Hi ACOT —
Wow, interesting video! As someone who is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Neoliberalism, I'm gonna give this a couple of listens.
The video covers Christianity very briefly, but essentially I think he's right.
Equally as briefly — the term 'person' derives from the Etruscan/Greek for the word used for the mask worn by an actor. The actor is, in effect, not there, it's the role played that matters, and inevitably the role was in accord to the will and whim of the Gods. Man had not self-determining autonomy, in that regard. No individuality, just his place in the scheme of things.
The idea of the individual soul goes back, of course, to the Hebrew Scriptures. But apart from the like of Philo, I'm not sure the Jews really engaged the Greeks in philosophical theological dialogue. (I could be completely wrong here.)
The Christian idea of a person was born out of the theological arguments regarding the nature and personhood of Christ. The theologian had to find a definition of man as a self-conscious individual, and not as a sort of gnostic manifestation, or pseudo-asiatic avatar ... hence Boethius famously declared a person is "an individual substance of a rational nature" — but this was in a defence of Christology and Trinitarian theology, not sociology. This was in the 5th century, and the definition remained the standard until refined by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th.
Early writings tell of slaves, the free, the property owner and the rich — both men and women — meeting together as a congregation of equals, whilst 'in the world', as it were, the social order continued, and there is no reference to any significant dispute between Christianity and the idea of slave ownership, for example. And as the church established itself, the women were pushed back into the shadows as the old patriarchy asserted itself.
It was a long, slow process. The video jumps 1400 years to William of Ockham, and then another 300 to the Enlightenment.
I need to listen a couple of more times ...
