The Sacredness of Human Life in a Desacralized World
by Dr. Donald DeMarco
1999
Let me begin with a personal anecdote. Some time ago, one of my students invited
me to speak to his Bible study group. He had been enjoying my philosophy course
and was confident that I would be able to elicit similar agreeable sentiments
from his colleagues. I was particularly grateful for the invitation. Teaching
philosophy can be frustrating for a Christian who would, on occasion, welcome
the opportunity to move beyond philosophy and discuss some of the insights
that are found in Revelation.
We met in a private home. I began by commending the students for studying
scripture and telling them how supremely important it is in life to be able to
know how to distinguish what is sacred from what is not. Obviously Sacred Scripture
is sacred, I pointed out. At that moment, and in need of offering an incontrovertible
example of a book that is not sacred, my eyes fell on a nearby Sears catalogue.
I proffered that the catalogue is an example of something that is not sacred.
My benign assumption proved false. The Bible students had not reached a
level of intellectual sophistication wherein the distinction between the sacred
and the profane meant anything to them. My relegation of the Sears catalogue
to the realm of the profane offended one of the students. "It’s sacred
to my father!" he snapped, rather indignantly.
What I hoped was going to be a learning experience for the students turned
out to be more of a learning experience for me. My offended student had effectively
derailed my presentation. Others in the group supported him. All values are relative.
It was impossible to get back on track.
Why were these students studying scripture, I wondered? Was it because
they happened to like it, the way my complaining student’s father happened
to like his Sears catalogue? It did not seem that they were cognizant of its
sacred quality, that it represented the word of God. Does not Heaven speak with
a more compelling voice than Madison Avenue? They did not convey the sense that
when one is in the presence of the sacred, one should have feelings of awe, gratitude,
humility, and dedication.
In our secularized society, the processes of desacralization are so advanced
that they easily capture the minds and hearts of students who are, ostensibly,
committed to its very resistance. An informal study group is a weak defense against
the penetrating power of secularization. To say that something is sacred primarily
because I like it is to obliterate any objective basis for distinguishing between
the sacred and the profane. It is to make me the source of sacredness and not
God. It is, effectively, to desacralize the sacred. It is to make equality of
feeling sacred and to make real sacredness unsacred.
If the sacredness of Sacred Scripture can be so easily desacralized, as
in the case of the Bible study group, how much more easily can the sacredness
of human life be similarly affected in the secular world! The prospect for the
possibility is most disconcerting.
There are psychological reasons for desacralizng the sacred. The more valuable
something is, even on a purely commercial level, the more we are obliged to care
for it. We go to great lengths to safeguard our valuables. We insure them, hide
them, guard them, and use them sparingly. The more valuable our possession, the
more nervous it makes us. Prudential’s "Rock of Gibralter" is
an image designed to ease our worries at the thought of losing something valuable
without receiving fair compensation in return. But if commercial valuables make
us nervous, the sacred should make us tremble. Our knowledge of the sacred causes
no end of anxiety, though fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. If we
profane what is sacred, we experience deep guilt; if we turn our back on it,
we are threatened with condemnation.
Psychologically, it is easier to function in a world of trivialities, though
only for a short time. A problem of immense proportions exists. A world of trivialities
quickly becomes boring. Ultimately it becomes meaningless. And since we are creatures
for whom meaning is far more important than convenience, the anxiety we experience
in the presence of the sacred is infinitely more preferable than the devastating
void we experience in its continuing absence. Our dilemma is this: in the presence
of the sacred, we tremble; but without any discernible relationship with the
sacred, we descend from boredom to despair.
Plato’s great dialogue, Euthyphro, is about two opposite tendencies:
one that is centripetal, seeking the heart of the sacred; the other, centrifugal,
that avoids it, seeking instead refuge in the ego. Socrates asks Euthyphro whether
things that are holy are holy (sacred) because the gods love them, or do the
gods love them because they are holy. Socrates, himself, is a seeker of wisdom
and believes that holiness is intrinsic to that which is holy. He wants to know
more about what is holy so that he can be guided by it. He judges himself to
be unwise. But he believes that through association with that which is holy,
we may begin to move in the direction of wisdom. Euthyphro, on the other hand,
is not interested in objective reality. He wants the power to confer holiness
on things by virtue of saying that they are holy. He is infatuated with his own
imagined powers. Socrates is ontocentric, Euthyphro is egocentric. The objective
reality of holiness is the topic of their debate.
The current debate about whether human life is sacred in itself or is sacred
only because someone says it is sacred - sacred in essence or by attribution
- is a reiteration of the dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro. But the new
context for the debate is the issue of active euthanasia. Those who want to take
matters of life and death into their own hands find it convenient for their purposes
to hold that concepts such as sacredness, sanctity, dignity, and so on, are not
descriptions but ascriptions. On the other hand, those who recognize that human
life is ineradicably sacred are content to serve life, and therefore have no
desire to destroy it. For them, sacredness describes human life.
The Socrates-Euthyphro debate also parallels the Medieval-Modern debate
concerning the meaning of things. Thomas Howard, in his critique of modern secularism,
Chance or the Dance?, states that, "the myth in the old age was that everything
means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything." To
the medieval mind, the lion was the king of the jungle and his kingliness reminded
us of the ruler of a kingdom who, in turn, reminded us of Christ the King. All
things were linked together analogically and everything was rich in meaning.
Man was made in the image of God and his life was sacred. From a moral point
of view, one could not strike against anything sacred. To do so constituted a
sacrilege. By contrast, the modern view is a perspective of dislocation. Nothing
means anything broader or richer than itself. A lion is simply a beast, a zoological
classification, and any relationship he bears with royalty is the result of wild
and misguided imagination. The modern world sees things in their naked individuality,
which is to say, without any particular meaning that goes beyond themselves.
The old myth was proclaimed in scripture, amplified and sustained in philosophy
and literature. In Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 15th century Oration
of the Dignity of Man we read a description of man that abounds in transcendent
implication: "man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the
familiar of the gods above him as he is lord of the beings beneath him; that,
by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his
intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless
unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the
very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David’s testimony but little lower
than the angels."
We find a similar experience of how the meaning of man reverberates with
God and the whole order of His creation in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: "What
a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form
and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension
how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! this quintessence
of dust"
The process of secularization in the modern world is at the same time a
process of fragmentation. As things become disrelated from any web of meaning,
they also become isolated. In this new perspective, it becomes difficult for
people to believe that anything could be truly sacred, for the concept of sacredness
presupposes an intimacy with the transcendent source of sacredness, which is
God. Metaphysics has been fractured, so to speak, and man is entirely on his
own. Nietzsche’s dictum that without God, everything is permissible, conveys
the haunting corollary that nothing has meaning (or that meaning is entirely
arbitrary).
If the old view of reality that includes the sacred is frightening, then
the new view that excludes it is terrifying. No matter how advanced the processes
of secularization are, we cannot function without meaning. And if we deny that
human life is sacred, then we ascribe new and arbitrary meanings to it. We cannot
fully emancipate ourselves from the old view that human life has meaning. We
retain an undismissable need to justify our tenuous tenancy in the universe by
replacing the notion of the sacred with virtually anything we can think of. Unfortunately,
each novel replacement introduces a deadly form of discrimination. We do not
want to expel everyone from the universe. But if we extend the right to live
only for the useful, the healthy, the mentally sound, and the financially solvent,
we withdraw it from the "useless eaters", the infirm, the mentally
unbalanced, and the poor. The new order believes it has liberated itself from
religious shackles, whereas it is denying more and more classes of human beings
their fundamental right to be.
The notion of "quality of life" is an arbitrary way of dividing
the human race into those whose lives are worth preserving and those whose lives
are not. This division, in some cases, is so clean and clear that it conforms
to a mathematical equation. Dr. Anthony Shaw, for example, a professor of pediatric
surgery and Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the American Pediatric Association,
has formulated a mathematical equation to differentiate those children who should
continue to live from those who should not. In his equation QL = NE(H+S), QL
stands for Quality of Life; NE for the Natural Endowment of the child (both physical
and intellectual); H for support that could be expected from the Home environment;
and S for help that could be expected from Society in the form of money, education,
and treatment.
The fact that NE and the sum of H+S are multiplied by each other (and not
added) insures that QL will be zero if either NE or (H+S) is zero. Thus, the
line of discrimination can be made clean and clear. As Shaw himself explains,
it does not matter how much (H+S) one might offer a microcephalic child, (H+S)
x 0 = 0. Conversely, a perfectly healthy child born to an unwed, drug addicted
mother who lives in a ghetto will yield the same zero Quality of Life, for NE(0)
= 0.
Manner, et al., in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, have
suggested that in addition to the "brain dead", the "irreversibly
demented", and those in a "persistent vegetative state", we might
also offer active euthanasia to the "pleasantly senile".
As the notion of the sacredness of human life falls into disrepute and
is replaced by various biological and sociological categories, it becomes increasingly
difficult for people to recognize man as a distinctive member of the animal kingdom.
In some circles, far from being "the paragon of animals", man is thought
to be inferior in certain instances to fitter members of the world of nonhuman
animals. Building on Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Evelyn Pluhar has
authored a lengthy work in search of reasons for favoring the "rights" of
nonhuman animals over those of "marginal human beings" (Beyond Prejudice:
The Moral Significance of Human and Nonhuman Animals, Duke University Press).
Reviewer Colin McGinn finds her book "exceptionally thorough, expertly reasoned,
and entirely convincing". There is nothing morally distinctive (let alone
sacred) about the class of human beings for McGinn. He writes: "Compare
a normal chimpanzee to a severely retarded human child unable to take care of
itself or to speak or to reason. Given that neither qualifies as a rational moral
being, capable of asserting its rights, why do we allow vivisection of the chimp
but not of the child? Surely, if moral significance attaches only to full persons,
then the child should be granted no more protection than the chimp, or the pig
awaiting slaughter." He adds: "Would you shoot retarded people because
they are encroaching on your food supply or messing up your back yard? Would
you kill and eat them because of the culinary pleasure to be derived? If your
answer is no, then you should return a similar answer in respect of animals."
Pluhar and McGinn argue that rights for human and nonhuman animals are
grounded not in personhood or rationality, but in "conation". By "conation",
they refer to a power of striving (from the Latin conatio, meaning "attempt"),
whether consciously or not, toward an end. It is "conation" and not
sacredness that is presumed to warrant continued life. And all conations apparently
are equal: "A dog’s desire to run free does not matter less to it
than my desire to enjoy a ballet performance matters to me." Nonetheless,
bestowing "rights" on animals and "liberating" them from
their inferior status to humans is not so much a bold strike for broadmindedness
and equality, but an insidious way of depriving some human beings of their right
to life, and an invidious form of discrimination that accords superiority of
some humans and nonhuman animals over other humans.
The one word that most often appears in pro-euthanasia rhetoric is "dignity".
According to the old myth, a human being has dignity because human life is sacred.
In other words, dignity results when the sacredness of life is concretized or
existentialized in the individual person. All human life is sacred, but the human
being has dignity. Moreover, dignity is an irremovable characteristic of the
person. According to the new myth, which can hardly dispense with the word, "dignity" is
both a transitory and external feature of the individual. Marya Mannes, in her
book Last rights: A Case for the Good Death, for example, states that euthanasia "is
simply to be able to die with dignity at a moment when life is devoid of it." Thus,
for euthanasia advocates, dignity is something we can lose. This means that it
is possible to be a human being and not have dignity. Presumably, the basis on
which human life is inviolable is not the fact that it is human life, but because
it has lost or is in danger of losing dignity. But "dignity" is merely
an ascription that is arbitrarily bestowed upon or withdrawn from a person. And,
given the pressure for euthanasia, the withdrawal of "dignity" can
easily be a verbal ploy to serve the ideology of the euthanasia movement. In
addition, the fact that people can confer and retract "dignity" by
fiat reintroduces a most pernicious form of discrimination that divides the human
race into those who have dignity and those who do not.
According to the new view, dignity is superficial. It is not a characteristic
of the person. It has no depth. Once sacredness was banished, it was inevitable
that interior dignity would also go. The picture of modern man shows him to be
without a soul. As T.S. Eliot describes him in his poem "The Hollow Men",
he is:
Shape without form, shade without colour;
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
For similar resaons, William Butler Yeats made his passionate cry that "Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
The truth about man, writes Pope John Paul II, is that man has dignity.
Furthermore, that dignity commands respect. And it is precisely the mutual respect
that human beings give each other on the basis of their respective dignities
that the foundation is established for respecting human rights and experiencing
human freedom. By harmonizing truth, dignity, and freedom, according to the Holy
Father, we secure the proper ground for morality.
We cannot live without meaning. The fact that human life is sacred and
that each human being has dignity provides a basis for meaning. The modern world
has sought to deny the sacredness of human life. But it has not denied it absolutely.
Rather, it has distorted it. It has not done away with the notion of sacredness
altogether. It has merely replaced it with relatively superficial notions such
as the "quality of life". It has not abandoned the notion of dignity,
but has enfeebled it by making it external and transitory.
The modern world is not at peace, however, with its new ethics. Though
the old view that acknowledged the sacredness of human life and the awesome responsibilities
that it implied was frightening, the new view which empties man of his interior
dignity and thereby deprives him of a life that has transcendent meaning is terrifying.
The euthanasia debate will not be satisfactorily resolved without a recovery
of the sacredness of human life as well as the exercise of love and courage which
are needed to live responsibly as human beings who are made in the image of God.
The reality that challenges us to be authentic human beings will always prove
more satisfactory in the end than the fantasy which, in promising us ease and
comfort, robs us of our soul.
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