Haven't done one of these in a while, and had stopped even checking SN for new content because it was all so boring, but I happened to notice this one and thought it was worth a bit of a teardown for the historical inaccuracies alone:
“All Men Are Born Free By Nature”: Theological Conceptions of Freedom
This one is by Tamer Nashef, whose bio says he's planning to write a book on this sort of thing; if this post is a representative example of his work, he seriously needs to improve his game.
So this post is nominally about the concept of freedom, which immediately gets things off to a bad start because it is conflating the essentially unrelated concepts of “liberty” and “free will”.
Slavery and Water Power
First up in Nashef's account is the concept of liberty. After a discussion of philosophical opinions on slavery, we get to the first historical problem:
Furthermore, the Romans were familiar with water power but did not bother to exploit or harness it because they relied on slaves to perform manual tasks.
The Romans were a lot more than “familiar” with water power; they built giant mill complexes, water-powered trip hammers, water-powered sawmills for cutting marble, water-driven turbines, and many ordinary watermills (traces of which have been found everywhere from Italy itself to Britain, the Levant, and north Africa). They had guilds specifically for watermillers (not just any millers).
Accordingly, the position that slavery acted to inhibit the use of water power or other engineering innovations is now widely rejected; the fact that water power was widely used (more than previously suspected), and that there are no Roman sources that support a preference for slave labour over engineering, leave it without foundation.
Slavery and Christianity
Did the arrival of Christianity change the situation? First it should be recalled that Christianity inherited, rather than originated, the institution of slavery.
Well duh. Slavery is prehistoric; the Greek and Roman philosophers that Nashef discussed also inherited the institution, just as much as the Christians did.
After a dicussion of acceptance of slavery in early Christian writing, we get this:
These views were soon challenged by a growing number of theologians and church fathers who began to disapprove of slavery, seeing it as incongruent with the teachings of their religion. As early as the 4th century, Gregory of Nyssa (335 – c. 395), one of the Cappadocian Fathers, indignantly denounced slavery in a sermon on the Book of Ecclesiastes.
A less charitable reading of that would be “it took 3 centuries before any significant Christian theologian disapproved of slavery”. As for the “growing” number, it grew only in the sense that “a few” is more than “none”. Cherry-picking the occasional anti-slavery missionary or monk, as Nashef does, simply ignores the fact that slavery was accepted, acknowledged or even commanded by a long string of Popes and council canons right down to the late modern period. Even Gregory the Great, one of Nashef's examples, did not actually act on his rhetoric: his papal estates owned slaves, yet he did not free them.
Christianity and Water Power
Nashef then compounds the historical error regarding Roman use of water power:
Recall that ancient Rome had dispensed with the exploitation of natural energy due to its heavy reliance on slavery while the dwindling number of slaves in medieval Europe goaded Europeans into seeking out new technologies as a substitute. A manifestation of this change was the proliferation of water and wind mills across Western Europe. […] The Domesday Book, put together in 1086 at the behest of King of England William the Conqueror (r. 1066-1087), shows that no less than 5,624 water-powered mills were operating in England. This constituted a decidedly dramatic increase from less than 100 mills a century earlier.
Nashef does not cite sources for the numbers given above (in fact he cites nothing except the Bible anywhere in his article). The Domesday book does indeed list a large number of mills (the exact number is uncertain due to duplication but it is over 6000 — and remember this is an incomplete survey, estimates of the total number are consequently higher) but it does not distinguish watermills specifically. (There is nevertheless strong evidence that at least the vast majority of these were in fact watermills.)
The big problem here is with the idea that there were less than 100 watermills in England in the late 900s. I do not know of any possible basis on which this claim could be made; there are no records of comparable nature to the Domesday Book for this period (or indeed any other period before the 1800s). Are we to assume that there was an inexplicable burst of watermill construction—more than one mill built per week for an entire century? Or that people in the 900s didn't use flour, or insisted on grinding it by hand despite knowing perfectly well how to build mills? (There is archaeological evidence of watermills in England throughout the 7th to 10th centuries.) The number of slaves in England wouldn't have changed much in the century before Domesday either, so even if there were many more mills, slavery would have nothing to do with it.
Between the 11th and 13th century, the number of water mills in the administrative division of Aube in northeast France grew from 14 to more than 200.
I don't know about France, but in Britain the 11th to 13th centuries was a period of massive population growth (in the two centuries after Domesday the population almost tripled) and increase in agricultural productivity and cultivated area, combined with a feudal system in which non-free farmers (the vast majority) were prohibited from grinding their own grain (mills were a valuable revenue source for feudal lords). So of course there are going to be a lot of mills built.
(The increased agricultural productivity was driven at least partly by climate; there were no major innovations in this period, though earlier improvements to equipment and methods may have become more widespread.)
Medieval Europeans used water power to “crush ores, manufacture iron, pound flax or hemp in preparation for the making of linen, turn saws and knives, and crush malt for beer, among other uses.”
As mentioned above, the Romans also did most of these things.
Later Christianity and Slavery
Then follows another round of cherry-picking of objections to slavery, without the slightest acknowledgement of the many, many cases in which the Church explicitly approved of slavery. Likewise, statements from theologians such as Aquinas that slavery was not inherent in natural law did not prevent them from arguing that slavery was permissible under human law; Aquinas refers approvingly to slavery in many examples throughout the Summa Theologica (for example, when discussing whether it is permissible for a master to strike a slave), and there is even discussion in the Supplement (compiled by others from Aquinas' notes) regarding whether the condition of slavery is inherited from the father or the mother. So much for people being “born free by nature”!
Free Will
Christian philosophers have botched the issue of “free will” just as badly as almost every other school of philosophy; no surprise, since the tools needed to even investigate the concept did not exist until very recently. (But I won't go into that further here.)
Limited Government
This section manages to even contradict itself when expounding its historical inaccuracies. For example, Nashef says:
Gradually, Christian political thought began developing the idea that not only was the ruler not invested with absolute powers, but he was also at risk of being overthrown should his policies harm his subjects and violate the laws of the realm under his jurisdiction. His legitimacy and authority derived from the people and failure to carry out the subjects’ will merited rebellion. As early as the 10th century, an English abbot named Aelfric (died c. 1010) remarked:
and then quotes Aelfric thus (Nashef's italics, my bold):
No man can make himself king, but the people [have] the choice to choose a king whom they please; but after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people, and they cannot shake his yoke from their necks.
This states exactly the opposite of what Nashef is trying to claim. And far from being “groundbreaking words”, the idea of kings being chosen by their subjects has a long history; for example the Roman account of the government of pre-Republican Rome has it ruled by kings chosen by the popular assembly. The idea that rulers should be subject to laws and not have unlimited power also long predates Christianity.
Then we get a real laugh:
The concept of responsible and limited government enjoyed a major boost in 1215 when English nobles and churchmen forced King John (r. 1199-1216) to sign the Magna Carta or Great Charter.
And when the barons made it clear that the Charter was more than a symbol and that they were going to enforce it, John then appealed to the Pope to annul it, which Innocent III duly did, calling it “harmful to royal rights”.
(Popes of this period saw themselves as supreme over all secular rulers, and I'm not aware of any Pope ever acknowledging any limitation on their own powers.)
Magna Carta was reissued several times by later kings, but without the provisions that allowed the barons any enforcement powers. Later restraints on the powers of English kings were more a consequence of the ongoing power struggles between king and nobles than about any religious or philosophical ideas of limited government. Also worth noting is that the provisions of Magna Carta are directed towards barons, clergy and freemen, who comprised a small minority of the population (the majority being serfs).
