He writes, "...the Enlightenment was much less of a break with what preceded it and much more indebted to centuries of ... moral osmosis: It was not a sudden kickstart of reason after ages of enforced ignorance."
Hilditch quotes scholar Brian Tierney:
... already by 1300 a number of rights were regularly claimed and defended...: “They would include rights to property, rights of consent to government, rights of self-defence, rights of infidels, marriage rights, procedural rights,” and also measures to make these rights enforceable against positive law.But from whence did people living in the Europe of the late Middle Ages get this notion of rights? It certainly wasn't from the ancient Greeks and Romans whose concept of rights was extremely attenuated. The only people who had rights in ancient societies were those who were powerful enough to protect themselves and their property. Women, children and the average male had few rights. Slaves and aliens had none.
Somewhere along the line that began to change, and the change agent was Christianity.
Several doctrines of the early Christians were responsible for this revolutionary view of human beings. First among these was the belief that we are all made in the image of God. This by itself conferred enormous dignity on humanity. We aren't just beasts, we were made by the Creator of the universe just a little lower than the angels.
Second, was the belief that the incarnate God in the person of Jesus loves each individual enough to sacrifice His life for us on the cross. Thus, Paul could write, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” People who believed this could scarcely avoid thinking of all persons as equals in the eyes of God.
Third, the fact that Jesus spent His brief life ministering not to the rich and powerful but to the poor, the diseased and the suffering sent the message to all who followed Him that these individuals were the special objects of God's concern and compassion. To believe that was to realize that the most wretched soul was infinitely important to God and thus to be valued by those who sought to follow God's command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
Jesus' teaching on servanthood, that the first shall be last, inculcated into Christians that the lowly were every bit as important, if not more so than those exalted by the world. Christians couldn't very well claim to love God while despising those He loved.
As Hilditch observes,
It’s almost impossible for us to get a real sense of just how earth-shattering the millennia-long aftershock of Easter has been on our civilization. We are all in our moral sensibilities and basic worldview creatures of Christianity to such a great extent that we cannot see it from the vantage point of a pre-Christian society without tremendous imaginative effort.We might say, as Tom Holland does in his book Dominion, that we're saturated in Christian assumptions to the extent that we're not even aware of it, nor of how historically unique those assumptions were.
The message of human equality and human rights didn't always sink in, of course. It didn't always find receptive soil, either in the hearts of men or in cultures, but over the centuries it continued to germinate until it eventually blossomed into a set of ideas about the human person that are today, at least in the West, taken for granted.
Hilditch writes:
The contingency of everything we think decent and valuable about ourselves and our society upon the sorrows and the triumph of this one man, in whose luminous shadow we have all lived for the last 2,000 years, consistently eludes us. We forget that in a historically demonstrable way, we in the West owe our sense of common universal humanity entirely to Jesus of Nazareth and his Church.It is a great irony, and a great tragedy, that just as the ideas of human worth, dignity and rights have reached a historical apogee in the West, Westerners are rejecting the very source and foundation of those ideas. They think they can hold on to worth, dignity and rights while discarding the God who has bestowed those gifts and upon whom those gifts depend.
It won't work. Nothing else, neither reason nor ideology, can support and sustain them. If modern man succeeds in expunging God from his culture and institutions he will also succeed in plunging humanity into a terrifying darkness whose brutality and inhumanity will rival or surpass the horrifying regimes of the Nazis and the Stalinists.
Perhaps, though, it's not too late to reverse course and avert this looming catastrophe.