastructure of our modern morality, however, was built squarely on the theology of the Cross. We are breathing borrowed air. We are judging the dirty glass of Church history using the clean water of Christian theology.

The defence rests.

I have survived the cross-examination. The historical record holds up. The logic tracks. I have successfully traced the clean water of our modern values back to the ancient theology that poured them.

As I pack up my briefcase and the courtroom begins to empty, a terrifying, unavoidable question paralyses me. I look at this neat, perfect narrative I just built to defend my worldview. I have to look in the mirror and face the ultimate bias.

Am I seeing this revolution because it is actually there? Or am I seeing it because I desperately need it to be there to justify my own faith?

Footnotes

1. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952). ↩

2. The maxim originates with the poet Simonides, as cited by Polemarchus in Plato, Republic, Book I, 332d. Teresa Morgan discusses its persistence as popular morality in the Roman world in Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ↩

3. Basil of Caesarea established the Basiliad c. 369 AD. See Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). ↩

4. Julian, Letter to Arsacius, High Priest of Galatia (c. 362 AD). ↩

5. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, 1254a-1255b. ↩

6. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), especially the First Treatise, which argues against patriarchal authority using Genesis. ↩

7. The Declaration of Independence (1776). ↩