Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 141, "Gregory of Nazianzus, for instance, exhorted his flock to love the
poor by imagining the ultimate justice of God. God created humans “free and with free will.” Christians should act with “the original equality of rights, not the subsequent inequities” in mind; invoking the word isonomia , Gregory gestured toward a rich, ancient value that had underwritten the most egalitarian impulses of Greek democracy. But Gregory could ground his vision of equality in divine intention; the divisions between wealth and poverty, like those between freedom and slavery, were not part of the original creation, but rather “evils” that attended only fallen humanity. 94 Christians should recognize this fact and act accordingly: “imitate the egalitarian justice of God and there shall be no poor man.”"
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 133, "Gregory’s thoughts on slavery emerge from his interpretation of Ecclesiastes, as Gregory launches out from the author’s reflections on the vanity of his wealth. “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?” Throughout the homily, Gregory returns again and again to the sheer arrogance of slave ownership. But there also courses throughout the text an unprecedented attack on the injustice of the institution itself. In the first place, slave ownership was unjust because it violated the free nature of humans. “Do you condemn man to slavery, whose nature is free and autonomous?” This is a remarkable statement. No ancient authority had invoked the “free nature” of human beings......Gregory, though, was the first to draw the startling conclusion that a material condition such as slavery violated the free nature of the human being. "
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p.125, "The first is universalism . Human rights are claims that all humans have simply by virtue of being human; they are universal across all individuals of the species. Hence, human rights are egalitarian. They are a kind of claim that does not depend on individual qualities or capacities and therefore cannot differ across individuals. The second is freedom . Human rights by their very nature insist on autonomy, whether conceived positively (as a power, a material capability) or negatively (as an immunity, an absence of restraint). The third is dignity . Human rights require a conception of human beings as incomparably valuable or worthy creatures. It is this third element that can inflect rights with a virtually absolutist quality. When competing goods are at stake, respecting human worthiness always outweighs the alternatives."
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p.131, "Christianization created the grounds for the development of human rights. This claim can be explored by isolating several moments of encounter between Christians and the world around them in the period of late antiquity, roughly between the ages of Constantine (AD 306 337) and Justinian (AD 527–565). ... In other words, we should expect to find neither formal human rights claims, nor the logic of Lockean rights. Instead, we will find the constituent elements of Kantian rights: universalism, freedom, and above all dignity – the view that each human is the bearer of incomparable worth. These moments of encounter are all we will find. The conversion of Constantine did not usher in an era of glorious Christian Kantianism; the world continued to be a cruel, gray place. These moments of encounter are, however, meaningful irruptions of the logic of human rights into a world where they were foreign."
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 143, " The early origins proposed in this paper, in which human rights rest on a long, pre-Enlightenment preparatory phase, argue that beliefs about the high worth of humanity were created slowly and collectively and took centuries to establish as broad cultural norms. Late antiquity is so important because here we witness the white sparks of friction, as now-familiar cultural norms for the first time confronted what were once unquestioned institutions and experiences such as slavery, sexual exploitation, and poverty. This history reminds us that what to us seems unthinkable was once unquestionable. Beliefs in the universal and incomparable worth of the human being provided the moral resources to begin the long and still unfinished business of trying to recognize and to realize the human rights of all."
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 132, "We have a tantalizing report that the Essenes, a breakaway purist sect of Jews in the late Second Temple period, refused to practice slavery because they considered it unjust, though we can know no more. Beyond that, the world records no opposition to slavery as an institution – before the words of Gregory of Nyssa.
Ramelli, Ilaria (25 June 2012). “Gregory of Nyssa's Position in Late Antique Debates on Slavery and Poverty, and the Role of Asceticism”. Journal of Late Antiquity5 (1): 87–118. doi:10.1353/jla.2012.0004.
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 134, "it is no small distinction to be the earliest human to have left an argument for the basic injustice of slavery....What is all the more remarkable is that Gregory looked past the obvious, surface rationalizations for slavery available in Christian scripture, to develop a philosophically coherent account of human nature grounded in Christian values. Those values were firmly centered on universal dignity. Gregory’s logic, even his rhetoric, presages the ideology of abolitionism, more than a millennium before it would come of age. "
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 134, "Rather, Gregory considered the physis , the natural constitution of the human, to be free, eleuthera ; eleutheria , in the ancient world, has not incorrectly been interpreted to mean “positive liberty,” the capacity to act; it was a status word, implying a state of honour as well as liberty. Novel though it was, Gregory’s claim here is not totally surprising, in light of the high emphasis that early Christians placed on free will. When Gregory calls human nature “free and autonomous,” he invokes a language that runs straight back through Origen to early Fathers such as Justin Martyr. The early Christians had stringently maintained that humans were endowed by God with a free will. In doing so, they explicitly set themselves apart from strongly deterministic philosophies like Stoicism. I have argued that Justin Martyr was the first person to use exactly the formula of “free will,” and the concept would be vitally important to the Christian conception of man as an essentially rational and moral being, created with both freedom and responsibility.
Kyle Harper, Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity, in Christianity and Freedom , pp. 123 - 148 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316408582.007, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 130, "The Stoics stared past the sheer violence and degradation that were essential to the institution of slavery, resolved to accept the world as fate handed it to us. Nowhere in Stoic thought is there anything resembling the argument that the institution of slavery violated the just claims and immunities to which all humans were entitled by their very worth. In short, Stoicism did not incubate the raw material of Kantian rights.
Harald Fischer-Tiné (2003). “'White women degrading themselves to the lowest depths': European networks of prostitution and colonial anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880–1914”. Indian Economic and Social History Review40 (2): 163–90 [175–81]. doi:10.1177/001946460304000202.
Aristot. Pol. 7.1327b, "The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.", Aristotle, Politics
