ABSTRACT

Ideas about human nature and its relationship to the cosmic universe have generally come from an attempt to understand the principles and methods for which matter, form, time, body and soul serve their respective functions. Knowledge can be built from intuition, experience or general assumptions about the behavior of complex and simple phenomena in both time and space; suffice it therefore to say that ideas can come from anywhere. The notion of citizenship-as we generally conceive of it today-“is a derivative of the emergence of the nationstate, which, in turn, was a direct outgrowth of the medieval period” (Gawthrop and Waldo, 1984, p. 101). “Citizenship was a meaningful concept in the GrecoRoman period, but from roughly the 5th to the 6th centuries-from the fall of the Roman Empire; from the triumph of Christianity over classical paganism to the revolt of Protestantism against Catholic Christianity” (Hearnshaw, 1981, p. 19). “the idea of citizenship evolved into that which clearly resembles a transcendent ethics of noble civility” (Gawthrop and Waldo, 1984, p. 101). Because it “implied a close union with the ancestral soil and worship in the ancestral religion, these became the exclusive bonds with which communities were knitted together; and which, in their exclusivity, denied the alien and stranger full rights of participation” (Gorman, 1992, p. 6).