Draft of Section I from above outline:
Introduction:
This essay grows out of questions that have been with me for a long time. How do contemplative and religious traditions relate to everyday life rather than just to monasteries and retreats? Can anything be learned from them without accepting their full metaphysical packages—about God, karma, rebirth, providence? And what resources do we have, now, for navigating a world in which deep disagreements about meaning and value are not going away? What follows is not a system or a “view from nowhere,” but a set of hunches: attempts to make sense of certain recurring patterns in history and to see what they might offer for our own situation.
In earlier chapters, the focus was on individual agency under conditions of uncertainty and luck. The argument, in compressed form, was that agency is neither the old sovereign self—standing outside history, fully in control—nor the mere illusion some post‑structural theories imply. Instead, what we have is a kind of weak, mediated agency: people act from within inherited practices, institutions, and discourses; their efforts are constrained and channeled in countless ways; yet their choices still make a difference, sometimes a very large one. Moral luck, on this view, is not an embarrassing anomaly but the normal background against which any meaningful action has to be undertaken.
Here I ask what happens when that weak, fallible agency is brought into contact with deep difference: religious, cultural, political. When empires meet, when traders cross frontiers, when scholars translate each other’s texts, when former enemies try to build institutions together—what makes the difference between mutual enrichment and mutual destruction? Why do some encounters, under conditions that look broadly similar, tilt toward syncretism and creative borrowing, while others spiral into crusades, expulsions, partitions? No single factor will ever explain that, but some dispositions seem to matter more than others.
I will call a certain cluster of those dispositions “Tier‑1 virtues.” The label is not meant to suggest a hierarchy of importance or a fixed taxonomy; it is just shorthand for a family resemblance among traits that keep turning up in very different settings: epistemic humility, tolerance, patience, curiosity about the other, attention to consequences, and a kind of steady equanimity under changing fortune. These are not full moral or religious outlooks. They do not tell anyone what to worship or how to order a society. They are thinner habits of mind and heart—ways of coping with contingency and difference—that can, in principle, be activated inside many thicker frameworks.
One of the surprises that emerged as I worked on this material is that moral luck and these Tier‑1 virtues are not in simple tension. Luck does undercut any picture in which virtue automatically brings reward or in which the world is guaranteed to be fair. But that very recognition can free agents from waiting on a providential script and push them back onto their own limited but real resources. When you stop assuming that “everything happens for a reason,” or that history is secretly arranged to vindicate your side, the question shifts from “Why is this happening?” to “Given that this is happening, what can still be done?” The stance I will call “reverent coping, come what may” is one answer: a mix of lucid acceptance and continuing care that shows up in Buddhist equanimity, Christian detachment, Islamic sabr and tawakkul, Confucian calm, Taoist non‑forcing, and even in naturalistic thinkers like Dewey and Einstein.
-Tier 1 Virtues as "Reverent Coping Come What May": Cross-Cultural Expressions-
Before turning to specific historical cases, I want to establish what I mean by Tier-1 virtues by showing how remarkably similar attitudes recur across very different religious and philosophical traditions. What follows is necessarily painted in broad strokes—I am highlighting certain strands and interpretations within complex traditions rather than settling longstanding textual debates—but the pattern is striking enough to warrant attention. These are not abstract principles but lived stances—ways of inhabiting contingency that combine lucidity about moral luck with steady, non-fatalistic agency.[Insert: These stances are all first cultivated inside thick ontologies—religious, humanist, or ideological; “Tier‑1” names not a separate moral code, but the ways those lived habits can sometimes travel into shared spaces where no single ontology is presumed.]
Many recent projects—for example in positive psychology and “character strengths” research—begin by positing a list of freestanding “thin virtues” (prudence, kindness, curiosity, etc.) that are said to enjoy straightforward cross-cultural validity as universal human strengths.[Footnote: e.g. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.]They explicitly claim six “ubiquitous core virtues” (courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, transcendence) and 24 character strengths as universal across cultures, treated as biologically grounded aspects of “good character.” What follows takes a different route. Tier‑1 is a heuristic, not a reified layer of morality: it names how habits first cultivated inside thick ontologies—religious, humanist, or ideological—can sometimes function as shared resources in mixed settings without being experienced by agents as “de‑theologized” or secularized. A Christian missionary, a lay Buddhist, and a secular humanist may all enact something recognizably like patience, tact, or “skillful means” in a tense encounter, while understanding those dispositions very differently in terms of grace, Dharma, or cooperative intelligence.
These contingencies of self-understanding are often opaque in practice; one rarely knows, in a street-level interaction, how another person privately narrates their own virtues. An Orthodox Christian missionary may understand her patience as grace-enabled kenosis, while a lapsed believer from the same tradition may enact similar patterns without any religious self-narration—both count as "Tier-1" in my framework because the observable disposition (patterns of response over time, alignments between stated commitments and sustained practice) is what matters for intercultural cooperation, not the agent's metaphysical commitments or lack thereof. This is not behaviorism or a claim that inner states are unreal or epiphenomenal; Tier-2 self-narrations—whether theological, humanist, or ideological—are genuine and consequential, shaping how agents understand their lives and make sense of their commitments. But for the purposes of this inquiry into intercultural cooperation, I focus on patterns of practice rather than the full complexity of personal motives because: (1) when actors are multitudinous and span centuries, the historical record does not furnish us with a comprehensive account of the animating motives of all the individual agents involved; (2) multiple self-narrations can be compatible with the same observable patterns; and (3) what enables cooperation across deep difference is whether dispositions actually ease navigation in mixed contexts, not what ultimately grounds them in agents' interior lives. If I were writing a focused study of contemplative practice drawing on diaries, memoirs, or ethnographic interviews, personal motives and subjective experience would be central; here, they remain important background but not the primary analytical target. What matters for this inquiry is that, under favorable conditions, such enacted dispositions can ease and sometimes deepen interaction across cultural and group lines, regardless of the mixed motives of the historically distant actors we will never meet.
What I'm calling "reverent coping come what may" names a family resemblance among virtues that appear again and again when traditions confront the same basic human predicament: how to act well in a world where outcomes exceed our control, where fortune plays a decisive role, and where no cosmic guarantee ensures justice.
Christian Mysticism and Orthodox Kenosis
In the mystical strands of Christianity, particularly in figures like Meister Eckhart and the Orthodox hesychast tradition, we find a radical detachment from outcomes that is anything but passive resignation. Eckhart writes of Abgeschiedenheit—a "detachment" or "disinterest" where one acts "without a why," releasing the anxious demand that the world conform to one's will or that one's efforts be visibly rewarded. The Philokalia, central to Orthodox spirituality, cultivates hesychia (inner stillness) and kenosis (self-emptying), training practitioners to receive whatever comes—suffering, joy, apparent injustice—as occasion for spiritual formation rather than as proof that "things are as they should be."
This is not fatalism. The mystic continues to act, to love, to engage—but the self's grip on controlling or justifying outcomes loosens. External fortune becomes training ground, not vindication. What matters is the quality of one's inner state and one's responsiveness to the present, not whether history rewards virtue or makes cosmic sense. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes, the contemplative learns to dwell in "the darkness" where God's justice is not legible but trust remains.
Zen and Taoist Equanimity
The famous Zen parable of the farmer captures a recurring East Asian attitude with particular clarity. When the farmer's horse runs away, neighbors say "Such bad luck!" He replies, "Maybe." When the horse returns with wild horses, they say "Such good luck!" Again: "Maybe." This continues through his son's injury and eventual escape from conscription—always "Maybe."
Come on Taoist philosophy articulates the same insight through wu wei (effortless action): responsive spontaneity that works with circumstances rather than rigidly imposing one's will. The Daodejing's image is water—it flows around obstacles, takes the lowest place, yet nothing is stronger. Zhuangzi, reflecting on his wife's death, places grief within endless transformations that exceed human categories of good and bad. The cultivation of the "uncarved block" (pu) aims at inner simplicity that can meet fortune's reversals without shattering.
Confucianism and the Calm Junzi
The Confucian tradition, often misread as focused only on social propriety, contains a profound account of inner equanimity under changing fortune. In the Analects (7.37), Confucius observes: "The noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting." The junzi (exemplary person) cultivates ren (humaneness) not because the universe guarantees it will be rewarded, but because it provides an inner stability that neither adversity nor prosperity can shake.
Another passage (4.2) makes this explicit: "Without ren, you can't dwell in adversity for long, and you can't dwell in prosperity for long." The point is not that virtue ensures worldly success but that it enables one to handle both good and bad fortune with equanimity. The junzi focuses on what lies within personal control—self-cultivation, appropriate conduct, understanding others—and releases anxiety about external recognition or material outcomes. As the Analects (1.16) puts it: "One is not concerned that others do not know one; one is concerned that one does not know others."
This is engaged agency—Confucius explicitly rejects withdrawal from the world—but agency that has relocated its ground from external validation to internal formation.
Islamic Sabr and Tawakkul
In Islamic tradition, sabr (patient endurance) and tawakkul (trust in God after having done what one can) capture this stance with particular clarity. Sabr is not passive suffering but active, disciplined management of fear, anger, and impulsive reaction—whether in obeying what is right when difficult, restraining destructive impulses, or accepting hardships without complaint. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said: "Whoever persists in being patient, Allah will make him patient."
Tawakkul names the balance between action and acceptance. The famous hadith captures this: when a man asked whether he should leave his camel untied and trust in God, the Prophet replied, "Tie her and trust in Allah." This is precisely weak agency plus acceptance: act responsibly within your limited sphere, then relinquish demand for control over outcomes. The psychological result—qana'ah (contentment)—comes not because the world is just, but because one has stopped insisting it be fully under one's control.
Hinduism and Karma Yoga
The Bhagavad Gita's teaching of karma yoga—action without attachment to the fruits of action—provides another powerful articulation of engaged, non-anxious agency. Krishna instructs Arjuna on the battlefield: act with full commitment and skill, but release your grip on results. The emphasis is on dharma (right action appropriate to one's role) performed with wholehearted effort, while understanding that outcomes depend on factors beyond individual control.
This is not a counsel to care less or act carelessly. Rather, it is recognition that agency is real but bounded, that one's duty is to act well, not to control history. The cultivation of this stance—acting without being "the actor" in the sense of claiming full authorship of outcomes—aims to free the agent from the oscillation between inflated self-importance when things go well and despairing self-blame when they do not.
Jewish Wisdom: Accepting What Cannot Be Changed
Jewish tradition, particularly in its wisdom literature and later Hasidic developments, contains similar resources. Ecclesiastes acknowledges the role of chance bluntly: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all" (9:11). This is not cynicism but realism about moral luck.
Hasidic teachings on bitachon (trust) and simcha (joy even in adversity) cultivate an attitude where trust in God coexists with full engagement in the world's messy contingencies. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov's famous dictum—"The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid at all"—captures the balance: acknowledge precarity, but don't let fear paralyze action or curdle into resentment when things go wrong.
Humanism and Naturalism: Dewey's "Natural Piety"
John Dewey, signing the Humanist Manifesto and writing A Common Faith, articulated a secular version of reverent coping that eschews supernatural guarantees while maintaining what he called "natural piety"—a sense of gratitude and humility before the conditions that make life and growth possible, combined with active intelligence in pursuing amelioration.
For Dewey, faith is not belief in providential design but "faith in the possibilities of experience"—a cultivated disposition to continue caring, experimenting, and acting responsibly under conditions of uncertainty. He writes of "enduring the undesirable while maintaining active interest in what is possible," which is a nearly perfect description of what I'm calling reverent coping. There is no cosmic guarantee that things will work out, no script ensuring that virtue is rewarded. But there are real possibilities for growth, cooperation, and amelioration if we can act intelligently and maintain hope without demanding certainty.
Einstein's "Cosmic Religious Feeling"
Albert Einstein, in his essay "Religion and Science," described what he called the "cosmic religious feeling"—a sense of awe before the intelligibility and vastness of nature that generates humility without requiring personalized providence. This feeling, he argued, is the source of genuine scientific motivation: the recognition that we are small, our understanding partial, yet understanding is possible and worth pursuing.
Einstein explicitly rejected both traditional theism and mechanistic materialism. What he affirmed was a kind of reverent naturalism: deep respect for the mystery and order evident in nature, combined with recognition that human purposes and sufferings are not written into the cosmic order. This generates what he called "a deep emotional conviction of the rationality of the universe"—not rationality in the sense of moral teleology, but intelligibility coupled with acceptance that the universe is indifferent to human projects. The appropriate response is not despair but a kind of disciplined wonder and humility, continuing to seek understanding and to act decently within the narrow sphere where human agency matters.
Synthesizing the Pattern
What emerges across these traditions is not a unified doctrine but a family resemblance—a cluster of attitudes and practices for inhabiting moral luck that recur despite vast differences in metaphysical commitments. We might name the shared elements:
Cognitive virtues: Epistemic humility (recognizing one's perspective is partial), refusal to over-read events as deserved or part of a knowable plan, willingness to track actual consequences rather than defend doctrine
Affective/temperamental virtues: Equanimity under gain and loss, patience without bitterness, what I'm calling reverent acceptance—a stance that can encompass Zen, Taoist, mystical Christian, Sufi, Confucian, and secular naturalist versions
Practical/social virtues: Tolerance and forbearance toward difference, willingness to sustain cooperation and exchange even under tension, non-resentful response to structural constraints one didn't choose
This is what I mean by Tier-1 virtues: not a philosopher's abstract list but a widely attested, tradition-crossing way of being in the world. These virtues do not deny luck or guarantee outcomes; they train agents to act responsibly and steadily within a world where contingency always has the last word.
Importantly, this Tier-1 ethos often coexists with Tier-2 metanarratives—providence, karma, Pure Land, cosmic justice—that promise ultimate sense-making. But when those metanarratives are strained by severe suffering or moral luck, it is precisely these Tier-1 resources that people draw upon. The mystical paths, the hard disciplines, the acceptance practices all effectively say: in extremis, when felt consolation and visible justice fail, what remains is a cultivated way of standing in the storm.
And crucially—accepting moral luck in this way does not diminish agency but paradoxically enhances it. When we stop waiting for providential alignment or external justification, more paths of action become thinkable. The question shifts from "Why is this happening?" to "Given that this is happening, what remains open to me?" As argued in the previous chapter on weak agency, Tier-1 virtues are thus not just compatible with moral luck but are the form that robust, flexible agency takes when agents relocate initiative into inner-directed resources rather than relying on cosmic guarantees.
With this Tier-1 profile in view, we can now turn to specific historical cases where these attitudes, or their absence, made decisive differences in how human communities navigated difference and whether intercultural exchange produced synthesis or breakdown.
III. Hermeneutical Preface:
Before turning to cases, a brief note on method is necessary. There is no single "Cyrus" or "Akbar" waiting to be discovered. Each exists in multiple, contested versions shaped by ancient sources, modern scholarship, nationalist projects, and contemporary appropriations. The same is true of the worlds they inhabited. There is no unitary "Persian culture" or "Mughal ethos" lurking behind these figures; they act within overlapping reference groups, contested social imaginaries, and shifting institutional arenas rather than within closed, homogeneous wholes. Yet this multiplicity does not render character itself illusory. As Dewey recognized, character emerges precisely at the intersection of these multiple reference groups and institutional orders—not as a fixed essence, but as a pattern of response that becomes observable across varied situations.
The interpretive challenges vary by case. Where sources are abundant and contested—Cyrus and his Cylinder, Akbar's religious experiments, the Ottoman millet system, European integration—we face what might be called historical palimpsests: multiple readings layered over the same evidence, each shaped by different political projects, scholarly traditions, and contemporary concerns. The task is not to scrape away later accretions to reveal an original "true" text, but to acknowledge the multiplicity, attend to patterns visible across competing interpretations, and ask what alignment (or misalignment) emerges when we put self-descriptions, institutional effects, and external testimony into conversation. Where sources are sparse or highly mediated—anonymous merchants navigating Silk Roads exchange networks, missionary translators working at imperial frontiers, the intellectuals and artisans whose everyday interactions sustained cosmopolitan courts—we confront what I'll call the historical Rorschach, in which ambiguous or fragmentary evidence tempts us to project our own assumptions onto the past. Here the discipline required is not interpretive humility in the face of abundance, but constrained projective imagination: using comparative cases, structural analysis, and what we know about similar institutional contexts to make plausible inferences without reading in what we want to find. Both palimpsest and Rorschach problems require methodological self-awareness, but they pull in different directions—the first toward acknowledging irreducible plurality, the second toward resisting unconstrained speculation.
The stance adopted here owes a great deal to mid‑20th century sociology at its best. Gerth and Mills treated "structures" not as occult forces but as history-making units—specific configurations of institutional orders (political, economic, military, religious, kinship, educational) whose interrelations vary historically and must be determined through empirical inquiry rather than fixed a priori. Mills's later call for a "sociological imagination" added a complementary insistence: serious social analysis must connect individual biography and the meanings actors live by with these dynamic structures, rather than dissolving one into the other. In contemporary classrooms this often surfaces when students who are "doing everything right"—working, budgeting, studying—still cannot make ends meet. The point is not to absolve individuals of responsibility, but to reframe a personal trouble as also a structural issue in wages, housing, health care, and debt.
This same habit of mind—seeing how meanings and fates at the level of a single life are entangled with wider institutional orders—applies with particular force to intercultural settings. When Cyrus governed Babylonians, Jews, and Egyptians, or when scholars from multiple traditions converged in Baghdad's House of Wisdom, they operated within history-making units that transcended any single society's normative order. These were not unified "civilizations" but intercultural exchange situations—dynamic arenas where institutional orders (imperial administration, local priesthoods, mercantile networks, scholarly communities) intersected in historically specific ways, selecting for certain dispositions while frustrating others. The Silk Roads of the seventh and eighth centuries, for instance, constituted a history-making unit defined less by territorial borders than by the integration of economic and religious orders across vast distances—a configuration that made certain character traits (linguistic flexibility, consequence-tracking, tolerance of difference) valuable for survival and success-- never guaranteeing success, but making it more likely in an uncertain world. This is not a search for a universal morality or for cross‑cultural “master virtues” in the strong sense, but a pragmatic inquiry into which tradition‑anchored dispositions have sometimes eased life amid deep disagreement.
Character, in this framework, is socially formed but real. Following Dewey's account of character as "interpenetrating habits" and Gerth and Mills's understanding of character as formed at the intersection of biography and institutional structure, I treat character not as a metaphysical essence but as a set of relatively stable dispositions—patterns of perception, judgment, and response—that emerge from the roles and reference groups a person inhabits. Character matters because different persons in the same structural position, with different habits and reference groups, plausibly take different paths and produce meaningfully different outcomes. This is neither psychologism (claiming transparent access to inner mental states) nor functionalism (reducing persons to mere role-bearers). It is pragmatist character theory: character is what shows up in patterned action under varied conditions.
In this spirit, the following pages read historical figures neither as solitary heroes nor as mere bearers of structure. When I attribute Tier‑1 virtues to Cyrus, Akbar, or Al‑Ma'mun, I am not claiming access to their inner mental states, much less to "the real" Cyrus or "the true" Akbar. What can be reconstructed, with varying degrees of reliability, are three kinds of evidence. First, the public self‑understandings and justificatory vocabularies preserved in texts, inscriptions, proclamations, and narratives—how these actors said they were acting and how they seemed to themselves and to others. Second, the reference groups and audiences that mattered to them: courtly elites, military peers, priestly or scholarly communities, mercantile networks, family and kin. Third, the institutional and intercultural effects of their policies over time: what actually happened in temples, cities, provinces, and trading routes as a result of decisions they took or declined to take.
These three dimensions—public self-understandings, reference groups, and institutional effects—provide the materials for inferring character. I reconstruct not inner mental states but operative dispositions: the relatively stable patterns of perception, judgment, and response that become visible when we observe consistency across cases, alignment between stated principles and enacted policies, and corroboration from external observers. Where a ruler's rhetoric of accommodation is matched by actual restoration of temples across multiple territories, respect for local autonomy in varied contexts, and avoidance of cult imposition even when militarily feasible, a case for operative dispositions (character) rather than mere rhetoric or pure opportunism becomes defensible. I call this the word-deed integrity principle: when what actors say aligns with what they do across multiple cases and external sources confirm both, we can reasonably infer that certain principles were operatively guiding their conduct—not with certainty, but with enough warrant to proceed.
The virtue‑attributions made here are bids about the intersection of these dimensions. When I say that a policy "manifests" epistemic humility or tolerance, I am making a double claim. First, that the actor at least partly understood and presented the policy in those terms within their own webs of meaning and to their salient audiences, drawing on specific traditions, myths, and precedents—and that this self-understanding shows alignment between stated principles and enacted policies across multiple cases. Second, that in practice the policy enacted a stance which, in its context, widened—however modestly and temporarily—the space for cooperation, coexistence, or syncretism in an intercultural field. Neither meaning nor effect alone is sufficient. Without institutional and intercultural outcomes, "intended humility" would be little more than rhetoric; without taking actors' self-descriptions seriously and locating them within their own webs of meaning, a purely functional account would risk making talk of persons and character otiose.
This interpretive stance also requires a certain discipline of temperament. On one side lies romance: the temptation to treat figures like Cyrus or Akbar as moral pioneers anticipating modern liberalism, smoothing away conquest, hierarchy, and the brutalities that underwrote their power. On the other side lies cynicism: the equally tempting reduction of everything to power and interest, in which all talk of virtue becomes ideological decoration and syncretism or accommodation can never be anything but a mask for domination. The path taken here is more modest and more fragile. Tier‑1 virtues are treated as thin, defeasible dispositions—epistemic humility, tolerance, consequence‑tracking, reverent coping—that can coexist with pride, cruelty, and self‑assertion.
As Dewey acknowledged in his most candid moments, "all character is speckled," and even "what desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results while good things often happen with no assistance from goodwill." The relationship between virtue and outcome is never an "exact equation"; it is subject to "contingencies, to circumstances which are unforeseeable" (Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 1922/2007, pp. 47-49). This applies with special force to intercultural encounters, where moral luck—the role of accident, timing, and structural conditions beyond anyone's control—shapes whether similar dispositions produce High Syncretism (Tang Chang'an's lasting Buddhist-Daoist-Confucian synthesis), Ambiguous Syncretism (post-colonial India's constitutional democracy shadowed by partition violence and ongoing communalism), or violent breakdown (Crusades, expulsions). The question in each case is whether, and to what extent, such dispositions were activated in and through particular roles and decisions, and how much difference they made within the constraints of their time.
Cyrus the Great offers a useful template. In different traditions he appears as Babylonian heir and pragmatic consolidator, biblical liberator anointed by Israel's God, Xenophon's philosophical ideal of enlightened kingship, modern Iranian nationalist icon, UNESCO human‑rights trailblazer, and, in revisionist work, as an ordinary Near Eastern monarch whose policies differed in degree more than in kind from his predecessors. The same cluster of facts—the sparing of Babylon from sack, the restoration of temples, the satrapal system with considerable local autonomy—admits several readings. One may see pure opportunism, a shrewd calculus that leniency pays better than devastation. One may see opportunism plus a minimal respect for diverse cults as instruments of order. One may see a thicker, if still bounded, pluralism in which the imperial centre genuinely accepts that Persian ways are not the only ways for subjects to honour what they hold sacred.
The choice among these readings cannot be settled by appeal to new facts alone; it requires an interpretive judgment guided by the word-deed integrity principle sketched above. Where Cyrus's rhetoric of accommodation aligns with actual policies across multiple contexts (Babylon, Judea, Egypt) and external sources corroborate both, the case for operative dispositions rather than mere opportunism becomes defensible. In this essay, Cyrus's policies are treated as exemplifying thin, defeasible Tier‑1 virtues: a form of epistemic humility that declines to impose a single cult; a tolerance that permits local rites to continue under imperial protection; an attention to consequences that prefers stable accommodation to recurrent revolt. To say this is not to deny that Cyrus was also a conqueror, that his empire rested on military superiority and strategic violence, or that the restored cults were subordinated to imperial interests. It is to claim that, relative to available alternatives, certain dispositions and self‑understandings were activated in ways that made intercultural life in the empire more breathable than it might otherwise have been—and that this mattered.
The broader framing is neo‑pragmatist and weak‑agency‑oriented. Following Gerth and Mills, the analysis treats history-making units—whether empires, cities, exchange networks, or institutional complexes—as configurations of institutional orders rather than as unified actors with a single will. Units of analysis are chosen case by case in light of the specific question being asked, not fixed in advance. Agency is neither sovereign nor illusory: when policies show consistency across territories, alignment between stated principles and enacted policies, and corroboration from multiple sources, we can reasonably infer operative dispositions rather than mere accident or structural determination. History‑making capacity is distributed across institutional orders, fused complexes (court–military–clerical blocs, commercial–administrative networks), small elites, and particular office‑holders. To say that "Cyrus mattered" or "Akbar mattered" is always shorthand for a counterfactual claim: given these constraints and opportunities, a different person in that role, with different habits and reference groups, would plausibly have taken different paths and produced meaningfully different patterns of intercultural relation.
Finally, the virtues in question are understood as thin, role‑linked habits rather than timeless essences. They are not metaphysical properties, but relatively stable patterns of attention, appraisal, and response that have been cultivated in many traditions and can be activated across them. I call these Tier-1 virtues to distinguish them from Tier-2 metanarratives—the incommensurable ultimate value commitments (providence, karma, democratic progress, market efficiency, theodicy) that often divide traditions. Tier-1 virtues are thinner: they can be learned within thick traditions (Buddhist, Confucian, Islamic, Christian, naturalist) yet activated in intercultural settings where Tier-2 commitments offer no guidance. When traders navigate the Silk Roads, or scholars collaborate in the House of Wisdom, or Jesuits negotiate with Confucian literati, their thick metanarratives often fail as resources for understanding. It is precisely then that thinner dispositions—epistemic humility about one's own standpoint, willingness to track consequences rather than invoke providence, patience with ambiguity—become functional necessities. They are not guarantees of success; they are the habits that make exchange and cooperation possible when thicker resources prove inadequate.
The next chapter turns from these earlier laboratories of navigation to
more explicitly colonial and post‑colonial settings, where knowledge
itself—philology, law, social science—becomes part of the infrastructure
that shapes who can cooperate with whom, and on what terms. Sir William
Jones, working in late‑eighteenth‑century Bengal, will be my hinge
figure there. From that vantage point it becomes easier to see how
modern projects of “universal” liberal order, anti‑colonial
nationalisms, and contemporary ethnoreligious movements have all, in
different ways, tried to control the very contact zones this chapter has
treated more modestly—as sites where weak agents still have to
navigate, whether or not anyone grants them a blueprint.
1. Theoretical scaffolding
Add footnotes at first mention of each:
-
Quine, radical translation / “gavagai”
W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), esp. 26–38.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1930), for character as habits.
H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
2. Cyrus and Achaemenid section
Anchor your claims about policy patterns and continuity with:
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Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002).
Use these for: continuity at Esagila/Eanna, local priesthoods, multi‑lingual administration, comparison with Assyrian/Neo‑Babylonian practice.
3. Ḥunayn / Abbasid translation movement
For the Baghdad vignette:
-
Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998).
Use for: workshop personnel and patrons, translation methods, al‑Maʾmūn anecdotes, downstream effects.
4. Mehmed II / Ottoman confessional order
For the millet‐style ordering and Iberian refugees:
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Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).
Use for: kanunname clauses on succession/confessional hierarchy, structure of non‑Muslim communities, post‑1492 influx.
5. Roger Williams
This is the big one you flagged. At minimum:
Primary texts
Biographical and historical
Use for: banishment context, Narragansett alliance, purchase of land, ship/voyage metaphors, limits (slavery, colonial frame).
Genealogical appropriations
Use these when you distinguish “historical Williams” from the various modern “Williamses” (evangelical hero, liberal rights pioneer, secular separationist).
Slavery / limits
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Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) for the broader New World paradox.
You can footnote briefly when you mention Williams’s acquiescence to slavery and the colony’s later role.
6. Closing navigation / cybernetics references
For the “dance with feedback” metaphor:
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Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), for the general “mangle” / dance idea.
Tomasello, joint attention / shared intentionality
Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), ch. 3; see also How We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
Dewey, “quest for certainty,” character as habit
John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960; orig. 1929).
Goffman, primary frameworks
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), esp. ch. 2, “Primary Frameworks.”
Ignatieff, “ordinary virtues”
Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
Pickering / navigation metaphor (if you cite)
Andrew Pickering, “New Ontologies,” in The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1–14.
Beer (if you mention cyberneticians explicitly)
Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (London: Allen Lane, 1972) for the adaptive cybernetic metaphor.
Mead / Gerth & Mills on character
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2007), esp. texts on Babylon and temple policy.
R. J. van der Spek, “Cyrus the Great, Exiles and Foreign Gods: A Comparative Perspective,” in Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming (eds.), Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006).
F. Rosenthal, “Hunayn ibn Ishaq,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.
Gerhard Endress, “The Circle of al‑Kindi,” in The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism, ed. G. Endress and R. Kruk (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1997).
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982).
Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (London, 1644).
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652).
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (New York: Viking, 2012).
William Lee Miller, The First Liberty: America’s Foundation in Religious Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1986).
Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) for Rhode Island’s entanglement.
Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (London: Allen Lane, 1972), for the cybernetic steering metaphor.
With this methodological groundwork in place—pluralized standpoints, weak but real agency, history-making units as intercultural exchange situations, character observable through word-deed integrity, palimpsest and Rorschach as interpretive challenges—I can now turn to the cases themselves. These will show Tier-1 virtues enabling navigation within and across multiple Tier-2 lifeworlds—the cultural-historical horizons actors inhabit (Buddhist cosmology, Islamic jurisprudence, liberal democratic commitments). In intercultural contexts, these lifeworlds remain present but often in muted, less peremptory form, making room for epistemic humility, tolerance, and consequence-tracking. Sometimes this produces syncretism (Islamic philosophy, Neo-Confucianism); sometimes structured modus vivendi (Ottoman cities); sometimes breakdown (partition, persecution). Outcomes depend on virtue, Tier-2 porosity, structural conditions, and moral luck.
IV. Illustrative Historical Vignettes:
I. Cyrus:
CYRUS VIGNETTE (COMPLETE WITH FOOTNOTES)
In what follows I treat Cyrus not as a timeless "human‑rights pioneer" or lonely moral hero, but as a fallible imperial actor whose way of ruling does seem to push existing Near Eastern repertoires toward a more pluralist pattern. The question is what can reasonably be inferred about his operative dispositions—his Tier‑1 habits—once I put propaganda, hostile sources, and later mythologies into conversation.
Context: between Assyria, Babylon, and a new empire
By the mid‑sixth century BCE, Cyrus II of Persia enters a Near Eastern political world already shaped by centuries of imperial practice under Assyria and the Neo‑Babylonians. The Neo‑Assyrian kings are famous for spectacular brutality—mass deportations, punitive campaigns, the seizure of divine statues—but they also develop a sophisticated administrative mix of provinces under Assyrian governors and vassal states ruled by local dynasts who pay tribute and swear loyalty by their own gods. The Neo‑Babylonian Empire inherits much of this repertoire: under Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylonia dominates the region through fortified cities, monumental cults, and a combination of direct and indirect rule.
The immediate context for Cyrus's entry into Babylon is a legitimacy crisis. Nabonidus, the last Neo‑Babylonian king, alienates powerful constituencies by elevating the moon god Sîn over Marduk—thereby threatening the Marduk priesthood's status and revenue—removing himself from Babylon for long periods to reside in Teima, and disrupting central rituals such as the Akītu festival. When Cyrus defeats the Babylonian army at Opis in 539 BCE and his forces enter Babylon—apparently without a destructive sack—he can present himself, in Babylonian idiom, as a restorer of proper cult rather than as a destroyer.
The many "Cyruses"
Even before modern scholarship, Cyrus appears in multiple, partly incompatible guises. Babylonian inscriptions, above all the Cyrus Cylinder,¹ cast him as Marduk's chosen king who ends Nabonidus's impiety, restores temples, and sends back divine statues and displaced communities to their proper cities. Biblical texts, especially Second Isaiah and Ezra–Nehemiah,² recode the same policies into a different providential script: Cyrus becomes Yhwh's "anointed" instrument who allows Judean elites to return, rebuild the Jerusalem temple, and re‑establish cultic life after exile.
Greek authors then add further layers. Herodotus³ presents a resourceful, courageous conqueror who can also be cruel, rash, and ultimately overreaching; his Cyrus is capable of both shrewd stratagems and hubristic campaigns that end in disaster. Xenophon's Cyropaedia,⁴ by contrast, is an explicit mirror‑for‑princes—openly didactic and only loosely historical—whose idealized Cyrus models justice, moderation, self‑control, and concern for willing obedience for later readers. Modern reception adds still more versions: Iranian nationalism's "father of the nation," UNESCO's brief experiment with the Cylinder as a proto–human‑rights charter,⁵ and, in reaction, deflationary scholarship that emphasizes Cyrus as an "ordinary" Near Eastern king, continuous with Assyrian and Babylonian practice.
My stance is not to choose the "real" Cyrus among these, but to treat each as encoding assumptions about virtue, power, and what counts as praiseworthy, and then to ask what pattern emerges when I put them alongside administrative and epigraphic evidence.
Policies: conquest, temples, satrapies, cults
Three clusters of policy matter most for my purposes.
First, Cyrus's treatment of Babylon itself. After Opis and the surrender of Sippar, Babylon falls without signs of large‑scale destruction in the sources; the Cylinder stresses that its walls and inhabitants are spared, and that cultic order is restored. Administrative texts suggest continuity in personnel: local Babylonian officials continue to operate, and Babylonia becomes a major Achaemenid satrapy rather than a devastated borderland.
Second, his religious policies around temples and exiles. The Cylinder describes Cyrus returning divine statues that Nabonidus had concentrated in Babylon, rebuilding or repairing neglected sanctuaries, and permitting displaced populations to go back to their cities with their gods. The text does not name Judah or Yhwh, but biblical materials interpret this general pattern as including an edict enabling Judeans to return and rebuild the Jerusalem temple. Archaeological evidence from Babylon shows continued temple construction and cultic activity in the late sixth century, and from Judah shows resettlement and temple reconstruction, though both processes were gradual and contested.⁶ Recent work by van der Spek and others⁷ stresses that these restorations are selective, political, and reversible, but they still amount to a consistent public image of Cyrus as a king who "took thought for all the gods" rather than suppressing them in favor of a single imperial cult.
Third, the broader administrative frame. The full satrapal system is formalized under Darius, but already under Cyrus the empire is governed through large regional jurisdictions that work with existing elites, legal customs, and languages. Compared with the most brutal phases of Assyrian expansion, there is a clearer, more routinized reliance on indirect rule and local collaboration—though Assyrian precedents for vassalage and indirect rule remain important, and Achaemenid rule is hardly free of deportations, forced labor, or harsh repression in other theaters. Cyrus’s way of ruling shows, in embryo, how an empire of this scale can be held together through semi‑autonomous satrapal enclaves and co‑opted local elites. The long‑term viability of that arrangement, however, depended heavily on Darius’s later systematization—clearer satrapal boundaries, more regularized taxation and tribute, and a more formal imperial bureaucracy. I focus on Cyrus here because his initial settlements make this repertoire of multi‑ethnic governance visible in the first place, not because he alone made the Achaemenid empire durable.
Word–deed integrity: rhetoric, audiences, effects
If I apply my word–deed integrity test—alignment between public self‑understandings, expectations of reference groups, and institutional outcomes—Cyrus's Babylonian settlement does look like more than a one‑off gesture. The Cylinder is unmistakably propaganda: in conventional Mesopotamian style it vilifies Nabonidus, presents Marduk as searching for a righteous ruler, and depicts Cyrus as chosen to restore proper worship and social order. But the very use of this idiom already signals something: Cyrus does not impose a distinctively Persian cult—such as Ahura Mazda—or claim to abolish Marduk's worship; he legitimates himself by honoring the city's patron deity and promising to repair what Nabonidus has broken.
The Babylonian priesthood appears, for a time, to accept this framing. Temple archives and later chronicles contrast Nabonidus's impiety with Cyrus's care for Marduk and the rituals of Babylon. For instance, the Verse Account of Nabonidus, though hostile to that king, credits Cyrus with restoring the Akītu festival that Nabonidus had suspended. Judean elites, facing their own trauma, hear the same pattern—imperial permission to rebuild shrines, partial restoration of local autonomy—and recast it within their theology of exile and return: Cyrus becomes the unexpected foreign "anointed" of Yhwh. Greek observers, writing later and at a distance, layer on their concerns with tyranny, freedom, and the dangers of empire, producing the divergent Herodotean and Xenophontic Cyruses.
Institutionally, Babylonia remains a major urban, priestly, and administrative center within the Achaemenid empire. Temple archives from the Esagila (Marduk's sanctuary) and the Eanna temple of Uruk show continuity in priestly personnel and cultic activity under Cyrus and his successors.⁸ Local cults continue, and the region is not stripped of status in the way some Assyrian conquests had been. Across the empire, the picture is uneven, but there is substantial evidence that Achaemenid rulers generally cultivate local gods and priesthoods, use multiple imperial languages, and accept a mosaic of legal and cultural regimes, so long as loyalty and revenue are secure.⁹ This is not egalitarian pluralism, but it is a recognizable style of multi‑ethnic governance.
Tier‑1 assessment: thin virtues and an enduring repertoire
Against this backdrop, I think it is reasonable—though not certain—to attribute to Cyrus a thin cluster of Tier‑1 dispositions. These are not modern liberal commitments or inner saintliness, but operative habits visible in the pattern of his rule and consistent across multiple contexts.
First, epistemic modesty about Persian exceptionalism. Cyrus shows no hesitation about conquest, but in his public theology he repeatedly presents himself as chosen by different local gods (Marduk in Babylon, later also claimed by Egyptian priests for Amun-Ra) and as guardian of their temples, rather than insisting that a single Persian or Zoroastrian cult supersede them. This is not relativism—Cyrus certainly believes in the supremacy of Persian ways within Persian contexts—but it shows a pragmatic readiness to acknowledge and work within multiple religious frames when addressing non-Persian subjects. The pattern holds: in Babylon he honors Marduk, in Judea he permits Yhwh's temple, in Egypt (according to later sources) he supports local priesthoods. This consistency across cases suggests an operative principle, not merely opportunistic rhetoric.
Second, bounded tolerance within imperial hierarchy. In Babylonia, major temples are restored, statues repatriated, cults allowed to continue; Judeans and other displaced groups receive imperial permission to re‑establish their shrines; local elites retain significant administrative roles. This is not egalitarian pluralism—the empire extracts tribute, maintains military garrisons, and can revoke privileges when loyalty falters. But compared with what a maximal terror strategy (à la Neo-Assyrian city destructions) would have permitted, there is a consistent pattern of leaving room for enclaves to maintain their gods, laws, and identities under an overarching imperial order. The tolerance is instrumental (serves imperial stability) but real (produces observable protections for diverse communities). Instrumentalism doesn't negate virtue—consequence-tracking is a Tier-1 disposition.
Third, attention to long-term consequences over immediate glory. In a world where Assyrian kings dramatized their power through spectacular punishments and monumental destruction narratives, Cyrus's Babylonian strategy trades short-term terror for long-term stability: winning priestly support against Nabonidus, reducing incentives for revolt, mobilizing the economic and symbolic capital of ancient cities rather than ruling a wasteland. These are prudential calculations, but they line up with the Tier‑1 virtue of tracking consequences beyond immediate vengeance or dynastic prestige. The Cylinder's emphasis on restoration rather than conquest, the sparing of Babylon's walls, the repatriation of statues—these are strategic choices, but they reflect a disposition to value outcomes (stable revenue, willing collaboration) over performative dominance (sacks, mass deportations, statue seizures).
The limits matter as much as the pattern. The campaign at Opis is brutal; peripheral regions suffer deportations and forced labor; the empire rests on military superiority and extraction. Van der Spek and other historians are right to warn against romanticizing Cyrus or exaggerating the novelty of his policies—Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian precedents for vassalage and indirect rule already existed. Yet it also seems too deflationary to say that nothing new is happening. Under Cyrus and then Darius, earlier Near Eastern practices are scaled up and routinized into one of the first clearly identifiable models for ruling a sprawling, multi‑ethnic, multi‑cult empire through satrapal provinces and co‑opted enclaves.
Later empires, especially Rome, will adopt similar patterns of provinces, municipal autonomy, and tolerated cults. Greek texts about Cyrus—both Herodotus's mixed portrait and Xenophon's idealization—will offer subsequent generations a stock of exempla for thinking about what such rule might mean, making this style of governance imaginable for successors. My more modest claim here is that, at the level of Tier‑1 virtues, Cyrus's way of inhabiting an inherited imperial field—his patterned non‑imposition of cult where suppression was possible, his bounded tolerance, his attention to consequences—helped make a certain kind of plural imperial order both thinkable and livable, without ever escaping the violences and asymmetries of empire itself. As Dewey recognized, even "what desirable trait of character does not always produce desirable results"¹⁰—but where Cyrus's dispositions did produce relative accommodation (Babylonia, Judea), they left a legacy that later rulers could draw upon, for better or worse.
Transition
A very different kind of multi‑faith, multi‑language field appears in Abbasid Baghdad's translation movement, where Tier‑1 virtues operate not through imperial statecraft but through scholarly exchange across religious and linguistic boundaries.
FOOTNOTES
¹ Cyrus Cylinder: Translation and discussion in Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2007), 70-74. For the British Museum's online catalogue and images, see BM 90920.
² Isaiah 44:24–45:7; Ezra 1:1-4; 2 Chronicles 36:22-23. For critical discussion of the historicity and dating of these texts, see Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Vol. 1: Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 272-305.
³ Herodotus, Histories 1.95–214 (Cyrus's rise and conquests); 9.122 (his death). Translation: A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920).
⁴ Xenophon, Cyropaedia. The work is openly didactic and only loosely historical—a philosophical novel about ideal kingship rather than a biography. See Christopher Nadon, Xenophon's Prince: Republic and Empire in the Cyropaedia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
⁵ The Cyrus Cylinder was displayed at the UN in 1971 and invoked as a "first declaration of human rights." For critique of this reading, see Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, "The Great Kings of the Fourth Century and the Greek Memory of the Persian Past," in Ctesias' Persica in its Near Eastern Context, ed. Jan P. Stronk (Düsseldorf: Wellem, 2010), 317-346; and Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 1-8.
⁶ For Babylonian temple archaeology, see Paul-Alain Beaulieu, "The Afterlife of Assyrian Scholarship in Hellenistic Babylonia," in The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, ed. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1-18. For Judean resettlement and temple reconstruction, see Oded Lipschits, "Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations," Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9 (2009): 2-30.
⁷ R. J. van der Spek, "Cyrus the Great, Exiles and Foreign Gods: A Comparison of Assyrian and Persian Policies on Subject Nations," in Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper, ed. M. Kozuh et al. (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2014), 233-264. Van der Spek emphasizes continuity with Neo-Assyrian practices and the selective, reversible nature of Cyrus's temple restorations.
⁸ For temple continuity under Achaemenid rule, see Paul-Alain Beaulieu (above); and Caroline Waerzeggers, "The Babylonian Priesthood in the Long Sixth Century BC," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 54, no. 2 (2011): 59-70.
⁹ Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002); Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2007). For the debate on Achaemenid administrative innovations vs. continuities, see also Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
¹⁰ John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922; repr., New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 47-49.
BAGHDAD VIGNETTE—FINAL DRAFT
The School of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq: High Syncretism in Early Abbasid Baghdad
In ninth-century Baghdad, a small Nestorian Christian workshop—Nestorians being members of the Church of the East who had been condemned as heretics by Byzantine councils and thus harbored no loyalty to Constantinople—became one of the central engines of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, a decades-long effort under Abbasid patronage to render Greek philosophy, medicine, and natural science into Arabic. At its core stood Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 873), an Arab Christian from al-Ḥīra in modern-day Iraq, his son Isḥāq, his nephew Ḥubaysh, and a circle of pupils, all moving between Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The "School of Ḥunayn" offers a compact, concrete instance of high syncretism: Tier-1 virtues of intellectual rigor, cross-confessional trust, and resilience operate within—and are sometimes threatened by—Tier-2 worldviews shaped by imperial ideology, theological rivalry, and courtly competition.
A Christian family workshop at the Abbasid court
Ḥunayn emerged from a long Syriac Christian tradition of translating and commenting on Greek philosophy and medicine. The Nestorian Church (Church of the East), having been condemned as heretical by Byzantine councils in the fifth century, maintained theological and political distance from Constantinople—a factor that made Nestorian scholars attractive to Abbasid caliphs seeking to appropriate Greek learning without dependence on their Byzantine rivals. By the time the Abbasids founded Baghdad (762) and began commissioning translations, Syriac churches in Syria and Iraq had already been rendering Aristotle, Galen, and others into Syriac for centuries, developing habits of "meaning-based" translation and a technical lexicon of their own.¹ When al-Manṣūr and his successors poured money into Greek science, they were effectively channeling funds into that existing Syriac mediation and redirecting it toward Arabic.
The School of Ḥunayn formed at the intersection of this Syriac legacy and Abbasid patronage. It included Ḥunayn as physician-philologist; his son Isḥāq, who would become the most consequential translator of Aristotle in the movement; his nephew Ḥubaysh b. al-Ḥasan; and pupils such as ʿĪsā b. Yaḥyā and Isṭifān b. Bāsīl. Their patrons ranged from Nestorian medical dynasties like the Bukhtīshūʿ family (long dominant in court medicine), to scientific magnates such as the Banū Mūsā (who reportedly kept Ḥunayn, Ḥubaysh, and the Sabian mathematician Thābit b. Qurra on generous retainers), to Abbasid caliphs including al-Maʾmūn and al-Mutawakkil.² Within the workshop, roles were differentiated: Ḥunayn as "editor-in-chief" and lead medical translator; Isḥāq as principal philosophical translator; junior associates often working from Syriac into Arabic and then being corrected against the Greek.
Already here, Tier-1 and Tier-2 layers are intertwined. The Tier-1 layer is a craft ethos: a family-based community of practice committed to accurate, intelligible translation across languages. The Tier-2 layer is a mesh of confessional and political identities: Nestorian hierarchy and intra-Christian rivalry, Abbasid bureaucratic needs, Persianate court culture, and an Islamic empire seeking to position itself between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran.
Sense-for-sense translation as a virtue practice
Ḥunayn's own treatise "On his Galen Translations" (the Risāla to ʿAlī b. Yaḥyā al-Munajjim) is a rare self-portrait of translation as Tier-1 virtue practice. He explains that for each treatise he first gathers all the Greek manuscripts he can find—travelling through Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, as far as Alexandria—to collate and establish a sound text. Only then does he translate, not word-for-word, but sense-for-sense: he reads a sentence until he fully understands it, then rewrites it in clear Syriac or Arabic, adjusting idiom and syntax so the meaning, not the Greek word order, is preserved.³ He openly criticizes earlier Syriac versions that clung too closely to Greek structure as opaque, and in several cases states that he has abandoned such versions and started afresh from the Greek.
This method, as Sebastian Brock and Myriam Salama-Carr have stressed, brings to maturity a Syriac tradition that already preferred intelligibility over literalness and turns it into a house style that Ḥunayn explicitly teaches to his son and pupils.⁴ When Arabic lacks suitable technical terms, he coins them—neologisms in medicine, optics, physiology, and logic that later physicians and philosophers treat as standard vocabulary.⁵
Here Tier-1 virtues are on full display: conscientiousness in checking manuscripts; epistemic humility in revising and even discarding earlier work; courage to innovate lexically; and a collaborative orientation that trains others into the same standards. The School's practice makes visible what it looks like, in concrete routines, to prize understanding over mere transmission.
Tier-2 enablement: from astro-imperial ideology to the "Aristotelian dream"
On the Tier-2 side, the School's flourishing depends on a particular Abbasid ideological trajectory as Dimitri Gutas reconstructs it. Under al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775), the Abbasids who relied on Persian support to overthrow the more Arab-centric Umayyad Caliphate, appropriate Sasanian models of kingship, including Zoroastrian "astrological history": a vision of world rule as a succession of empires under the stars. Commissioning translations of Persian and Greek "books of wisdom" helps present the caliphate as rightful heir to a cosmically ordered sequence of monarchies. Under al-Maʾmūn (r. 813–833), this astro-imperial logic intensifies. With a maternal Persian lineage and a power base in Khurāsān, al-Maʾmūn wins a civil war in part by mobilizing eastern Persian elites and then deepens Persianization of the court while sponsoring large-scale Greek translation as a badge of cultural superiority over Byzantium: Greek science has become "ours," and we can do it better than the current "Romans." Gutas captures this as an ideology of anti-Byzantine "philhellenism" and, domestically, as an "Aristotelian dream"—a project to build an Arabic, Aristotelianized science that would underwrite centralized caliphal authority and provide a rationalist counterweight to the decentralizing pull of the ʿulamāʾ (religious legal scholars).⁶
At the same time, al-Maʾmūn aligns himself with Muʿtazilite kalām (rationalist Islamic theology), enforcing the doctrine of the created Qurʾān through the Miḥna—an inquisition that punished scholars who refused to affirm that the Qurʾān was created in time rather than eternal. This is less a lapse from "rationalism" than its authoritarian edge: once a doctrine is held to be rationally demonstrable, dissent can be treated as both epistemically and politically intolerable.⁷ For my purposes, the point is that this courtly Tier-2 constellation—Persianized monarchy, anti-Byzantine philhellenism, rationalist theology—creates the funds, prestige, and demand that sustain the School of Ḥunayn, even as it also produces episodes of coercion and doctrinal policing. The "Aristotelian dream" as caliphal state ideology would not survive al-Maʾmūn's successors, but it had already accelerated and deepened a translation program whose magnitude and momentum proved unstoppable for centuries.
Pipeline and downstream creativity
Within that environment, the School's multi-stage workflow becomes a medium of syncretism. A Greek medical treatise might be produced in late-antique Alexandria, translated into Syriac by earlier Christian scholars, transmitted to a major Sasanian center of learning like Jundīshāpūr, then to Baghdad, where Ḥunayn reconstructs the Greek text and produces a new Syriac version, after which a junior associate renders it into Arabic, and finally Ḥunayn or Isḥāq revises this Arabic against the Greek.⁸ In medicine this process yields an almost complete Galenic corpus in Syriac and Arabic, along with Hippocrates and Dioscorides, which structures clinical teaching from Baghdad to Central Asia.⁹ In philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences, the same pipeline produces Arabic versions of Aristotle's Physics, De anima, and much of the Metaphysics (primarily through Isḥāq), as well as Euclid and Ptolemy, whose quality modern scholars judge to be high by comparison with surviving Greek.¹⁰
These texts become the backbone of the Aristotelian tradition in the Islamic world, the basis on which thinkers like al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes build new metaphysical and logical systems—what came to be called falsafa (Arabic philosophical theology)—often in deliberate synthesis with kalām (rationalist Islamic theology).¹¹ Through later Latin translations from Arabic, they also shape scholastic theology, including Aquinas's Aristotelian-Christian synthesis. The School thus plays a crucial Tier-1 role in enabling creative Tier-2 syntheses: Indian numerals with Greek geometry in algebra; Galenic medicine with Islamic law and ethics in new medical compendia; Aristotelian metaphysics with Qurʾanic monotheism in falsafa and kalām.
Crisis, resilience, and reconstituted trust
The famous crisis in Ḥunayn's relationship with the court—his imprisonment, flogging, and loss of property, followed by recall and elevation—comes down to us as a historical palimpsest. Christian apologetic sources tell a story in which al-Mutawakkil tests Ḥunayn by ordering him to prepare poison; Ḥunayn refuses, is punished for his scruples, then vindicated.¹² Rival traditions portray fellow Nestorians, the Bukhtīshūʿ enemies, exploiting Ḥunayn's hostility to images, tricking him into spitting on an icon in the caliph's presence and provoking outrage. Modern reference works accept the punishment and recall as historically secure but treat both specific explanations as later, agenda-driven rationalizations.
Given this, the most that can responsibly be said is: (1) court dynamics were volatile enough that even an indispensable Christian physician-translator could be abruptly ruined for reasons we cannot reconstruct with confidence; and (2) he was soon recalled and placed in a more exalted position, displacing his rivals and entrusted with the caliph's health and the direction of major translation work.¹³ Those two facts together point to Tier-1 and Tier-2 lessons that do not depend on choosing between the poison and icon stories.
On the Tier-2 side, the episode illustrates the fragility of syncretic cooperation in a courtly world where confessional rivalries, personal intrigue, and shifting ideological winds could override merit and prior service. On the Tier-1 side, the eventual restoration indicates both functional indispensability—no one else could match the School's combination of medical competence and philological rigor—and a reconstituted trust strong enough for a caliph to put his life in a Nestorian Christian's hands. The School's survival and subsequent consolidation—especially in the high-quality Aristotle translations produced by Isḥāq in the style his father had established—also exemplify resilience: the ability of a cross-confessional, knowledge-producing micro-institution to recover from severe shocks and continue transmitting rigorous practice across generations.¹⁴
Fragility and transformation
The School of Ḥunayn as a family enterprise was brief—Ḥunayn died in 873, his son Isḥāq in 910—but the collaborative infrastructure it exemplified continued. Nestorian Christians like Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d. 940) and others led interfaith scholarly circles in Baghdad well into the tenth century, working alongside Muslim philosophers like al-Fārābī. As late as the twelfth century, Syriac Christians continued as court physicians and translators. Muslim scholars increasingly joined the movement, primarily as revisers and original thinkers building on translated foundations rather than as translators from Greek. Translation work itself continued—if in more decentralized form, sustained by diverse patrons rather than centralized imperial backing—for centuries, eventually slowing not because of theological repression but because most available Greek works had been translated.¹⁵ The specific courtly configuration that made a Nestorian family workshop the intellectual engine of an Abbasid state project proved unrepeatable, but the collaborative scholarly ethos and the texts it produced became foundational infrastructure for philosophy and medicine across the Islamic world and, through later Latin translations, medieval Europe.
High syncretism without romance
Seen through the framework I have been developing, the School of Ḥunayn shows that "the Golden Age" in Baghdad was neither pure romance nor mere realpolitik. The same imperial structures that sought to monopolize reason through an "Aristotelian dream" and the Miḥna also bankrolled a Christian-led workshop whose Tier-1 virtues—philological care, conceptual clarity, cross-confessional trust, cooperation, and resilience—were essential to the movement's success. Within that workshop, Nestorian Christians, Muslim patrons, and Sabian mathematicians cooperated daily by setting aside, in practice though not abandoning in their lifeworlds, their divergent Tier-2 worldviews to honor shared standards of evidence, argument, and linguistic precision.
Yet those deeper commitments never disappeared. They sometimes clashed openly (as in the Miḥna's theological coercion), sometimes remained compartmentalized (as in Ḥunayn's simultaneous production of Christian apologetic works and medical treatises for Muslim patrons), and sometimes fed back into the shared enterprise (as when Muʿtazilite theology appropriated Aristotelian logic). High syncretism here names not harmony, but a historically rare configuration in which Tier-1 virtues and shared practices are strong enough to make genuine, durable innovation possible across confessional and cultural lines—even as Tier-2 projects of power, theology, and identity continue to pull in different directions. That these innovations—Arabic Aristotle, algebraic synthesis, Galenic medicine—would influence intellectual traditions for centuries shows the durability of what Tier-1 virtues, under favorable conditions, can produce.
FOOTNOTES
¹ Sebastian Brock, "The Syriac Background to Ḥunayn's Translation Techniques," Aram 3 (1991): 139-162; and G. C. Anawati, "Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-ʿIbādī, Abū Zayd," in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008), vol. 6, 230-233.
² G. Strohmaier, "Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq," in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 3, 578-581; Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ [Sources of Information on the Classes of Physicians], ed. August Müller (Cairo, 1882), vol. 1, 185-200.
³ Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, Risāla ilā ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā fī dhikr mā turjima min kutub Jālīnūs [Epistle to ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā on What Has Been Translated of the Books of Galen], ed. Gotthelf Bergsträsser (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1925); English translation in John Cooper, "Galen and His Translators: The Case of the De optimo medico cognoscendo," Galenos 7 (2013): 9-34.
⁴ Brock, "Syriac Background"; Myriam Salama-Carr, La traduction à l'époque abbasside (Paris: Didier Érudition, 1990), 45-68.
⁵ Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998), 136-141; Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 22-28.
⁶ Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, chs. 2-4, esp. 53-96.
⁷ Ibid., 166-175; Michael Cooperson, Al-Maʾmun (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 89-104.
⁸ Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 136-141; Salama-Carr, La traduction, 45-68.
⁹ Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 17-29; Emilie Savage-Smith, "Medicine," in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. Roshdi Rashed (London: Routledge, 1996), vol. 3, 903-962.
¹⁰ Gerhard Endress, "The Circle of al-Kindī," in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43-69; Henri Hugonnard-Roche, "The Influence of Arabic Astronomy in the Medieval West," in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 1, 284-305.
¹¹ Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World, chs. 5-9; Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 27-180.
¹² Max Meyerhof, "New Light on Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq and his Period," Isis 8, no. 4 (1926): 685-724, esp. 704-710.
¹³ Strohmaier, "Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq"; Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ, vol. 1, 191-195.
¹⁴ Gerhard Endress, "Die wissenschaftliche Literatur," in Grundriss der arabischen Philologie, vol. 2, ed. H. Gätje (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1987), 400-506, esp. 420-435.
¹⁵ On the continuity and eventual completion of the translation movement, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 175-186; and Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill,1992)
OTTOMAN VIGNETTE—REVISED WITH MINOR REFINEMENTS
1. From Baghdad to Istanbul: Another Kind of Coexistence
The School of Ḥunayn exemplified something like high syncretism: genuine intellectual fusion across confessional lines, enabled by thin Tier‑1 virtues operating within a relatively favorable imperial patronage structure. Not all successful intercultural arrangements look like that. More common—and often more durable—are structured modi vivendi: arrangements in which deep differences persist, communities remain segmented, yet coexistence is maintained over long periods through institutional frameworks and calibrated policies. By modus vivendi here, I mean a working arrangement for coexistence that does not require shared ultimate values or thick mutual recognition, only institutions and reciprocal restraint.¹ The Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II and his successors offers a particularly instructive case of a third type: a hierarchical order that nonetheless sustained multi‑confessional coexistence for centuries. Understanding how such arrangements work—what thin virtues they require, what limits they face—expands our conceptual repertoire beyond the liberal/illiberal binary that dominates contemporary debates.
2. Palimpsest and Word–Deed Integrity
Mehmed II has long functioned as a kind of Rorschach figure. Contemporary Venetian reports, later Habsburg pamphlets, and some Byzantine exiles cast him as an apocalyptic Antichrist; other modern biographers emphasize his patronage of Greek and Italian humanists, or his supposed attraction to Christianity, or his ruthless "one faith, one ruler" intransigence.² Babinger, to his credit, warns the reader at the outset that "the absence of reliable documentation makes it impossible to sketch a psychologically rounded portrait of Mehmed," and then spends several pages doing precisely that in his closing chapter, stitching together hostile diplomatic reports, courtly panegyrics, retrospective theological judgments, and romantic nationalist histories into a vivid but internally strained figure.³ Genres and temporal layers blur into a single palimpsest. The result tells us at least as much about the hopes and fears of successive observers as it does about Mehmed himself.
A stricter evidentiary discipline is possible. In what follows, only those words that are tied to Mehmed's acts of will, and that cohere with institutional practices over time, will count as evidence for his priorities. That means privileging texts such as his kanunname (secular law code), his charters to the Orthodox Patriarch and the Bosnian Franciscans, and the theological confession he commissioned Gennadios Scholarios to write, and pairing them with deeds such as the systematic use of the devşirme (the "human tithe"—a periodic levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, trained in palace schools or Janissary corps, and often promoted to high office), the reorganization of the Janissaries, and the long, messy work of repopulating and rebuilding Constantinople.⁴ What falls away are uncorroborated anecdotes and free‑floating ascriptions of motive. This does not yield a "true inner Mehmed," but it does allow a more disciplined reconstruction of the thin virtues his rule in fact exhibits.
3. A Thin Virtue Profile
Viewed through that word–deed filter, Mehmed does not look like a proto‑liberal avant la lettre, nor like a flat caricature of "Oriental despotism." What comes into focus instead is a cluster of thin virtues: traits of intelligence and restraint that help make a multi‑confessional modus vivendi governable from above, without presupposing egalitarian respect or high syncretic openness.
3.1 Prudential, systemic intelligence
The first is a kind of cold prudential intelligence: an ability and willingness to think in a systemic, long‑term way about the empire as a whole. The devşirme turns scattered Christian village boys into a centrally controlled corps whose advancement depends on the sultan, addressing recurrent problems of military loyalty and provincial magnate power.⁵ Its coercive character is undeniable; it begins in seizure and forced conversion. What matters for present purposes is not its moral attractiveness but the way it channels religious difference into a centrally managed instrument of rule rather than treating provincial Christian populations simply as enemies to be crushed or expelled. The Janissary corps and palace schools built on that human material become key instruments of centralized rule, staffed by men with no local power base apart from their office.⁶ “Mehmed’s kanunnâme (sultanic, secular law code) codifies punishments, taxes, salaries, and offices…”, taxes, salaries, and offices in a way that both constrains lesser officials and concentrates ultimate authority in the palace.⁷ The notorious succession clause—on which more below—casts even dynastic violence in the same dry, impersonal idiom of ‘order of the world’ (nizām‑i ‘ālem, the good order of society and the empire) rather than as an openly self‑serving, ad hoc act of killing.”⁸ .
3.2 Structured openness to difference
A second thin virtue is structured openness to difference. Here "openness" does not mean hospitality, equal welcome, or voluntary participation—the devşirme already shows how coercive Ottoman incorporation can be. It means instead a readiness to engage, incorporate, and depend on non-Muslim skills and institutions for imperial purposes, rather than treating all religious difference as an anomaly to be crushed. Mehmed shows little interest in theological fusion; there is no Ottoman analogue to the collaborative translation workshops of Baghdad in his court. But he consistently organizes confessional and ethnic diversity as a resource. Greek and Italian architects and engineers are employed to repair and adapt Byzantine structures and to construct new mosques and fortifications; Armenian and Greek merchants and financiers are drawn into the fiscal apparatus; Jewish and Christian diplomats and dragomans serve as indispensable intermediaries with Latin Christendom.⁹ His charter to the restored Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople recognizes the Patriarch as ethnarch of the Greek Orthodox community, grants him certain tax exemptions and judicial authority, and promises protection in exchange for loyalty and tribute.¹⁰ A similar pattern appears in the ahidnâme (charter of protection) granted to the Bosnian Franciscans, which confirms their right to maintain churches and property on condition of political obedience.¹¹ None of these documents proclaim equality of faiths. They do, however, instantiate a durable, formalized place for religious others within the imperial order. That is a recognizable virtue of structured openness: the capacity to treat plural communities as enduring components of an imperial system rather than as temporary hostages or enemies to be extirpated.
3.3 Conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint
A third thin virtue is conditional tolerance and calibrated restraint. Isaac Zarfati's mid‑fifteenth‑century letter, urging German and Hungarian Jews to migrate to Ottoman lands, contrasts the persecutions and expulsions of Christendom with the relative security and opportunity Jews enjoy under the sultan: "Here every man may dwell in peace under his own vine and fig tree, and no one makes them afraid."¹² The rhetoric is promotional, but it reflects a real pattern. Mehmed's policies toward the Greek population of Istanbul, as Halil İnalcık shows, combine coercive forced migrations (sürgün) to repopulate the city with tax privileges and recognition of communal institutions; churches are sometimes converted to mosques, sometimes left in Christian hands, and major Byzantine buildings are repaired rather than destroyed.¹³ Across the empire, non‑Muslims remain subordinate, marked and taxed as such. Yet they are also repeatedly treated as communities to be governed and taxed, not as permanent enemies to be expelled or annihilated. Toleration here is not premised on equal respect; it is a calibrated restraint grounded in revenue needs, geopolitical calculation, and a certain recognition that the empire cannot function without its religious minorities.
These three traits—prudential system-building, structured openness, conditional tolerance—are not equally attractive, and the institutions they sustain are not morally equivalent. The thin virtues at work are not friendliness, hospitality, or egalitarian respect, but a hard-edged willingness to work with and through difference for imperial ends. That willingness produces both the durable multi-confessional modus vivendi visible in Constantinople and the coercive mechanisms—devşirme, forced migrations, subordinate legal status—that make such arrangements possible under autocratic rule. The darker implications of this combination will become fully apparent in the law of fratricide.
4. Constantinople as Test Case
Constantinople provides the clearest test of this thin virtue profile. The city could easily have gone the way of other conquered centers: left to decay into a garrisoned semi‑ruin, stripped of its multi‑confessional character, or broken into a provincial backwater eclipsed by some upstart capital. Mehmed instead treats it as the linchpin of a new, explicitly imperial project. Strategically, it controls the Bosporus and joins Anatolia to the Balkans; symbolically, it allows him to claim the title Qayser‑i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) and to present the Ottoman house as heir to both Byzantine and Islamic imperial traditions.¹⁴
The ensuing policies are anything but haphazard. Immediately after the conquest, Mehmed ransoms some prisoners himself and allows them to remain; shortly thereafter, he issues edicts ordering the transfer of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish households from other parts of the empire to repopulate the city.¹⁵ These forced migrations (sürgün) are often paired with inducements: tax reductions, grants of land or lodging, the allocation of specific quarters to particular confessional groups.¹⁶ Over time, as İnalcık and others document, the state layers voluntary migration on top of these coerced movements, creating a city in which Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish neighborhoods are distinct yet economically interdependent.¹⁷ By the end of Mehmed's reign, Constantinople's population likely exceeded its late Byzantine levels, and the city had resumed its role as a major commercial and administrative center of the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁸
This is not a melting pot. Confessional lines remain salient and legally encoded in what would become the millet system—formal recognition of religious communities as corporate bodies under their own religious leaders, with jurisdiction over internal affairs, education, and family law. The foundations of this structure are visible in Mehmed's charters to the Patriarch and other communal heads, though the system would be more fully elaborated under later sultans. At the same time, it is not a simple story of zero‑sum domination. Mehmed's word–deed pattern here illustrates the thin virtues already identified: systemic planning, structured openness to difference, and conditional tolerance as tools for building a multi‑faith modus vivendi under autocratic rule. The empire that emerges is hierarchical, often harsh, and far from egalitarian. Yet for centuries it sustains a dense, multi‑confessional urban life in its capital and across its provinces under conditions that, on many alternative paths, could easily have yielded depopulation, expulsion, or permanent low‑grade religious war.
5. Fratricide as Limit Case
It is precisely against this background that the law of fratricide must be read—not as an awkward detail to be explained away, but as a dark counterpoint. Mehmed’s kanunname does not merely record a brutal custom; it explicitly authorizes whoever ascends the throne to kill his brothers “for the order of the world” (nizâm‑i ʿâlem), and states that “the majority of the ulema have approved this procedure.”¹⁹ Before codifying the practice, Mehmed himself had already ordered the blinding of two brothers and the execution of an infant half‑brother, and his law then generalizes this logic into a standing rule of dynastic governance.²⁰a Later Ottoman jurists labor to justify the article using the familiar tools of maslaha (public interest), “lesser of two evils” reasoning, and the Qurʾanic dictum that “fitna [i.e. civil strife] is worse than killing,” presenting the elimination of rival princes as a measure taken in the name of public order.²⁰
By almost any Tier‑2 standard one might bring to bear—including those of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, humanism, and, crucially here, the Qurʾan and Sharia as understood within the empire itself—deliberately killing non‑rebellious or infant brothers counts as a grave moral transgression. Ottoman legal discussions themselves acknowledge that the execution of non‑rebelling princes pushes the limits of Sharia, conflicting with basic norms against killing innocents and punishing one person for another’s potential wrongdoing.²¹Jurists distinguish between executing a brother in open rebellion (treated as uncontroversially legal), killing one clearly preparing revolt (debated but sometimes shoehorned into the law of rebelliousness), and killing non‑rebellious or infant princes merely for their potential to cause future fitna (i.e. civil strife), the most contentious category.²² Some scholars refused to endorse the broadest applications; others acquiesced under political pressure, and Mehmed’s kanunname itself pointedly specifies that “the majority of the ʿulema have approved this procedure,” a vague assertion that obscures how many jurists actually agreed and on what grounds
What is most striking, in this context, is not simply that fratricide occurs—dynastic killings were common from Europe to Asia—but that Mehmed's law frames what is a grave moral transgression by almost any standard, including the Qurʾan and Sharia, not even as a "necessary evil" but as a public good, an act done "for the order of the world" in the public interest.²⁴ It stands as one of the darkest chapters in this autocratic regime's history; after a particularly shocking succession in which Mehmed III had nineteen brothers—many of them young children—strangled in a single day, it was quietly abandoned in practice.²⁵ Within a generation, Ahmed I broke with precedent by sparing his brother Mustafa and shifting toward a system of seniority and confinement in the kafes (i.e. ‘cage’), the secluded apartments where potential heirs were held under palace surveillance. The fratricide clause was never formally repealed, but it ceased to guide succession.²⁶ Even judged narrowly on its own instrumental terms, the law misfired: it generated controversy, trauma, and continued succession strife rather than the stable order it purported to serve.
The law of fratricide, then, marked a limit case. The same systemic, order‑obsessed intelligence that helped construct a durable multi‑confessional modus vivendi in Constantinople was, in this domain, willing to override the religious and moral standards the regime otherwise enforced and to recode a grave moral transgression as a public good. Thin virtues of planning and consequence‑tracking could coexist with, and even abet, serious moral failures. The Ottoman example is instructive not because it offers a model to emulate, but because it shows how far an autocratic regime could go in sustaining a multi‑faith modus vivendi for reasons that had little to do with ideals of equal respect, and how sharply those same thin virtues could break loose from the thicker Islamic frameworks of Qurʾan and Sharia in whose name they were exercised.²¹
6.Political–Philosophical Payoff
In a world where many nominally pluralistic states struggle to maintain even a minimal modus vivendi in the face of resurgent nationalism and religious polarization, this pre‑Westphalian, unapologetically hierarchical, yet remarkably durable imperial order has something to teach. The lesson is not that one should “be like Mehmed,” still less that empire is a superior form of life. It is that an autocrat with extensive coercive power and little tolerance for organized political opposition can nonetheless, under some conditions, choose structured coexistence over homogenization or expulsion for his religiously diverse subjects.²⁷
The virtues on display in that choice are thin and the justice they support is limited. But that is precisely what makes the case worth dwelling on. Mehmed’s regime combines serious moral failures—including a succession law that recodes fratricide as a public good—with a set of thin dispositions that enable a multi‑confessional city and empire to function for centuries without requiring deep agreement or modern norms of equal respect. That combination neither licenses nostalgia for empire nor supports fatalism about contemporary democracies. It suggests, more modestly, that there are multiple, historically distinct ways of sustaining imperfect but workable modi vivendi, and that thinking clearly about thin virtues and dark chapters together is part of learning how to live, and let others live, under conditions of enduring difference.²¹
FOOTNOTES
¹ For the conceptual distinction between modus vivendi and more ambitious forms of consensus, see John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000).
² For sharply contrasting portraits, see Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), and John Freely, The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II—Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (New York: Overlook, 2009), especially ch. 8, which leans heavily on Kritoboulos to present Mehmed as a kind of Renaissance prince presiding over a cultivated, cosmopolitan court. Later writers sometimes invoke Venetian relazioni as if they independently corroborated this “philosopher‑ruler” image, but the reports themselves are terse diplomatic documents, as Babinger acknowledges on p. 410 of Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time; they emphasize Mehmed’s power and threat rather than his erudition. The notion that they corroborate Kritoboulos’s dedicated, admiring portrait of a prince of deep curiosity and learning—written while he was in Mehmed’s service as an appointed governor within the empire—functions as a kind of hermeneutical echo chamber, conflating the Greek’s apologetic narrative with the brief Venetian dispatches. For hostile Byzantine perspectives that cast Mehmed as tyrant or even Antichrist, see Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks: An Annotated Translation of “Historia Turco‑Byzantina”, trans. Harry J. Magoulias (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975); and Korać Dušan and Radić Radivoj, “Mehmed II, ‘The Conqueror’, in Byzantine Short Chronicles and Old Serbian Annals, Inscriptions, and Genealogies,” Zbornik radova Vizantološkog instituta 45 (2008), available at https://www.medievalists.net/2009/11/mehmed-ii-the-conqueror-in-byzantine-short-chronicles-and-old-serbian-annals-inscriptions-and-genealogies.
³ Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Book 7, p. 410, where he concedes the lack of material for "reliable documentation concerning his personality" even as he proceeds, over the next several pages of that closing chapter, to describe Mehmed's motives, intentions and beliefs in unwarranted detail, by his own lights.
⁴ On the kanunname, see On Mehmed's charter to the Patriarch, see Halil İnalcık, "The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23 (1969): 229-249. On the Gennadios confession, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 165-167. On the devşirme system, see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 134-148 . On Constantinople's repopulation, see İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II"
⁵ Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 134-148.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid., esp. ch. 7 (“Law”), on kanun and kanunnâme alongside the Sharia.
⁶ Ibid.,
⁷ Ibid..
⁶ Ibid., see also, Mark David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021),
⁷ Ibid., esp. ch. 7 (“Law”), on kanun and kanunnâme alongside the Sharia.
⁸ On the fratricide clause in the kanunname, see Halil İnalcık, "Fratricide in Ottoman Law," in Belleten 38 (1974): 541-552.
⁹ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II"; Imber, Ottoman Empire, 195-210.
¹⁰ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 235-238; Runciman, Great Church in Captivity, 165-177.
¹¹ See Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 60–85, on ahidnâmes and the status of non‑Muslim communities; and Mark David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 145–152, on Bosnia and the Bosnian Franciscans under Ottoman rule.
¹² Zarfati, Isaac. “Letter of Rabbi Isaac Zarfati.” In Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam, 135–136. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Also available in English translation at “Letter of Rabbi Isaac Zarfati,” TurkishJews.com, accessed [date], http://turkishjews.com/history/letter.html.
¹³ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 239-245.
¹⁴ On Mehmed II’s assumption of the title Qayser-i Rûm and the Ottomans’ claim to Roman imperial succession, see Mark David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021), esp. chap. 1
¹⁵ İnalcık, "Policy of Mehmed II," 231-233.
¹⁶ Ibid., 240-242.
¹⁷ Ibid., 243-246.
¹⁸ On the demographic reshaping and repopulation of Istanbul after 1453, see Halil İnalcık, “The Policy of Mehmed II toward the Greek Population of Istanbul and the Byzantine Buildings of the City,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23 (1969): 229–249
¹⁹ Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, “Fratricide in Ottoman Law,” Belleten 82, no. 295 (2018): 1013–1046, esp. the text of Mehmed II’s kanunname.
²⁰ Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95–97.
²¹ Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, “Fratricide in Ottoman Law,” Belleten 82, no. 295 (2018): 1013–1046, esp. the text of Mehmed II’s kanunname.
²³ Ibid.
²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ On Mehmed III’s execution of nineteen brothers and contemporary shock, see Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, “Fratricide in Ottoman Law,” Belleten 82, no. 295 (2018): 1013–1046; and Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95–97
²⁶ On Ahmed I, Mustafa I, and the shift to kafes and seniority, see Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 176-178.
²⁷ For the contrast with contemporary "liberal" failures of modus vivendi, see later case studies in this volume on the EU, Northern Ireland, and India..
ROGER WILLIAMS VIGNETTE (COMPLETE DRAFT)
Palimpsest and method
Roger Williams offers, more than any other figure in this chapter, a rare chance to watch Tier-2 convictions, Tier-1 virtues, and radical contingency interacting in "real time." His thick eschatological claim that no visible church has divine warrant in the present age never softens, yet it is precisely that Tier-2 judgment, combined with exile, rescue, and temperament, that enables an unusually far-reaching practice of soul-liberty in Rhode Island.
Over four centuries Williams has become a hermeneutical palimpsest, onto which very different projects have been written. He appears as: the troublesome Puritan heretic banished from Massachusetts Bay; the founding "saint" of Rhode Island and architect of American religious freedom; a proto–Bill of Rights liberal; a theorist of "mere civility"; and a Baptist or evangelical prophet of soul-liberty. These layers are not mutually compatible, yet each can point to some of his words and deeds.
Modern interpreters fall roughly into three clusters. Philosophical universalists, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, prize Williams as an early expositor of equal respect for conscience whose arguments, she suggests, "follow even if we leave aside the religious doctrines," aligning him with Kantian dignity and Rawlsian pluralism. Historical contextualists such as Edwin Gaustad and Edmund Morgan insist that he is a "God-intoxicated" seventeenth-century Separatist shaped by millennial eschatology and English church politics, not a free-standing liberal. Teresa Bejan's "mere civility" reading offers a bridge: Williams as a realist of low-level coexistence who allows harsh speech so long as people do not kill or banish one another.
The vignette here takes a different angle. It treats Williams as a case where a very thick Tier-2 world—apocalyptic Protestantism, Seeker ecclesiology, biblical typology—combined with radical contingency and a distinctive character to activate a narrow but uncompromising Tier-1 lane: the state must not touch "soules" and "consciences" in matters of faith and worship. The method is a word↔deed integrity test: what he actually writes in The Bloudy Tenent and his prefaces, and what he actually does in Providence, London, and Rhode Island, are read together to see how far that one radical lane is carried in practice.
Tier-2 core and Milton as counter-case
Williams's doctrine of liberty of conscience does not arise from a general love of "freedom" in all domains; it is the consequence of a specific Tier-2 judgment about the present age. In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), he repeatedly turns to Christ's parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13. The servants want to uproot the tares (false believers), but the householder forbids them because their roots are intertwined with the wheat; Williams glosses this to mean that in the "field of the world," attempts to extirpate error risk destroying true believers as well. The civil magistrate is precisely that over-zealous servant: unable to see hearts, he must not wield the sword in matters of doctrine or worship.
From this, Williams draws a sharp jurisdictional line. The magistrate's power is "God-ordained" but strictly for "bodies and goods," not for "soules" and "consciences." Earlier "two kingdoms" and "two tables" distinctions are radicalized: the state simply has no authority over the First Table (idolatry, blasphemy, worship); it may punish theft and murder, but not heresy or false religion. By the late 1630s he has become a Seeker: he leaves the Church of England, then Congregationalism, then his brief Baptist experiment, and dies refusing to join any visible church, convinced that since Constantine the church's purity has been fatally compromised and no valid apostolic commission exists until Christ's return. The theological vacuum is real: all visible churches are provisional and mixed; only God can finally judge their errors at the Last Day.
John Milton, a close contemporary and friend in London, provides a revealing counter-case. Milton shares Williams's diagnosis that the church has been corrupted since Constantine; he too denounces prelatical structures and resists state-imposed uniformity. Yet from similar premises he draws the opposite interim strategy. In Areopagitica he presents truth as "torn into a thousand pieces" and scattered; the point of a free press and a revolutionary state is to gather those pieces, using censorship against "Papists" and suppressing doctrines deemed politically dangerous. Milton lends his pen to Cromwell's regime as Secretary for Foreign Tongues and defends regicide as an act of godly justice; Williams, by contrast, insists that any attempt to "force" religion usurps Christ's prerogatives and "stinks in God's nostrils."
The timing matters. In the 1644 Bloudy Tenent prefaces—before Charles I's execution and before Cromwell's Protectorate—Williams is already telling Parliament and the "courteous reader" that Christ arms his followers only with persuasion and love, not "swords of steel," and that coercion in religion produces hypocrites, not saints. When he returns to London in 1651–54, Milton is firmly installed in the revolutionary regime and Cromwell is ascending; Williams tutors Milton in Dutch and uses his "friends in high places, and Cromwell in the loftiest of them all," as Gaustad puts it, to defend Rhode Island's charter against Coddington. Yet he does not recant his earlier critique or endorse the Commonwealth as a nursing father of the true church; instead he lobbies a regime he regards as spiritually dangerous in order to preserve a small haven where no magistrate will wield the sword in religion. The Tier-2 core remains intact; what varies is his Tier-1 prudence and tact in pursuing limited ends under unfriendly structures.
Milton's path shows that Williams's theology does not entail his politics. The shared premise—Constantinian corruption and a lost true church—permits both a Cromwellian "godly state" strategy and a Rhode Island "lively experiment" strategy. Understanding why Williams took the latter, more radically non-coercive path requires turning to contingency and character.
Contingency, temperament, and weak agency
Three elements converge in Williams's life: a Tier-2 theological vacuum, radical moral luck in the "winter woods," and a distinctive temperament shaped by but not reducible to his piety. Without all three, Bloudy Tenent and the Rhode Island charter would almost certainly look different.
First, the theological vacuum: by the late 1630s Williams has concluded that no existing church possesses valid apostolic authority; all visible churches are "mixed" and fallible, and Christ alone will restore the true church at the Second Coming. This deprives magistrates of any credible claim to enforce God's will; if no church can certify who is truly in the right, then no civil authority can punish heresy without risking violence against the unknown elect.
Second, moral luck and intercultural encounter. Williams's curiosity about and respect for Native Americans predated his banishment—he had already studied their language, traded with them, and argued (among the charges leading to his exile) that Natives were the "true owners of the land," grounding this claim in Acts 17:26: "Of one blood God made him, and thee, and all." These Tier-1 dispositions (intellectual curiosity, openness to difference, epistemic humility) were cultivated within his intense biblical study and theological reasoning, not independent of them.
Banished from Massachusetts in the winter of 1635–36, Williams was "sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean," until he found, as he later wrote, that "the barbarous heart of the wild Indians" proved more compassionate than his countrymen. Wampanoag and Narragansett neighbors saved his life, sheltered him, and later sold him land on which to found Providence. He formed decades-long friendships with sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, learned Narragansett well enough to produce A Key into the Language of America (1643), and earned such respect for his intercultural work that Cromwell, during their 1651 London meeting, asked Williams to discuss the Natives and his findings.
In A Key he noted with evident wonder: "It is a strange truth that a man shall generally find more free entertainment and kind quarters amongst these Barbarians, than amongst thousands that call themselves Christians." This "strange truth" posed a theological problem Williams wrestled with—at times speculating whether the Natives might be the "Lost Tribes of Israel." But the lived experience resisted easy incorporation: those his culture called "heathens" practiced forms of justice, mercy, and hospitality his "Christian" persecutors had denied. The theological structure (wheat and tares, no true church until Christ's return) was already in place, but the intercultural experience made the soul-liberty principle existentially compelling: if God's grace could work through the "Indian," then magistrates, who cannot see hearts, had even less warrant to coerce conscience. Civil peace (respecting bodies and goods) was possible among people of vastly different souls—a lesson learned through dependence on and friendship with the Narragansett that became the foundation of Rhode Island's experiment.
Third, temperament and internalized virtues. Contemporary testimony and his own letters depict a man both stubborn and sociable, strongly committed to truth as he sees it but unusually willing to maintain relationships with those he regards as deeply mistaken. He valorizes patience, meekness, honesty, and a refusal to force the conscience even of enemies; he spends long hours in conversation with Native leaders, quarrels with and yet protects Samuel Gorton, and in old age rows himself across Narragansett Bay to debate Quaker leaders he considers doctrinally "filthy." These Tier-1 traits—epistemic humility about who is saved, openness to alterity under moral luck, a disciplined refusal to coerce, and an ability to cooperate tactically with opponents—shape how far he pushes the non-coercion logic his Tier-2 commitments allow.
Against Milton as counter-case, the pattern is clearer. Both men share the Tier-2 premise of a corrupted church and a deferred true kingdom; both reject Laudian establishment. Only Williams, however, is driven into literal dependence on "heathens," given prolonged cross-cultural contact, and endowed with the particular mix of patience and sociability that leads him to defend the conscience of people he finds abhorrent. Milton's world remains European and textual; Williams's is also ethnographic and intersocietal. The theology enables his lane; the contingencies and character determine its breadth.
Rhode Island, word↔deed integrity, and limits
Williams's words sketch a polity where the soul's quest for God is inviolable; his deeds in Rhode Island show both the depth and the narrowness of that radicalism. After founding Providence on land purchased from Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi, he travels to England in 1643–44 and secures the "Providence Plantations" patent, which authorizes the towns to govern themselves "by such a form of civil government as by voluntary consent of all or the greater part of them shall be found most serviceable." Under this vague but generous grant, the 1647 code declares that "all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God," so long as they keep the civil peace.
His later "ship of state" letter casts this in a vivid metaphor. A ship at sea carries "Papists, Protestants, Jewes and Turkes"; the captain may command obedience in civil matters—preventing mutiny, punishing theft and violence, compelling necessary work, even using "chains and whips" to preserve safety—but may not compel or forbid any passenger's prayers or worship. Bodies and conduct may be constrained; souls may not. Here the Tier-2 eschatology and jurisdictional line become institutional design.
The word↔deed integrity is unusually tight in this lane:
- In Bloudy Tenent and later tracts he insists that "all men of all Nations and Countries, Jewes, Turkes, Papists, Protestants… ought freely and peaceably to enjoy their own Judgements, and Consciences in matters of Religion," with the magistrate barred from "intermeddling" in such things. Rhode Island's patent and 1647 code encode "full liberty in religious concernments" and leave the content of worship to each person and group.
- He explicitly names "Pagans, Jewes, Turkes" among those whose consciences must not be coerced, and argues that forcing anyone—even an atheist—to swear religious oaths constitutes a profanation of God's name. In practice, Rhode Island becomes a haven for Anabaptists, Quakers, Jews in Newport, and others "distressed for conscience," and Williams consistently opposes importing Massachusetts-style persecution.
- He portrays the state as a "non-religious ship" whose officers enforce only civil peace; the actual arrangements he defends confine magistrates to the "Second Table" offenses of theft, violence, and disorder, not idolatry or doctrinal error.
The Quaker case is especially revealing. Seventeenth-century Quakers often engaged in disruptive prophetic performances: entering meetings half-naked, interrupting sermons, denouncing ministers, smashing symbolic objects. In Massachusetts such acts prompted whippings, brandings, and executions; in Rhode Island they prompted irritation but not legal persecution. Williams loathed Quaker theology and wrote a long, bitter attack in George Fox Digg'd out of his Burrowes (1676), yet he did not demand their expulsion or punishment. Late in life he rowed across Narragansett Bay to hold multi-day public debates with them, treating argument as witness rather than as a prelude to civil sanction.
This history undercuts "mere civility" readings. Quaker behavior would fail almost any minimal civility test, yet Williams opposed using the civil sword against them; their inclusion did not depend on any agreed standard of tone. He never offers a theory of civility thresholds or sanctions; "civil peace" remains a generic common-law phrase, stretched in practice to preserve liberty of conscience even when conscience produces incivility. What constrains is not civility but an absolute refusal to "rape" the soul.
At the same time, the Rhode Island record reveals limits. Politically, the colony remained fragmented: Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick often behaved like semi-autonomous city-states, with factions leaning toward Massachusetts, Coddington's quasi-magisterial island regime, or Gorton's radical Warwick experiments. Williams's formal leadership was intermittent; he served as president only from 1654–57 and more often as mediator and envoy than as a controlling party boss. His non-coercion principle was one force among others, not an undisputed orthodoxy. Economically and militarily, Rhode Island was weak; its relative freedom from persecution owed as much to overlapping claims and limited enforcement capacity as to theology.
Morally, his absolutism is narrow. He never extends the "infinite sanctity" he ascribes to the soul's relation to God into a general theory of rights across domains. He accepts conscription for defensive wars, taxation, civil punishments for bodily crimes, hierarchical gender and social roles, and, with evident discomfort, some forms of servitude and slavery. After King Philip's War he participates in or acquiesces to the enslavement of Native captives, seeking to mitigate and time-limit such servitude but not condemning it as a violation of the same inviolable principle that makes religious coercion an abomination. In this sense, he is "radical in one lane, conventional elsewhere": the soul's quest for God may not be coerced, but the body and property remain subject to a range of coercions a Kantian dignity framework would at least problematize.
Historical and Genealogical Williams
Later traditions have written their own layers over Williams's one radical lane, creating what might be called a "genealogical Williams" distinct from the historical figure. This genealogical Williams has proven extraordinarily productive in shaping ideas of liberty and rights—even as it extends Williams's arguments well beyond the domain he himself applied them.
By the eighteenth century, The Bloudy Tenent circulated alongside Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, and the writings of Voltaire and other philosophes. Williams's texts—whether directly or through intermediaries—became part of the repertoire from which Anglo-American writers drew when articulating "liberty of conscience" and "rights of man." There is a structural family resemblance between Williams's core move and later rights language: both draw a hedge around some aspect of human standing, claim this hedge is prior to and limits political authority, and deploy moral rhetoric of "rape," "usurpation," or "tyranny" when that limit is crossed. Williams's hedge is theological and domain-specific (the soul's relation to God); Locke's and Jefferson's are more anthropological and expansive (natural rights to life, liberty, property). Yet the underlying shape—a sphere into which no magistrate may reach—made Williams's arguments especially susceptible to transposition.
Several kinds of creative and selective appropriation occurred. Liberal Enlightenment transposition took Williams's insistence that "no man should be forced to worship... against his own consent" and extended the logic from "worship" to "speech," "press," "assembly," and eventually more general "liberty." Evangelical transposition took his defense of conscience and voluntarist faith and recast it as a protective hedge around "the church" against secular or rival religious interference. In both cases, later actors did what creative traditions often do: they selectively appropriated a powerful argument from one domain, recognized its latent moral force, and extended it into new domains the originator had not explicitly considered.
These extensions were historically transformative. The liberal–republican line from Williams to Locke to Jefferson to the First Amendment helped entrench ideas of "first freedoms" and "inalienable rights" that continue to shape constitutional orders. The Baptist/evangelical line made "religious liberty" a central watchword in American struggles. Yet Williams never said "all men are born with inalienable civil and political rights" in the Lockean–Jeffersonian sense. He never formulated a general human-rights doctrine encompassing property, gender, or political participation. He never joined an abolitionist movement or articulated a comprehensive egalitarianism.
What he did do was argue, with relentless theological force, that coercing the soul's quest for God is a crime against God and man, and live that argument out—unevenly but recognizably—in his dealings with Natives, Gorton, Quakers, and fellow colonists. He thereby provided later generations with a lexicon and structure (soul-liberty, rape of conscience, hedge between magistrate and spiritual matters) that could be lifted out of its original frame and set to new uses. If the historical Williams drew a hedge only around conscience, the genealogical Williams helps explain why later generations came to draw hedges around bodies, property, speech, and political personhood as well. The hedges are not the same, but they are cognate—and this is how ideas often travel through history: creative appropriation that is productive but not faithful to the originator's intent.
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