We can trace the desire to understand the universal quality and dignity of the human person as far back as our very origin as a Western people. While someone might justly quibble with me on the exact moment of Western genesis, I happily and confidently turn to the development of philosophy and ethics in the Greek-Persian town of Miletus. There, a number of men gathered and debated the origins of humanity.
They asked two fundamental questions, each trying to get at the nature of our diversity within our universality. First, they asked: Are we and our essence earth, water, wind, or fire? That is, is there an “Urstoff—that is a primary substance that holds us all together? Second, though, and equally important: Are we trapped in the cycles of the world: life, middle age, and death; or spring, summer, fall, winter? And, if a God exists, does he share in the Urstoff with us, and can He help us escape the cycles of the world? While the Greeks didn’t find answers to any of these profound questions, Heraclitus’ definition of our Urstoff—”fire”—became a universal way of understanding the human person. The word Heraclitus employed was LOGOS, a Greek word that meant fire, spirit, Word, reason, and imagination. Throughout the Hellenic and, especially, the Hellenistic periods, many of the Greeks—Zeno, Cleanthnes, and the Stoics especially—adopted the LOGOS as their own. To them, it bridged the world between the God and all men. Each person, it seems, was a singular manifestation of the universal principle. As such, each person was connected to every other person through the God.
Virgil, Cicero, and the Romans took this to its logical conclusion. Virgil, in Eclogue 4, written roughly a half-century before the birth of Christ, predicted that the God would marry a Virgin, and she would conceive a child who would usher in golden age and, through the merits of the father, erase sin from the world. Just as seriously, Cicero, in On the Laws, proclaimed Reason as the link between all men and the God. What is there, he asked, more divine than Reason? As such, all good men and the God live in the cosmopolis, the city of the universal.
Let’s take this argument even farther. We can immerse ourselves in the ancient texts of Western civilization—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—and look for proof of racism (that is, judging another person by the color of his skin), and our search will be totally in vain. Judging a person by the color of one’s skin—a grave sin, to be sure—simply did not exist in the ancient West. It is a modern phenomenon, an accident of history, not something rooted in the Western tradition. As horrific as it is, it came with modernity, not with the West.
