In the Western world today, mothers often feel pressure to work all through a pregnancy, even into the onset of labor. They return to work soon after, using breast pumps and daycare centers to minimize the baby’s impact on their productivity. Sometimes, women outsource pregnancy itself, employing a surrogate to carry their baby for them. Meanwhile, technology addiction and workaholism are rampant, euthanasia has become the sixth-leading cause of death in Canada, and schools are jettisoning the liberal arts in favor of soulless, technocratic meritocracy.
Nadya Williams, author of Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, sees a bigger picture emerging from these seemingly disparate trends. She thinks modern society is desperately ill, having lost its appreciation of human dignity.
Williams does have a lot to say about mothers and children, but her book offers a broad-ranging critique built around the parallels that she (a Princeton-trained classicist) sees between the ancient world and today’s “culture of death.” Appealing especially to her fellow Christians, she wants them to address these cultural maladies as early Christians did: with a searing, transformative vision of human beings as infinitely precious “image bearers,” made in the likeness of God. This, she thinks, is the key to supporting not just mothers and children, but also everyone else. Everyone should fear the consequences if, as it seems to her, we are returning to the dehumanizing, utilitarian ethic of the pagan world.
This argument has much to recommend it, and I agree with Williams about ninety percent of the way. It’s tempting just to sit back and applaud a book that is by turns entertaining, inspiring, and a model of practical wisdom. Williams clearly writes from a place of deep conviction, blending personal experience as a mother with insights from her work as a scholar, in a thoroughly readable volume that could be enjoyed on a plane ride or picked up as bedtime reading. Williams has spent years pondering the devaluing of women, children, and other “useless” persons in an ancient world that didn’t prioritize human love, and she sees eerie parallels to the circumstances of similarly “useless” persons today. Her writing is haunting, approaching old questions from a new angle. I found myself nodding along through many chapters, because I, like Williams, see much evidence of a growing culture of death, and I yearn for a cultural renewal that would revive our appreciation of human dignity. I also join her in viewing a robust Christian humanism as the likeliest route to such a renewal.
Having said all of this, it still seems to me that the final ten percent, where Williams and I do not fully agree, may really matter. It boils down to this: in her eagerness to expound on a transcendent view of human dignity, Williams seems to lose sight a bit of natural excellence, natural justice, and the rightful claims of natural philosophy. I worry that this may hinder any effort to realize the humanist vision she paints so beautifully. We need a spoonful of Aristotle to help the Gospels go down, as the medieval Scholastics realized. The Christian view of human beings as “image bearers” is deeply compelling, but it may be more fruitful if it is supplemented by a less mystical, and more grounded, account of what rational humans need, want, and are able to do.
Fairer Disputations is not a theological publication. Accordingly, I must pray the non-Christian reader’s patience for a bit, while I engage Williams as one historically educated Christian humanist to another. I hope non-believers might benefit from “listening in” on this conversation, but regardless, I promise to return to more generally accessible concerns at the end of the piece.
Baptizing Aristotle
Christianity spread through the ancient world with a speed that amazes historians even today. There are many possible explanations, but it certainly had something to do with the humane, inclusive Christian ethic that Christian missionaries brought into a pagan culture that was often brutal and dehumanizing. In the cities of the ancient world, Christians preached the remarkable message that God is love, and every single human being is an embodied soul of infinite worth. Williams discusses how the early Christians demonstrated the strength of their commitments by providing for the poor, caring for abandoned babies, and robustly including women, slaves, and other low-status persons in their communities.
Williams knows the ancient world well, and she is particularly attentive to the ways in which women were undervalued, examining the status of wives, daughters, widows, and of course mothers. She sees parallels between a Roman world that prized military might, and a modern world in which economic productivity threatens to swamp all other measures of human worth. The Romans valued manly strength, political talent, and aristocracy. Working on a grassroots level, Christians managed to upend that culture and political structure with their revolution of love. If Christians today could come together, not as a crusading army of Christian Nationalists but as a movement of cultural reformers who transform society as the early Christians did: by loving their neighbors, building healthy communities, and responding to the needs of people close to them (especially women and children).
At many points, this account is very uplifting as well as informative. Readers will learn about Saints Perpetua and Felicity, and how their courageous embrace of martyrdom enhanced their contemporaries’ understanding of both Christians and women. Williams explores the role of women in the Iliad, in Aristotle, and in the structure of aristocratic Roman families. More sobering segments discuss how women were often brutalized or used as pawns in warfare, raped by the victors or sold into concubinage. This is valuable historical perspective, helping readers to reflect on women’s status across history. As a Cornell-trained medievalist, I was familiar with some of these facts, but I could not have told this story. I don’t have Williams’ easy familiarity with the social and political realities of the ancient world, and it was helpful to see the themes developed explicitly from the perspective of a mother.
Even so, this is also the point at which I’m inclined to see a different side of the ancient world. She is of course quite right that Christianity upended much of Roman society, with its theology of love and audacious claims about the infinite value of souls. But Christianity didn’t bury the ancient world. It baptized it. By combining the best of ancient wisdom with Christian revelation, the Christians unfolded a world-transformative faith that was both rational and humane. It’s a potent combination, which we still need today.
Despite the cranky protests of Tertullian, early Christians certainly saw a kind of harmony between ancient wisdom and Christian faith. Hellenized Jews were some of the most enthusiastic of early converts, and great thinkers like St. Augustine (extensively cited by Williams) made good use of their philosophical education. However, it was in the high middle ages—a period in which nearly everyone in Europe was baptized as a Christian—that questions about faith and pagan philosophy came to a head most dramatically. As texts from non-Christian Greek and Arab thinkers emerged from the monasteries, some scholars and prelates thought it would be best to bury them, relegating the darkness of the pagan world to the mostly forgotten past. Others disagreed, arguing that non-Christians, even without the truths of revelation, had made important discoveries that should be preserved. They had explored the natural potentialities of rational persons in some truly impressive ways, and the Christian tradition would be that much stronger if it could incorporate those truths into its own worldview.
Team Aristotle ultimately won the medieval debate. The fight about natural philosophy has been renewed periodically in subsequent centuries, sometimes as a fault-line between Catholics and Protestants or between different Christian denominations. There are connections, too complex to explore here, between the role of women in society and the fusion of faith and reason. For now, it is enough to say that Aristotelian Christianity has overall proven remarkably stable and enduring, and I for one see this as a very good thing. We doneed natural reason. The pagan world was not merely a hellscape of dehumanizing darkness, though there was quite a lot of that, as Williams accurately documents. The ancients also had penetrating insight into metaphysics, epistemology, the potential of rational beings, and by working to harmonize those achievements with Christian revelation, the medieval world brought forth something more potent than either the Nicomachean Ethics or the Gospel of Matthew alone. This is truly the great legacy of the medieval Scholastics.
What does this little history lesson have to do with women and children, surrogates, physician-assisted suicide, or liberal arts education? In fact, it has everything to do with them. All people, as Williams rightly argues, will be better off in a society that appreciates human dignity. But our ability to do that is greatly enhanced when we take natural philosophy seriously, working to harmonize the Christian commitment to dignity with truths uncovered by natural reason. Modern life has turned up a lot more of those “challenging truths,” and we’re still working to integrate them into a larger picture. We need to continue that process.
Mothers, Women, Widget-Makers
Let’s pull back for a moment from the lofty heights of Christian philosophy to consider a more practical question. In a chapter on motherhood and creative labor, Williams decries social messaging that would lead women to see paid work as more important than caretaking. She is disturbed by authors like Betty Friedan and Julie Phillips, who celebrate mothers for “sacrificing their children on the altar of their craft.” For a more positive example, Williams tells the story of Martha Ballard, an eighteenth-century midwife in rural Maine, who channeled her creative impulses into a journal kept for decades. Ballard’s journals today offer a valuable historical resource, and inspiration for mothers everywhere.
It’s a good story. Ballard found a way to thrive as a writer, a mother, and a midwife. Yet it’s hard to say how much this will help new mothers today. Obviously, circumstances differ. But the more important point is that Williams’ framing of the question (“how can we respect the good of creative labor without undermining maternity?”) is itself rather distinctively modern.
A non-Christian might fairly ask: given their iron-clad commitment to human value, dignity, and worth, weren’t Christians a bit slow to recognize the importance of that effort? We shouldn’t engage in hackneyed generalizations about the sexism of Christendom, which did after all have some powerful queens, transformative female religious orders, and remarkable women like Hildegard of Bingen. Still, it does really seem that women’s non-maternal potentialities were chronically underestimated for a great many centuries. Why did that happen, if the Christians were so good at valuing persons in all their rich complexity?
A complete answer is beyond the scope of this review, but any reasonable answer should acknowledge that it’s taken the human race rather a long time to realize just how much women are able to do. We have a better understanding of this now than in any previous era. The reasons are numerous: egalitarian and feminist ideologies have something to do with it, but so do rising levels of wealth and education, scientific and medical advances, and advances in technology that made conveniences more readily available and domestic labor less time-consuming. It’s true as well that women are better positioned to distinguish themselves according to the metrics of our own day. As Williams notes, the ancients valued military prowess very highly. Today, cognitive, managerial, and creative achievements are more highly valued. Women are better suited to this second set of activities.
Whatever the reasons, it’s just a fact that contemporary people understand certain things about women, and their interests and potentialities, that were not as well understood through much of antiquity, the middle ages, and the early modern era. Those truths need to be processed and integrated into our social and political life. For those who approach such questions from a Christian-humanist perspective, it might be helpful to think of this process in light of earlier Christians working to harmonize the ancients’ real insights with more distinctively Christian views. Human dignity is extremely important, but Christian convictions about the worth of souls need to be squared with other truths that have, over time, been uncovered through natural reason. This is a non-trivial task, involving real intellectual labor.
It’s not clear that Williams would actively disagree with this. The concern is that her paradigm doesn’t leave much room for it. As she tells it, the brutal pagan world needed to be upended. The culture of death must be vanquished. These stark contrasts are evocative, but they don’t open much space for working through tensions or mediating disputes. We just default to dignity and consider the matter resolved.
That won’t necessarily be satisfying to people who see some real insight in the authors she places on the side of the culture of death (such as Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir), or to those who see value in market mechanisms that Williams mostly presents as soulless and dehumanizing. For assessing and increasing certain kinds of natural goods, markets can be very effective. They cannot give us the measure of souls. But that’s not a reason to dismiss or disparage markets as the engine of the culture of death. It’s a reason to roll up our sleeves and figure out how these different types of goods relate to one another. Don’t bury Aristotle. Baptize him. (Perhaps Adam Smith needs a bit of baptizing too, though he was nominally a Presbyterian, at least in childhood).
In the Western world today, mothers find it difficult to place our children at the center of our lives, though most of us want them there. Williams sees this problem clearly, and she approaches it with unusual insight derived from her historical expertise. Her book contains valuable insight, but we should be cautious about sweeping diagnoses of the culture of death. Pagans aren’t all bad, in the ancient world or today. We will value mothers and children (and everyone else) best if we keep working to harmonize all relevant truths, no matter where we find them.
