TWO ASSUMPTIONS

In order to shed some light on the ideas that are at the center of the present meeting, Christianity and Freedom, I will take my bearings from two basic assumptions.

The first is that liberty is not a merely political fact. It strikes its roots in a deeper soil, in the very conception of man and of God that underlies a religion, and even in the way each religion conceives of the interplay of God and man in history. The concrete achievements of people who happened to share the tenets of this or that religion are the business of the historian. However, people who considered themselves as Jews or Christians, whether as individuals or communities, may not have been faithful to the claims and obligations of their faith. In such cases, the historian will have to borrow the standards that they failed to live up to from a field of inquiry other than mere historical narration. Hence, it is not enough for us to tell the story of the achievements and shortcomings of Jews and Christians in giving liberty a concrete dimension through their social institutions. We also have to climb upward to the level of principles, which are theological in nature.

My second assumption is that the idea of liberty was not a sudden invention, springing into existence, out of the blue, as part of the great intellectual revolution that we know as the Enlightenment. Although the Whig conception of history interprets the call for liberty as some kind of break with Christian ideas and ideals that allegedly held sway over the Middle Ages, this view is far from the truth. Western liberty is a far older tradition, the sources of which are to be looked for first and foremost in the medieval period. Lord Acton, in the essays in which he summarized the history of liberty (and that he most regrettably never completed), already could point this out. More was done after him by students of the medieval legal tradition and of the conflict between the papacy and the empire, in which both sides, interestingly, chose as their catchword libertas, that is, “freedom.”