The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights

5. Soul and Gift: The Human Being as Image and Child of God

140 5 Soul and Gift The Human Being as Image and Child of God The key thesis underlying the three historical-sociological discussions presented in this book is that we should understand the rise of human rights and the idea of universal human dignity as a process of the sacralization of the person. Inherent in this thesis is a rejection of all notions that this rise can be regarded as the product of a particular tradition, such as the Christian—a product that was more or less bound to emerge from the seed of tradition at some point in history. Traditions as such, I suggest, generate nothing. What matters is how they are appropriated by contemporary actors in their specific circumstances and amid the field of tension in which they find themselves , made up of practices, values, and institutions. Institutions and practices, however, have their own inertia, which may resist and correct actors’ deviations from the spirit they embody—but only up to a certain point. Institutions drained of their “spirit” can no longer be relied upon. We can easily find concrete examples of these propositions by examining the relationship between Christianity and human rights. There was a Christian justification for slavery. Christianity coexisted without too much trouble with torture, rejected the human rights declarations of the eighteenth century, and was even skeptical about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. We can also point to the other side of the coin, such as Christian engagement in the abolition of torture and slavery and Christian influence on and acceptance of the human rights declarations made from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. In all these cases, for individual Christians and sometimes even for a specific Christian community, it may have been clear what the Gospel demanded—but not to all of them, and certainly not independent of time and culture. If tradition is not a major factor in explaining human rights, we will still do well to take a closer look at it. But we must reverse perspective. 141 Soul and Gift While it is true that traditions generate nothing, they must relate in some way to any innovation. As a novel form of the sacralization of the person, the rise of human rights represents a challenge to Christianity —and to other religious and even to secular value traditions and worldviews—in light of which their adherents must inevitably reinterpret them. In the case of human rights, in the first instance such reinterpretation relates to the foundations of political and legal thought. Here the spectrum of possible reactions extends from radical rejection to complete appropriation, which may include the invention of a tradition that declares itself the true author of the new phenomenon.1 A few examples should suffice to demonstrate this. Catholic Christianity sharply rejected human rights in the context of its polemics against the French Revolution and associated persecution of the Church, but began to rethink its position during the period of fascism and Nazism . Philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, theologians such as the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray, and the spokespersons of numerous lay Catholic organizations played an important role in this rethinking process.2 This went beyond the political level, centering on the question of whether—as the magisterium long asserted—human rights must really be grounded in natural law or whether in fact the crucial element was a specific understanding of human personhood. This understanding was sometimes developed within the framework of natural law and sometimes pointed beyond it. At least in Germany, skepticism about possible proximity to (Catholic ) natural law determined the initial reaction to human rights on the part of postwar Protestant theologians. For them, just as justification in terms of natural law tends to overlook the thoroughly sinful nature of the human being—which has implications for his rationality —human rights and the basic rights enshrined in the constitution might appear as a “Magna Carta of human autonomy,” something unacceptable to Protestant Christians.3 This required the development of intellectual alternatives that emphasized the break with the Lutheran faith in the state or justified human rights in Christological terms. We find a similar spectrum of responses in other religious traditions .4 And philosophical schools went through a similar process. Jeremy Bentham, the classical representative of utilitarianism, initially referred to human rights as “nonsense upon stilts”—a view few 142 Chapter 5 contemporary representatives of this school would like to be...