A Radically Condensed Genealogy of Western Ontology

The history of the Western self is often traced back to its roots in ancient Greek and Roman
culture. Thus, to best put the ontological apparatuses of the Western mind in its context, we must
first trace through the specific historical impulses that contributed to its production. For the
purposes of what follows, ontological apparatus simply refers to modes of seeing oneself in the
world, though this definition will be fleshed out into something a little more technical in later
chapters. Methodologically, it is obviously outside the scope of this self-consciously condensed
history to provide a rigorous account of roughly three millennia of ontological development, but
rather, much like the physical process of condensation, this condensed history aims to interrogate
the vast and vaporous entanglements of Western history in order extricate some insight into the
fluid relationship between humans and their environment. As such, my emphasis throughout the
following history will be on the impulses that inform novel philosophical and political
ideologies, and the varying social structures that said ideologies produce.
A Coalescence of Familial Cults
The written record of the so-called archaic period of Greece begins around the 9th
century B.C.E., roughly three centuries after the decline of the Mycenaean civilization. The
social order that emerged was characterized by a wide range of small, self-governed
communities, each of which organized into tightly controlled patriarchal family units. These
family units should be understood primarily as a mechanism of tracing an sustaining paternal
heritage, thus providing a model for a kind of microcosmic patriarchal cult: Indeed, as French
historian Fusel de Coulanges argues in his book, The Ancient City, it was the ancient family that
constituted the basis for all Western religious thought. He writes, [t]he most ancient generations,
long before they were philosophers, believed in a second existence after the present. They looked
upon death not as a dissolution of our being, but simply as a change of life (9). While this
position might look like an obvious precursor to the Christian notion of heaven and the afterlife,
de Coulange points to two significant differences. First, According to the oldest belief of the
Italians and Greeks, the soul did not go into a foreign world to pass its second existence; it
remained near men, and continued to live under ground (9). This is to say, in the ancient greek
ontological apparatus, there was no notion of a world somehow beyond their own. The earth
itself was the plane on which all interaction (mortal or otherwise) took place.
This lack of any kind of transcendental field beyond the earth pairs interestingly with de
Coulanges observation of the ancient Greek understanding of the role of the body after death. As
he suggests, in this second existence [i.e., after death], the soul should remained associated with
the body; born together, they were not separated by death, and were buried together in the grave
(10). Again, we see in the ancient Greek ontology the centrality of materiality. Just as the dead
remain tethered to the earth, they remain fundamentally tethered to their physical bodies. The
key point here is that no notion of transcendental immateriality was required to produce a
sustained mythology of heritage: there was no realm beyond the physical earth around which
the ancient familial unit would orient itself. Rather, the ancient family was unified (both intraand inter-generationally) through their physical embodiment and their physical location. As
political philosopher Larry Siedentop suggests, the ancient family was an instrument of

immortality, at once a metaphysics and a cult. The practices of the ancient family met the needs
of self-conscious creatures seeking to overcome the fact of death. Around the family hearth
with the father tending its sacred fire, offering sacrifices, libations and incantations learned from
his father members of the family achieved union with their ancestors and prepared their
future (10). The significance of the family hearth as a material locus of worship can not be
overlooked, as it functions as a point of origin for the modern western notion of private property.
As de Coulange goes on to point out, There are three things which, from the most ancient times,
we find founded and solidly established in these Greek and Italian societies: the domestic
religion; the family; and the right of property three things which had in the beginning a
manifest relation, and which appear to have been inseparable (48). De Coulange posits that
because each family unit devoted itself exclusively to its ancestral familial deity (who was
inextricably linked to the family hearth), the notion of private and exclusive ownership of the
familial land naturally follows. Indeed, private property, for the ancient family, is properly
understood as a religious prerequisite, wherein individual family members understood their land
(i.e., the physical space that contained their ancestral hearth, domicile, and farmland utilized to
sustain the family) not only as practical necessities for being in the world, but as the central
signifiers of their identity. As Siedentop points out, [a]s each family had its own gods, from
whom it sought protection and to whom it offered sacrifices, separation from the family worship
involved losing all personal identity (14). Thus, the ontological apparatus of the ancient Greek
mind was constructed not around an abstract notion of an autonomous individual self but
rather an intimate material relationship between familial units and the land they occupy.
Gradually, of course, these disparate familial units congeal into larger city-state
organizations, and the emphasis on familial gods is superseded by the less private deities
generally associated with classical Greek polytheism. As Siedentop explains, as the scale of
association increased, the gods of nature or polytheism became more important These were
gods who represented the sea, the wind, fertility, light, love, hunting, with familiar names such as
Apollo, Neptune, Venus, Diana and Jupiter (21). Thus, the first Greek cities emerge not as a
union of individuals, but rather a coalition of familial cults. In this way, the strict tethering of
religious practice, materiality, and identity is sustained on a larger scale, and citizenship
(understood as the individuals inextricable embeddedness within his political and material
context) takes the place of family as the dominant ontological apparatus for constructing identity.
As Siedentop demonstrates, No abstract principle of justice could give [the citizen] pause. Piety
and patriotism were one and the same thing. For the Greeks, to be without patriotism, to be
anything less than an active citizen, was to be an idiot (25). Because ones active participation
in the life of ones city was understood as the central mode of being, it is no surprise that, as the
scale of cities increased, so did the scope and sophistication of intellectual discourse on how the
city should best be governed. Thus, the notion of reasoned rhetoric (or logos) emerged as an
inextricable feature of public sphere.
Because the notion of reason emerged as a feature of civic life, it initially came to be
understood not as a specific kind of practice in which all individuals could engage, but rather as
an attribute of the archetypal citizen (i.e., because identity was fundamentally defined by ones
position within the civic structure, there really wasnt a distinction between what one does and
who one is). Rationality was simply understood as a natural attribute of citizens, which was

therefore fundamentally inaccessible to non-citizens (and we should note, too, that this
naturally exclusionary access to rationality was used as justification for the disenfranchisement
of women, who were seen as naturally irrational). In fact, the etymology of the term idiot (as
employed in the quotation above) provides some instructive insight on this front: Derived from
the Greek word idios, meaning ones own, the term idiot applied literally to private
individuals, i.e., those non-citizens barred from participation in the public life. In this sense, to
be an idiot was less a commentary on ones character so much as an objective feature of ones
station in the the structure of the civic entity. Thus, its gradual transition toward the derogative
connotations that it maintains in modern English demonstrates a similarly gradual shift in a sense
of identity constructed entirely through social relationality to one that is ostensibly selfdetermined.
While logos was initially understood as a mechanism for encouraging public discourse
between citizens for the betterment of the city, it didn't take long for schools of discourse to
emerge that questioned the validity of the entire project of civic life. For example, As Malcolm
Schofield points out in his book, The Stoic Idea Of The City, stoic thinkers often found
themselves advocating positions that would be basically antithetical to civic prosperity. He offers
commentary on fragments of Zenos Republic, noting, [f]or if only moral virtue really matters,
the conventions of the polis do not. So acquiescence in them may induce the conviction that they
do. So acquiescence is to be actively an indeed dramatically discouraged (23). The point here
isnt so much to attack stoicism but rather to highlight how the emphasis on reason as a primary
feature of civic life paradoxically led citizens to dispute or even outright reject the public life all
together. As Siedentop writes, [t]he logos which had been embodied in the city and its laws
began to make way for a logos embodied in a universal rational order, in what would be called
natural law (45). What emerges, essentially, is an ontology that places rational understanding
(i.e., the natural function of the citizen) at the centre of a hierarchically-structured universe.
Both Platos notion of forms and Aristotles typology of causality are built around this
presupposition of idealized rationality as the central organizing principle of a tightly structured
universe. Significant here for our purposes is not only the shift away from the materiality that
characterized the familial cults of ancient Greece, but also the contextual changes that facilitated
this shift: the emergence of logos as the centre of the classical Greek ontology can be directly
traced to concrete changes in the scale of social organization. This is not to suggest that Platonic
idealism is somehow the inevitable product of the development of the Greek city, but rather
simply to highlight the entanglement of humans and their environment as a crucial factor in
tracing the development ontological apparatuses.
Tracking Individual Salvation in The Rise of Christianity
Indeed, a similar emphasis on environmental constraints can yield several valuable
insights on the shifting western ontologies that coincide with the late Roman Republic and rise of
the Roman Empire, as we turn outline the rise of Abrahamic monotheism, and, eventually, the
tethering of ontology, personal agency, and morality characterized by early Christian doctrine. As
Siedentop observes, the rise of Rome as the singular centre of power for an increasingly vast and
disparate republic had profound effects on the ontological apparatuses of its disenfranchised
citizenry: Rome was like a giant theatre or stage, with the citizens of subjugated and dependant

cities reduced to mere spectators sitting on its bench. They ceasing to be actors on their own
stages. Their inherited roles were jeopardized (52). As the scale of the republic increased, the
role of the citizen (which had previously been synonymous with active civic participation) was
greatly reduced. As such, many disenfranchised Romans, no longer securely tethered to the
relational identity signified by the natural right of their citizenship, began to look for new
modes of self-identification.
Indeed, this desire for self-identity outside of the traditional mode of citizenship as a
result of empiric expansion was felt on all levels of the Roman Republic. For example, the
Republics rapid expansion led the senate to extend a consuls or praetors imperium (literally,
their power to command) for longer than the traditional single-year term. Quickly, this notion
of extended imperium was employed as a mechanism to cope with the expansion of newly
conquered Roman provinces, such that, after a citizen completed his term as consul or praetor, he
could be subsequently transferred to a governmental position in a province for an additional year,
as a proconsul or propraeter. This practice, while it did effectively limit the Roman power base
(which was, of course, the primary concern of Roman nobility), had the undesirable effect of
granting too much power to those holding consul- or praetorships. As historian David Shotter
describes in his book, The Fall if the Roman Republic, [traditionally], whilst a man was consul
or praetor in Rome he was in effect held in check by the daily surveillance of his peers, which
helped to emphasize the corporate nature of the governing class. In a province, the governors
authority, although legally under control, might in effect not be controlled. It is not surprising
that some provincial governors should have seen themselves in quasi-regal terms and have been
very reluctant to sink back into the corporate obscurity when the year of duty was over. Thus
individualism began to prevail over the traditional class loyalties (12). Again, what were seeing
here is a collapse of the traditional notion of civic structure as the basis for identity on all levels
of society predicated on, amongst other factors, a rapid increase in geographic scale. The rise of
individualism, then, can in a very real sense be understood as a loss of perspective. Consider the
implicit shift in ontological apparatus: the governor of a province, though understanding in the
abstract that he is a temporary representative of a larger governmental body, is essentially
overcome by the experiential immediacy of the power he maintains locally, and thus feels
himself to be not a provincial arm of a larger governmental entity, but rather a governing entity
all unto himself. The world, and his relation to it, emerges differently as a result of geographic
expansion.
It is in these terms that we can understand the Roman Republic as an entity whose
populace is primed for an ideological revolution. A particularly strong ideological candidate
emerged in the religious tradition of Judaism. As a result of Pompeys Siege of Jerusalem in 63
B.C.E., a wave of diasporic Jews brought their radical brand of monotheism around the
Mediterranean. As Siedentop argues, the increasingly disenfranchised populace of the Republic
(now a mixed bag of citizens and half-citizens) were perhaps uniquely predisposed toward the
monotheistic ideology of Judaism: the image of a single, remote and inscrutable God dispensing
his laws to a whole people corresponded to the experience of peoples who were being subjugated
to Roman imperium (53). Crucially, the rise of Judaic monotheism presented a severe challenge
to the centrality of reason in the classical Roman ontology. Unlike the Roman notion of a
natural inequality of beings, the Jewish monotheistic ontology was structured around a set of

rules which each individual being was equally capable of either eschewing or submitting to.
Siedentop elaborates, Although the law had always been understood as the inheritance of
Yahwehs chosen people, the law embodied his will for all of his peopleLaw therefore did
not have to aristocratic connotations it had acquired through its identification, by Greeks and
Romans, with the logos of a citizen classGods will was like the wind shifting the desert sands.
Nothing could resist it (54-55). This monotheistic ideology of a God who must be obeyed
before he can be understood gradually integrated into the ontological apparatuses of the rapidly
expanding Roman populous, largely thanks to a series of messianic movements. As Harris
Lenowitz relates in his book, The Jewish Messiahs, Romes policies of taxation and military
occupation, capped by its disregard for the religion of the populace, provided fertile ground,
washed with blood, for one messianic candidate after another (25). The most successful of these
candidates was Jesus of Nazareth, and while there was apparently little unanimity regarding the
specifics of his teachings, his narrative of birth, crucifiction, and rebirth (as reconstructed and
popularized by Saul of Tarsus or St. Paul) quickly spread until it became the official
ontological apparatus of the Roman Empire, thus finally displacing the familial unit with the
individual as the medium of immortality. As Siedentop argues, through the story of Jesus,
individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things,
into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending
death (58). The narrative of Jesus provided a model of the world which situated the individual
human as the autonomous agent of Gods will, submission to which offered an avenue toward
individual salvation from death.
The establishment of practices which aligned with Gods will, then, took precedent over
individual action governed by human reason. Indeed, a notion of agency wherein obedience
precedes understanding fundamentally inverted the Roman emphasis on reason, and in doing so
implicitly undermined the Roman notion of Roman societys naturally hierarchical structure.
In his book The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, Albrecht Dihle observes, wherever the
contrast being the ignorance of the future and the responsibility for ones decisions becomes the
basis of ethical, psychological, or ontological reasoning, knowledge of the aim of action cannot
possibly become the decisive factor to which all moral judgements ultimately refer. Intention that
leads to right action has to be determined by a good will rather than true knowledge (70). Thus,
we can understand St. Pauls emphasis on the inherent capacity for autonomous action in each
individual as an implicit effort to subvert the classical Roman emphasis on logos, as it forces the
actor to acknowledge that much of the relevant knowledge required to adequately rationalize any
action is fundamentally inaccessible (i.e., we can never really know the outcome of any action,
nor can we fully know the entire context of relevant causality which structures any given
event). Thus, the truest expression of agency, for early Christian thinkers, was not to attempt to
rationalize from ones own distinctly human (and therefore limited) perspective, but rather to
trust in the laws established by God. Dihle observes, This belief is strongly expressed in the Old
Testament, where people are frequently praised for having decided according to the order of
Yahveh without attempting to perceive, by their own intellectual effort, the end of their
action (71).

This seemingly contradictory relationship between submission to God and individual

free will is perhaps best captured by Alexandrian theologian Origen in the third century C.E.,
who, in his major philosophical work, De Principiis, squarely attacks the capacity of human
reason as a mechanism for understanding the underlying justice of Gods will, writing, [h]ow
this enormous variety and diversity of circumstances can be understood as fully just and
equitable is, I am sure, beyond the power of human intelligence or speech to explain (99). In the
same way, he goes on to characterize his uniquely Christian conception of human diversity and
free will: Since [God] himself, in whom there was neither variety, change or incapacity, was the
cause of the beings which he was about to create, all the being which he created were created
similar and equal; for he had no cause for variety or diversity. Butthese rational creatures were
endowed with the faculty of free choice; they were induced, each one by his own free will either
to imitate God and so to advance or to ignore him and so to fall (100). In this way, Origen both
offers his own solution to the so-called problem of evil (i.e., if God is both omni-potent and
omni-benevolent, why do bad things happen?), and, perhaps more significantly, asserts the
fundamental equality of humans in the early Christian ontological apparatus on the basis of
autonomous individual agency within a larger project of agential action: this is to say, unlike the
Greek and Roman notion of a natural hierarchy of being, Christian doctrine is built on the
notion that all humans are individuals and free actors, with an equal agential capacity to either
align with the will of God (and thus advance) or not (and thus fall). Significantly, Origen
posits that because the overall project of Gods will is beyond the power of human intelligence
or speech (99), the free choice to either imitate God or follow ones personal capacity for
reason are mutually exclusive. Thus, and almost paradoxically, the choice of autonomously
acting individuals to imitate God, and thus actively align themselves with an ideological
movement that explicitly downplays their capacity for independent reasoning, is the purest
expression of ones free will.
While this new self-oriented ontology gradually solidified itself as the dominant mode of
thought for the Roman Empire (a process formalized by the Emperor Constantine, who officially
decriminalized Christianity via the Edict of Milan of 313 C.E., and who early church historian
Eusebius of Caesara effusively branded our emperor, most beloved by God(Maier 328)), its
impact on the shifting relationship between individuals and society is perhaps best captured in
the rise of Christian monasticism. As Siedentop points out, Christian monasticism represented a
truly novel model for societal organization, which stood in stark contrast (both physically and
ideologically) from the classical tradition: seperating themselves physically as well as morally
from the ancient family and polis, monks offered the picture of a world founded on different
principles. Their struggle to subdue themselves by means of a deeper relationshipsuggested
how the individual could and should constrain social relationships, giving them a new
foundation (95). Indeed, monastic Christian communities signal a radical break from the
Roman Empire and its residual emphasis on the citizen as an emergent feature of social
organization. Instead, monasticism prefigured the Lockian notion of society as the free
association of autonomous individuals for mutual benefit. Because individuals no longer
conceived of their identity on a purely relational basis, but rather saw each other as equals in
their project of salvation through the figure of Christ, the decision to construct monastic
communities was not an impulse toward hierarchy or power dynamics between those naturally

inclined to lead and those naturally inclined to serve, but rather to provide mutually beneficial
services such that individuals could focus primarily on their practices of salvation.
The free association of individuals that characterized these monastic communities had a
particularly liberating impact on the social role of women. As historian Marilyn Dunn observes
in her book, The Emergence of Monasticism, [t]he belief that women could become male or
that gender was temporary meant in practice that in some ascetic groups and sects men and
women mixed freely, convinced that the temptations of the flesh were either irrelevant or could
be overcome by spiritual achievement (45). Significantly, the extension of the monastic practice
of abstinence to women signals what we might characterize as the first societally-sanctioned
practice of female free will: this is to say, for a woman to autonomously chose to practice
celibacy with the support of her community marks her emergence from her subservient position
in a patriarchal familial unit firmly embedded in the Western ontology from the era of the
familial cults outlined above. Dunn goes on to
So, whats beginning to emerge here around the fourth century C.E. is a conception of the
individual that in many ways feels modern: rather than the natural hierarchies of classical
Rome, we have individual humans whose relationship to each other is increasingly informed by a
fundamental sense of ontological equality. Society is increasingly conceived not as the central
project of all human activity, but rather as a infrastructure through which individuals can more
effectively distribute the necessary labours of life before pursuing their own individual goals.
Similarly, and perhaps most crucially, rather than indiscriminately committing themselves to the
overvalued force of logos, individuals are actively and critically engaging the limits of the
human intellective capacity and submitting to a larger project of agential enaction through the
figure of Christ. Indeed, no where is this critical stance more self-consciously displayed than in
the writings of theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. Central to St. Augustines thinking is the
intensely personal introspection necessary to forge a meaningful mode of being-in-life. In his
autobiographical work, Confessions, (which takes the form of a long prayer directed at God)
Augustine first decries the shallow nature of secular life, writing, I panted after honours, wealth,
marriage and you just laughed. These ambitions gave me nothing but trouble, made more
intense by your kindness in making them bitter since they were not you (117), before offering
some fairly direct insight as to how to best access the beauty of God: Men, however, can by
interrogation see Gods invisible things through the things he has madeunless attachment to
the visible enslaves them, disqualifying them, as slaves, from sitting in judgement (216). In this
way, Augustine effectively constructs a binary between enslavement to the visible or secular
world and the critically active interrogation of Gods invisible or spiritual works. This is to
say, for Augustine, knowing God (and therefore knowing more fully ones role in the world) is
explicitly a project of self-conscious introspection, or critically engaging with ones ontological
apparatus such that Gods invisible beauty can emerge. As he writes, You [God] were waiting
within me while I went outside me, looking for you there, misshaping myself as I flung myself
upon the shapely things you made (234). Again, for Augustine, human pursuits in the secular
world outside the self are understood as a fundamental misshaping of human life (in contrast
to the shapely objects of Gods creation). Thus, as historian Peter Brown observes in his
biography, Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions are a manifesto of the inner worldA man

cannot hope to find God unless he first finds himself: for this God is deeper than my inmost
being, experience of him becomes better the more inward (162).
This emphasis on critical self-reflection not only rejects the shallow offerings of
materialism (and its associated sins of gluttony, avarice, envy and lust), but also (and more
significantly for our purposes) signals a new ontological status for humans: in Augustines
conception, our capacity for self-reflection and considered autonomous action places us in a
fundamentally different ontological order than other animals who, as he observes, can merely
see but not interrogate the beauty (216). Thus, as Siedentop points out, the faithful are those
who see themselves as sojourners on earth (110). This is to say, humans, while embedded in the
world and subjected to its material temptations, are also privy to the immaterial being beyond the
world (i.e., God), and can thus escape their enslavement to materiality through rigorous and
self-conscious orientation toward him. In this way, we see the development of a dichotomy
between humanity and the rest of the natural world that is based not on social relationality
(wherein human identity is a fixed feature of ones position within a natural societal
hierarchy, as maintained in Classical roman ontology) but rather, some innate human capacity for
self-reflective reverence for a transcendental, omnipotent object.
Bringing The Individual Into Law
This move to separate humans from other animals on the basis of their capacity for selfreflection is extended further in the early Middle Ages, when, after the fall of the Roman Empire,
the conquering Germanic tribes relied heavily on the influence of the Christian church to
maintain control over the Western populations now under their jurisdiction. Thus, the bishops
and clergy, who had already functioned as de facto leaders of their largely Christianized
communities, also became diplomats and administrators. This served as the basis for a more
formal importation of Christian doctrine into the legal structure of the burgeoning kingdoms of
the early Middle Ages, effectively replacing the last vestiges of the classical Roman model. As
historian Franois Guizot declared, The senatorial and curial aristocracy was a mere phantom;
the clergy became the real aristocracy; there was no Roman people; a Christian people
arose (54). There were many political innovations associated with this shift from Roman to
Christian society, but the most significant, for our purposes, are a series of policy initiatives
which demonstrate the practical implications of making the individual (i.e., the autonomously
acting and self-reflective being central to the Christian ontology of salvation) the central figure
of a legal system. Consider, for example, the 8th century King of Franks, Charlemagne, and his
practice of requiring all men, regardless of rank, to swear an oath of allegiance to him. As Joanna
Story observes in her book, Charlemagne: Empire and Society, [t]he implementation of the oath
of loyalty signified a fundamental shift in the structure of the kingdom, from a pyramid of selfstanding segments held together by personal relationships between their leaders and the king, to
a clearly defined hierarchy, at which power at all levels was articulated with reference to
paramount obligations to the king as a ruler of a Christian society (81). This is to say, by
instituting a practice through which individuals at all levels of society pledge solidarity directly
to a singular leader, Charlemagne effectively appropriates the structure of the Christian ontology
(wherein individuals understand themselves to be discrete entities autonomously orienting

themselves toward a centralized power) as the organizing principle of secular government. In this
way, we can trace the subtle shift of a conception of the individual as the basic unit on a plane of
moral equality (as described by early Christian doctrine) toward a notion of the individual as the
basic unit of political subjugation. The crucial point to be recognized, here, is that while in its
original iteration the Christian notion of the individual manifested as a kind of self-conscious
moral refinement (again, consider the monastic communities described above), its usage here in
the 8th century is decidedly less interested in morality and salvation, and more focused on the
dynamic of power between individuals and their secular leader. While this notion never entirely
pervaded how the individual saw themselves in the world (as demonstrated in the late Medieval
the tension between the King and the Pope, discussed below), it provided a model for centrally
governing large populations that would later provide the basic framework for modern institutions
such as the State and, later, the Nation.
Another significant shift taking place in the early middle ages is an emphasis on policy
eliminating any recalcitrant traces of pagan animism. As Siedentop describes, the church
initiated a process that began to strip intentionality from the physical world leaving it
ultimately as just that, the physical world. Legislation by church councils was directed against
seeing different parts of the physical world as the habitations of spirits or demigods (146). In
one sense, the reasoning behind this is clear: legislation against non-normative ideology has
always been a reliable mechanism of maintaining a unified populace. But the specific legislative
move of deanimating the physical world speaks to a much larger project undertaken in the
Middle Ages to construct a clearly delineated dichotomy between humanity (and the culture it
produces) and the natural world. As Medievalist Megan Cavell points out, The written record
depicts culture, represented by manmade buildings and artifacts, as under constant attack by
nature, the chaotic world existing outside of civilization a world that could not be kept under
human control (157). This dynamic between man-made culture and untamable nature is perhaps
best animated in the early middle ages epic poem Beowulf (usually dated somewhere between the
8th and 11th century) by the figure of Grendel, who is introduced in the poem as A bold demon
who waited in darkness/ wretchedly suffered all the while,/ for every day he heard the joyful din/
loud in the hall, with the harps sound,/ the clear song of the scop (I.86-90). Thus, the
anonymous poet of Beowulf presents Grendel as a figure strongly opposed to culture, such that
the narrative that follows, in which the hero Beowulf hunts and eventually kills both Grendel and
his mother, reads analogously as the triumph of human culture over the unruly and monstrous
forces of nature. The impact of this nature-culture dichotomy, alongside the image of the
ostensibly autonomous but willingly subjugated individual described above, offers an eerily
modern ontological apparatus: one of individual subjects, each accountable to a singular central
figure of power, autonomously creating societal infrastructure to hold out the unconsciously
brutish force of an aimless and inanimate natural world.
The key notion to be established here, for our purposes, is that in the Middle Ages were
observing a radical break from the Classical Roman ontological apparatus: while the Classical
notion of being-in-the-world was fundamentally structured around materiality (both in the
political sense, where ones political being was literally a birth right and therefore deeply
tethered to ones physical embodiment; and in the religious sense, wherein the physical world
was animated by a multitude of embodied deities), the new Western paradigm of the Middle

Ages is characterized by an emphasis on transcendental abstraction: humans are granted their

identities not through their embodiment within the socio-political relationality of the world, but
rather by their recognition of and subjugation to a central, transcendental God. This model
provided a structurally similar basis for political sovereignty, as employed, to different degrees,
first by Charlemagne and then later by the Catholic church, in an effort to establish a centralized
secular government. Indeed, as Siedentop points out, [t]he example of the church as a unified
legal system founded on the equal subjugation of individualsgave birth to the idea of the
modern state (207). Crucially, though, the emphasis on Gods transcendence (and, implicitly, the
subjects access to this transcendence) cuts both ways: because individuals understand their
equality on the basis of subjugation to a transcendent (as opposed to secular) power, no secular
institution could truly claim full authority over any individual. As Siedentop goes on to describe,
by the late Middle Ages, kings ceased to be regarded, as in the tenth century, as the vicars of
Christthey were no longer the direct agents of spiritual government (220). Thus, kings were
understood as functionally useful but ultimately fallible representatives of a secular structure of
authority, that stood alongside, if perhaps slightly below, the authority of God, as represented by
the pope. The effect of these dual structures of power was a kind of authoritative stalemate,
wherein subjugated individuals, observing the jostling of institutions vying for control, found a
previously unrealized position for critical reevaluation of the previously unquestioned societal
infrastructure. As Anthropologist David Graeber suggests, [i]f there is an essence to Medieval
thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather in a dogged insistence that the
values that govern out ordinary daily affairsare confused, mistaken, illusory, or perverse. True
value lay elsewhere, in a domain that cannot be directly perceived (287). Because the Christian
notion of identity was rooted in a primary subjugation to a transcendental God, individuals
became increasingly inclined toward a more critical engagement with the dominant structures of
political authority.
The philosophical import on the Middle Ages emphasis on transcendence cannot be
overlooked: by emphasizing the equality of souls in critical self-reflection, the Middle Ages
witnessed the development of an increasingly sophisticated theophilosophic tradition, which
productively melded classical Greek dialectics with Christian moral equality to produce a
radically new understanding of reason: unlike the capital-R Reason established by the Classical
Greeks (which, as discussed above, was seen as a natural property of a privileged citizen
class), the medieval notion of reason was understood as democratized tool which could be
equally accessed and invoked by any individual as a mechanism of critical engagement. As
Siedentop describes, In the twelfth century, reason began to lose the ontologically privileged
position it had been accorded by aristocratic societyReason ceased to be something that used
people, and became something that people used (243). It shouldnt come as a surprise, then, that
this era also witnessed the emergence of a notion of society similar to what would eventually
come to be known as social contract theory, wherein the authority of a governing body is
understood as a conditional arrangement between consenting individuals.

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Guizot, Franois. General History of Civilization in Europe: From the

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