Who is the opposite of a Spiritual Atheist? A Theistic Spiritualist? Never mind the label, such a question usually implies what Larry Siedentop calls “a competition of beliefs” in his new book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. “Is it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian West?” Siedentop asks while pointing to Christianity as the true fount of western liberalism rather than renaissance or enlightenment.
What separates the Christian West from the rest of the world is the religious notion of ‘moral equality’, he argues. He also locates it in St Paul’s original formulations (whom he dubs as being possibly the “greatest revolutionary in human history”). Paul’s ideas were amplified by arguments of lawyers and philosophers in the 12th- 13th centuries, he adds.
By that logic, if God created all humans as equals, He also supposedly fashioned them as ‘rational agents with free will’. Now, the crucial question: who is the uber-revolutionary, St Paul or Jesus Christ? According to Siedentop, it was St Paul who really spread Jesus’ revolutionary “revelation about God being potentially present in every believer”.
By that token, Advaita Vedanta with its ‘I-am-Brahman’ credo would seem like an even more tenable candidate. But the philosophy did not negate or challenge India’s entrenched caste system. Similarly, the treatment of ‘native’ populations in colonised regions shows how fraught or tenuous is the idea of locating an egalitarian ethic solely (pun intended) in Christianity. Is it better left to atheists?
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