Episode Details

In the year 1 BC, an ordinary, loving husband wrote home to his pregnant wife with a casual instruction: if the child is a girl, expose it. It was normal. It was legal. And it captures the world that reason and law had built — a world where the greatest minds in history looked upon the slave and the unwanted child and saw beings of lesser worth.

This is the story of the third pillar of the West, the one Athens and Rome could not raise: Christian morality, and the revolution it worked in the worth of the human soul. From the image of God stamped upon every person, to the staggering claim that God Himself became man and died a slave’s death, to an empty tomb that broke the power of death — and onward through the Fathers who drew out its meaning: Athanasius on the Incarnation, Gregory of Nyssa condemning slavery itself fourteen centuries before Wilberforce, Augustine on the two cities, and a pagan emperor confessing that the Christians out-loved his gods. Every word of “created equal, endowed by their Creator” was quarried here, and so was the standard that would one day burn slavery down. Three pillars now stand. One man still had to braid them into one.