“‘God’s Image cut, or carved in Ebony,’ was a phrase first used, we believe by the English Church Historian, [Thomas] Fuller [in 1642]…and assuredly this phrase is among the most striking of the graphic sentences which he stamped so deeply on the republic of letters. There it stands, this beautiful and appropriate piece of imagery, and there it will stand, as long as those walls endure.”
H.G. Adams, God’s Image in Ebony, preface, 1854
I find most supporters of the liberal arts fail to realize how dangerous they are. Often, I’ll hear them long for the old days of the medieval university but fail to realize the evils in which these universities were complicit. The American holiday, Emancipation Day, provides a good occasion to contemplate how liberal arts education at supposedly Christian universities can still support unchristian thinking about humanity. It should also provide an occasion for us to consider how our willingness to accept falsehoods from popular pagan authors can have horrific consequences.
The key tragedy of the medieval liberal arts curriculum is that it emphasized Aristotelian metaphysics and downplayed a key theological concept—that humans are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). In fact, I contend it is possible that the tragic emphasis upon one aspect of Aristotelian thinking delayed the abolition of slavery.
In an article about the roots of human dignity in late antiquity, Kyle Harper observed, “Few societies have been so squarely constructed on the institution of slavery as were ancient Greece and Rome.”1 The institution had strong philosophical backing. As is well-known, Aristotle claimed in his Politics, “It is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain people who are slaves [by nature], and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves,” a lie that David Brion Davis noted, “would help shape virtually all subsequent proslavery thought.”2
In fact, we know of no specific pronouncements against institutional slavery until an ancient Christian bishop, Gregory of Nyssa, made this theologically-grounded argument against slavery in the fourth century,
If a man makes that which truly belongs to God into his own private property, by allotting himself sovereignty over his own race, and thinks himself the master of men and women, what could follow but an arrogance exceeding all nature from the one who sees himself as something other than the ones who are ruled?… How much does rationality cost? How many obols for the image of God? How many staters did you get for selling the God-formed man? [emphasis added]3
He would go on to say that everything about humanity “manifests royal dignity” due to its “exact likeness to the beauty of the archetype.”4
Why was this early anti-slavery thinking, rooted in the core biblical concept that we are all made in God’s image, not advocated more widely? One thing that certainly did not help was the incorporation of Aristotelian metaphysics and moral philosophy into the liberal arts curriculum of the first medieval universities that emerged at the end of the twelfth and the start of the thirteenth century.
Aristotle’s writing justifying distinct social roles and human slavery became the primary text used in the moral philosophy classes of Christian medieval European universities for the next 350 years.5 The universities taught Aristotle in the “undergraduate” course on moral philosophy, and they focused upon Christian theology and ethics in the more advanced theology graduate faculty.6 Thus, “undergraduate” students educated only in the liberal arts would read primary texts that built their understanding of humanity’s core moral vocation on Aristotle’s elitist and hierarchical understanding of humanity instead of the concept of the imago Dei. This reality is one reason why we must be careful about promoting pagan liberal arts as some sort of panacea apart from a Christian theological framework.
It was only when the brilliant University of Paris scholar, Pierre de la Ramée (commonly known as Peter Ramus, 1515-1572) and the Catholic defender of the human rights of Native Americans, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), challenged the use of Aristotle metaphysics in the sixteenth century that the way opened for scholars to recover the revolutionary views of human dignity grounded in Christian anthropology.
It eventually took Christian eighteenth and nineteenth-century abolitionists to revive and expand this truth (e.g., H.G. Adams, ed., God’s Image in Ebony). As David Brion Davis noted in his book, Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery, “The popular hostility to slavery that emerged almost simultaneously in England and in parts of the United States drew upon the tradition of natural law and a revivified sense of the image of God in man.”7
Not surprisingly, when one compares the arguments of the Christian abolitionists to the Christian defenders of slavery in the early 1800s, one finds that the former constantly focused on the Christian doctrine that all humans are made in God’s image to justify the abolition of slavery, while the latter ignored it. As the southern abolitionist Angela Grimke argued, humanity “who was created in the image of his Maker, never can properly be termed a thing, though the laws of Slave States do call him ‘a chattel personal.’”
They also drew upon Paul’s speech in Acts 17:26 to remind others that we are all made from one blood. As the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglas proclaimed to a crowd in his famous Fourth of July speech, “You profess to believe ‘that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,’ [Acts 17:26] and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own.”
Today, we still need to unpack and consider what it means that all humans are made in God’s image and what it means to restore that defaced image. I have attempted to do so in my forthcoming book, Unleasing the Image of God: Discovering Your Identity, Purpose, Vocation, and Character.
We also need to be on guard continuously against replacing the truth that all humans are made in God’s image with popular academic theories that neglect this point. Academics or public intellectuals promoting theories that appear to address social injustice but do not begin with the affirmation that we are made in God’s image will only reproduce the historic tribalism and degradation of sectors of humanity into which we too often descend (e.g., see past and present communist societies and contemporary societies falling prey to antisemitism). They offer us no meta-identity that can be the source of worth, value, and dignity for every human. In contrast, may all American Christians, indeed all Christians, celebrate today one key implementation of that important idea in American life and continue to work for its further realization.
Editor’s note: This post is a revised and updated version of a previous post that appeared on Emancipation Day in this blog four years ago.
Footnotes
- Kyle Harper, “Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity,” in Christianity and Freedom: Historical Perspectives, eds. Timothy Samuel Shah and Allen D. Hertzke (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1:131.
- David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2001), 128.
- Gregory of Nyssa, In Ecclesiasten, 4.1. In Sources chrétiennes no. 416.Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, 81–82.
- Quoted in Andrew Louth, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Genesis:1–11, vol. 1 ( IVP Academic, 2001), 34.
- Laurence Brockliss, “Curricula,” in A History of the University in Europe: Vol. II: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Hilde De Ridder-Symoens (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- Gordon Leff, “The Trivium and the Three Philosophies” in A History of the University in Europe: Vol. I. Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Walter Rüegg, 307-336.
- David Brion Davis, Image of God: Religion, Moral Values and Our Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2001), 198. See also Dierdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
