The Desecration of Man

Introduction

The Madman and the Messiah

• What is man?
• Once upon a time in the West, the answer would have been easy: Man is a creature, made in the image of God who created him, and his life is to be ordered to those ends that this involves
• ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred
• having leaped over a line that was sacred to him, he beings to admire the fact that nothing is holy for him anymore; as if he feels an urge to leap over all legality and authority at once, and to revel in the most boundless and unbridled freedom, to revel in this thrill of horror, which it is impossible for him not to feel.
• surge of power he feels in breaking the rules
• morality should not be sought in virtue but rather in sin
• Transgression of that once considered sacred has become their primary task. And transgression of the sacred is exhilarating precisely because it makes us feel like gods, the creators of our own meanings and our own selves.
• Smashing old standards of decency and kindness rooted in the Christian ethics is fun, even compulsory, in order to appear authentic. On both right and left the playbook is the same
• connection between the loss of religious faith and the pending bankruptcy of Western culture.
• importance of a sense of the sacred to a healthy civilization
• “the fundamental, intrinsic reason for culture’s ongoing decline, its petering out, is its secularization.”
• most distinctive and problematic aspects of modern culture: the confusion of taste for truth
• modern notion of man - free and autonomous as demonstrated by his ability to transgress boundaries once considered sacred - has paradoxically reduced him to nothing. In desecrating God, man has ironically desecrated himself.
• having disposed of God - having killed him, Nietzsche’s phrase - they must now become gods themselves, forging their own values and their own meaning.
• A world with no Creator leaves the task of creation to us. We have to become self-creators.
• in its approach to all three areas - sex, reproduction, and death - modern culture aspires to godlike control over the limits, obligations, and ends that Christianity gave to those things, and in doing so, has desecrated man.
• We must choose today whom we will follow. Christianity’s Messiah or Nietzsche’s Madman. All else is nihilism.

One: What Is Man?

• To ask, “What is moral?” is to ask, “How should man behave?”
• The opposite, the man concerned only with his own private affairs (literally, “the idiotic man”) was inferior and not what a human being should be.

What is Man?

• Only man has the capacity to pose the question about his own nature and significance.
• personal variations on that single question: What is man?

Man as Divine Image Bearer

• God is not impersonal, morally indifferent force analogous to gravity.
• Creation is a free act and God would still have been God had he chosen not to create. Creation also has a purpose.
• Man as the divine image bearer is the mark of God’s ownership of the world, as he is to act as his vice-regent within it, carrying out God’s will, not acting in accordance with his own desires.
• man has purpose or ends that God has given him and it is his failure to act in accordance with those that precipitates disaster within the biblical narrative.
• in Christianity human beings have a supernatural end: that of intimate communion with God.

Man Without God

• We do not have the limits, the obligations and dependencies, nor the given ends that being made in his image connotes. We are born free, we are defined by our autonomy, and we are masters of our own destiny. We are to decide what limits and what ends we will respect.
• doomed to an existence that offered no real significance whatsoever.
• The refusal of God-given obligations, the transgression of God-given limits and the rejection of God-given ends is both a rejection of the idea that man is made in God’s image and a rejection of God himself.

Defining Desecration

• Made in the image of God, we are therefore made with a moral structure tailored toward a supernatural end: enjoyment of God in eternity, often referred as the Beatific Vision.
• Hi literally destroys the image of God.
• even thinking of another divine image bearer merely as an object or an instrument itself is an act of desecration.
• the language of desecration does imply intention
• To refuse limits, obligations, and ends that are understood to be imposed by God is to rise to godlike status oneself. It is a Promethean move that promises a feeling of power.

Dimensions of Modern Desecration

• First, desecration is involved in any move to eliminate human exceptionalism and turn human beings into merely one animal among others
• granting human babies no more rights than a newborn calf
• arguments for promiscuity or homosexuality based on the fact that it is natural and commonly found in other species.
• incest and cannibalism
• Second, desecration happens when one human being treats another as a thing or an object
• Pornography
• cultural expression of individual autonomy that rejects the notion of natural obligations toward others
• laws and social practices, for example, that do not prioritize the obligations of parents toward children, such as the legal and social culture that allows for no-fault divorce. It is also manifested in the IVF and surrogacy, where children become commodities.
• Christianity claims, human beings are made for ends that are given - natural ends such as friendship, love, marriage, and procreation, and supernatural ends such as love and worship of God
• more recent development of transhumanist ideology whereby the physical body and its natural limitations are something to be overcome.
• as transgenderism, or a guest for physical immortality, or the melding of the body with a machine in some way to enhance the strength or intelligence.
• notion of disenchantment does not go far enough in describing what has happened in modernity
• There is a delight being taken in the destruction.

The Return of the Old God?

• those who kill God, those who indulge in that greatest act of desecration, are obliged to become gods themselves and to desecrate his image again and again.

Two: Making a Path for the Madman

• The philosophers have not merely disproved God’s existence but they have metaphorically killed him.

The Social Imaginary

• centuries of Christian cultural dominance have not simply faded away but have been ecstatically torn down.
• what we believe and how be behave cannot be reduced to matters of argument or logic.
• Nietzsche’s Madman: He had come too early because the social conditions were not yet in place to make the popular imagination receptive to his argument. God was dead; the Enlightenment philosophers had killed him; but life went on much as before.

Who am I

• His “self” is communitarian, defined by the limits and the ends of the community to which he belongs and over which he has no significant control.
• Today time and space no longer have external weight and authority that they once possessed.
• Economies based upon new, productive technologies had no use for the old agrarian calendar. Time itself was transformed.

Technology

• It gives him physical strength and enables him to transcend his own limitations.
• Technology brings with it a sense of power.
• ancient Promethean move to Faust. Man’s technological brilliance gives him godlike aspirations.
• The more rapidly technology develops, the starker the difference in the way different age groups think of the world.
• The Industrial Revolution was the final death blow to the family as the place where workplace skills passed from generation to generation, a process that had begun centuries earlier.

Technology and Nature

• While other animals are creatures of instinct, hardwired to relate to their environment in instinctive ways, human beings do so with freedom and intention. We use our knowledge and technical abilities in ways that both transform the world and transform us.
• God is traditionally the one who sets limits
• what happens when technology develops to the point where human limits are not boundaries that define who we are but problems to overcome?
• Are we all cyborgs now?
• Enframing means that humans are in danger of seeing themselves now as much as raw material, to be used for ends that deny any intrinsic integrity to their being.
• Human beings are exceptional in their ability to develop and use technology. But does that very power not ironically bring with it the possibility of annihilating our exceptionalism?
• Is man at all significant? Yet unlike the latter, Pascal’s thoughts here terminate in fear and in a sense of loneliness, not praise and wonder

Technology and the Bod

• Technology, more than anything else, has transformed the world into a place of dramatic flux and constant change.
• My limits, my obligations, and my ends come down to my choice. I have to decide who I am. The “I” has been destabilized by forces beyond my control, because those limits, obligations and ends have all themselves been destabilized.

The Rise of the Expressive Individual

• when Luther pressed for his understanding of justification before God as being rooted in faith, he shifted the responsibility for salvation from the institution to the individual
• Christians now needed to know what they believed as individuals
• With the church fragmented by the Reformation, the quest for religious certainty, like the quest for human identity, moved inward.
• As the outer world became more fluid, the inner space became more important as a source of stability and continuity.
• the man who marries a woman simply because he wishes to satisfy his own sexual appetites is treading his bride as a mere means to an end. He is dehumanizing her by making her an object rather than seeing her as a subject or a person. And in doing so he also of course dehumanizes himself.

Three: The Hour of the Madman

Introduction

• liquefaction
• The Tech Bro mantra “Move Fast and Break Things”
• Technology encourages us to think of the world as a set of challenges to overcome or limits to be transcended.

The Transgressor as Hero

• Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
• the amoral antihero has emerged as a central figure in Western culture, defined by rebellion against social norms.
• Whoever must be a creator in good and evil - truly, he must first be annihilator and break values.
• “the Overman,” is the desecrater, the one who crosses cared moral boundaries.
• Karl Marx places a similar emphasis on the need to destroy religion, although for him the transgressor is not the Overman but the political revolutionary.

Art, Artists, ans the Social Imaginary

• Art has typically fulfilled communal functions, arising out of the shared values and practices of a society
• it was rarely ever directly iconoclastic
• In this world where religion lost both its institutional and intellectual authority, art and artists emerged to fill the gap.
• Reason unchecked by feeling and feeling unchecked by reason both lead to dehumanization.
• The move to complete subjectivity or anarchy is precluded by the assumption that there is such a thing as human nature and that it does have a moral shape.
• With this human nature gone, the task of the artist had to move from discovering and revealing meaning to creating meaning. The artist thus takes center stage and becomes a performer. His communal task becomes modeling self-creation, not connecting the audience to traditional values or to the transcendent.
• art had come for many to play the role once occupied by religion - that of providing a sacred, moral vision for humanity
• Art becomes nothing more than a rebellious performative gesture. IT does not elevate man; it points rather to his insignificance
• Social orders have traditionally been built upon sacred orders
• once a society makes its art into deathworks, pitted as they are against sacred order, its ability to justify its moral norms is eliminated.
• The spirit of our age
• It is the spirit that negates, the spirit that desecrates.

Theories of Negation

• What common vision do queer theorists, BLM activists, the radicals in the LGBTQ+ community, and the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah share? Nothing positive.

The Hour of the Madman

• our world makes us impatient with the idea of a given human nature.

Four: Endless Sex

• it is the sexual revolution, more than any other single thing, that has served to shatter traditional religion.
• sexual revolution has not only destroyed traditional, sacred sexual codes but has also objectified us all.

Sex and the Sacred

• Sex for Jews is clearly not merely one natural bodily function among others. It possesses powerful ritual significance. Even legitimate sexual activity requires special rite of purification afterward, while illegitimate sexual activity merits punishment, even death.
• Sex connects to one of the great mysteries of our existence: the creation of life itself. We might say that the sexual act gives men and women their most godlike, sacred power.
• Sex and sexual relationships were not private matters, of concern only to the parties involved.

The Perennial Power of the Erotic

• most creative force
• among the most destructive
• for how a society things about sex really connects to what society things it means to be human

The Sexual Revolution

• Once people started to believe their neighbors were routinely acting in certain ways, they were more likely to start acting that way themselves.
• Its functions were no longer seen as unitive and procreative. It became something that was primarily recreational.
• Technology made sex both safe and sterile (antibiotics, widespread access to contraception, legalized abortion)
• various media of pop culture preached an increasingly dominant message of sexual self-expression as both harmless recreation and necessary self-expression. Technology and entertainment turned sex from a matter of communal and sacred significance into one of personal, pleasurable recreation.

Sex and Politics

• It makes sense, for example, for someone to claim to be gay even if that person has never had a sexual experience. Sex is now something we are before it is something we do.
• Laws about behaviour are transformed into laws about identity. And that makes sex an explicitly political issue.
• Once society teaches us that our sexual desires are a fundamental part of our identity, then we crave public affirmation of those desires.
• Sexual identity must be celebrated.
• The message of our culture is simple: If you are not sexually active, there is something wrong with you. You are not liberated and you are not fulfilled.
• sexual desire has proved perennially powerful force within human culture. Sex sells because sexual desires are among the most potent feelings that we experience; it is therefore also easy to sell the idea that sex is a central component to our identity.

Sex as Politics

Sex as Recreation

• The free, liberated individual strives to be an agent with personal significance but ends up feeling like an object with no significance at all.
• Porn is merely the extension of the logic of sexual revolution pressed to its conclusion.
• Sex is quite literally turned into a commodity, as are the pornographic actors. They cease to be subjects in any meaningful sense but are purely instrumental to the sexual satisfaction of the voyeur.
• Pornography evacuates erotic desire of its particularity and turns love into lust.
• his desire is not for a woman but for the woman.
• love does not treat the other person as a means to an end but rather as an end in themselves.
• it also reduces human persons to objects, instruments, lumps of meat

The Sexual Revolution and Abortion

Redefining the Human

• Happiness is no longer construed in classical terms, as the pursuit and cultivation of virtuous life that has a given moral structure and telos. It is anything that makes one feel good.
• another tendency of expressive individualism in general and the sexual revolution in particular: the minimizing of denial of the moral nature of natural, physical relationships.
• The telos of expressive individualism is personal happiness.
• The utilitarian logic of abortion at the start of life is also the logic of euthanasia at the end of the life.

The Sexual Revolution and Sacred Intuitions

• sex cannot be reduced to just one human action among others but has an intrinsic quality that sets it apart.
• In a properly ordered sexual encounter, each party must freely give themselves to the other.
• Sex is intersubjective
• philosophy of the sexual revolution involves a denial of the special/sacred significance of the sexed human body.

Desecration and the Sexual Revolution

• the interest of each party being merely what they can obtain from the other.
• The logic is flawless, but the reality is far different.
• exchanges selfhood for money, reducing the value of the most significant of human acts to dollars and cents.
• once the sacred nature of the sex organs has been desecrated, the sacred distinction between male and female is desecrated too.

Five: What Is Man in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction?

The Work of Procreation in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction

• there is no area of human life that has traditionally made human beings more like gods than the creation of new life through sexual intercourse.
• generation of new, conscious life.
• procreation was powerful, godlike but also mysterious.
• analogy here with that other area of human creativity is most distinctive and mysterious: art.
• the ability to reproduce art on an industrial scale has transformed the significance of art itself. Once, works of art possessed what he calls an “aura.”

IVF, Surrogacy, and the Transformation of Man

• surrogacy: woman is nothing more than a womb, and the womb thong more than rental space.
• adoption is akin to a bridge across a river, respecting the structures and nature. IVF and surrogacy are more akin to the hydroelectric dam that treats the river as so much raw material.
• we have become gods with the ability to create life, but in the process we have turned ourselves into experiments in biochemistry.

IVF, Surrogacy, and Eugenics

• The natural parents have a natural responsibility toward the child. They are to care for him, regardless of the personal cost to their own comfort.
• Technology offers the promise of power over previously mysterious processes.

But Is This Desecration?

• technological culture treats human nature and human bodies as raw material, out of which something is to be made or manipulated.
• when technology takes control of reproduction, it also takes upon itself the right to decide what the telos of human being is.
• woman is a human being whose body is normatively tailored toward gestation.
• Once the teleology of the sexed human body is rendered negotiable, the question of gender becomes more urgent.
• Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant quietly replaced God.
• Technology has done that, most particularly in its transformation of the body’s reproductive function.

Conclusion

• reproductive technology strips the creation of human life of its aura.

Six: The Final Enemy

• Death is unbearable, and so we either hide it away or render ridiculous.
• If we cannot defeat death by eradicating it, then we can eat least control it by implementing it on our terms and at the moment of our own choosing.

The Perennial Presence of Death

• When a society changes its attitude to human mortality, a basic revision of what it means to be human is taking place.
• Something holy is being dismantled and our humanity reduced. And as death is removed from the realm of the sacred, our humanity is desecrated.

Negotiating the Boundary

Mortality and the Meaning (or Not) of Life

• only because life is finite that our experiences take on significance, as precious moments seized out of the jaws of the death.
• Cicero was right: No man is so old that he does not thing he can live another year.
• With no religious framework, death constantly threatens to destroy all possibility of meaning.
• What makes death so terrifying and outrageous is not death itself but the fact that, in the wake of the death of God, it seems to lack meaning itself and ultimately to negate the meaning of all other human acts.
• we respond to its stubborn reality with acts of denial - denial of its radical finality, denial of its inevitability, denial of its sovereignty over our lives

Ignoring Death

• The cult of youth that is so prevalent in modern Western society discourages us from thinking about death.
• even when faced with the reality of their own vulnerability, these people preferred to go to the theater to be entertained rather than to come to the church to hear the truth about life and death.
• divert us from what we fear most, our own mortality.
• Move starts and topflight athletes earn far more than the President of United States. The reason is that in reality entertainers do a more important job than the President: They keep the public’s mind away from mortality.
• Both Hollywood and healthcare have served to push death to the margins.

Sex, Death, and the Battle against the Body

• the Victorians put death on display and hid sex from view, we have done the opposite.
• Sexual intercourse, being the context for the creation of new life, is the moment at which human beings are indeed most distracted from their own mortality and most convinced of their immortal, godlike qualities.
• When the self is psychologized, then the body becomes raw material and natural limits become problems to be overcome where possible.
• If your brain tells you that you are gay, or that you are a woman trapped in a man’s body, then the problem is with the sexed nature and telos of your physical body.
• Death is the final proof of the unity of soul and body, and of our own nature as dependant creatures.

The Managerial Death Culture

• human dignity, in the expressive individualist world, is synonymous with autonomy.
• Death is no longer sacred. It is routine medical procedure that deals with the problems that animated lumps of meat encounter.
• intolerance towards imperfection
• Our modern medical brilliance has come to this: the downgrading of human lives.

The Religious Trivialization of Death

• Once, churches stood next to graveyards, and the weekly rituals of worship required we first pass by the reminders of our own mortality.
• If the life was worth celebrating, then the death can be only a devastating loss.
• The funeral and the graveside are not places to celebrate strength or to make ourselves the exception; they are places to acknowledge our weakness and our fragility and our common mortality.

Death as a Privation

• the closer we have been to the person who has died - the more the death deprives us of the future we had imagined for ourselves.
• His nonexistence is more than a personal privation for the father; it is an interpersonal, relational privation for the son.
• the fact that death hurts is in fact a good thing, because it points to a key truth of what it means to be human: We are not free-floating selves of the modern cultural imagination but rather beings who are made to exist in relationships with others who are persons, not objects or things. As with sex, so with death.

Seven: Nihilism Repacked or Christianity Redivivus?

Dawkins and Gender

Scruton and the Sacred

• The Christian faith depends upon dogmatic claims that are truly independent of such intuitions: for example, God as Trinity, human beings as made in his image, Christ as God incarnate, the Resurrection as historical reality.

Nihilism Repackaged

• “nihilism” topically means the rejection of all meaning and value.
• Nietzsche’s approach to life that sets forth a grandiose vision, whether aesthetic, moral, religious, or philosophical
• the highest values that human beings have had, such as truth, beauty, goodness - all these things that shape our moral and aesthetic lives - were rooted in a religious faith
• Dawkings wants some of the cultural fruits of Christianity without the pesky truth claims of the Christian faith. Nietzsche’s Madman exposed that opinion as untenable, even cowardly, in the late nineteenth century.
• not a nihilism that denies meaning so much as one that pretends there is meaning.

The Need for Consecration

• It is solved by acknowledging that Christianity is true and living accordingly.
• Creed, cult, and code.
• Code needs cult. The code and the cult only really make sense when grounded in the creed.
• The place where creed, cult, and code are properly connected is the place where human beings are not desecrated but consecrated. And where is this? It is in the church as worshipping community.
• in the church’s worship the true is manifested in the beautiful and thereby leads us to the good.

The Church and the Creed

• The Apostle’s Creed may be brief, but it captures rather beautifully the essential claims of the Christian faith. And those claims are ones of metaphysical and historical truth.
• humanist consumerism (take culture, leave the creed)
• particular eras raise particular questions
• Today, the struggle is over anthropology. “What is man?”
• deep moral reflection
• Protestants need to develop a rich anthropology of the kind Catholics already have in the work of John Paul II
• it also requires that the church catechize people in this anthropology

The Church and the Cult

Prayer

• When Christians pray, individually or corporately, they acknowledge in word and deed their dependence upon God and their obligations to him and to other people.
• “Give us this day our daily bread” - dependency upon God for all things, even those we do with our own hands.
• “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” - indicates the belief that we are not autonomous individuals but exist in relation both to God and to others, and that those relationships have moral weight.

The Whole Church Sings

• Music has until recently always been a matter of communal production
• key technological transformation of music … when human beings developed the ability to store music and detach it from its original performative context.
• Music has thus moved over time from being a matter of communal production to one of private consumption
• Modern music-delivery systems truly make the consumer think he is king, sovereign, an isolated, unencumbered individual.
• The church is the place where music is still a communal production
• The impact of this is incremental. Nobody attending a church just once is likely to leave transformed. But years of regular communal singing…

Dialogue

• paradox: My belief in my autonomy depends upon me being taught that by others.
• Christian worship understands that we are dialogically formed
• A good liturgy is also dialogical
• The dialogue depends upon the creed for its authority, even as the creed depends upon the dialogue for its imaginative power. If God is alive, he can speak to me in the worship service.

Teleology

• the marriage is not primarily about the individuals as individuals at all
• As human beings, we are creatures of ritual and not just words
• For human being the ritual of eating and drinking is more than juts ingestion of calories. It connects us to our humanity and to that of others.
• Taking food together at a table creates an intimacy between those involved.
• recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this one exclusive center of its life. In the postmodern world, all else must at best be decoration and more likely distraction.

The Church and Code

• As God cares for the weak and the vulnerable, so we are to do the same.
• key question to ask of any attitude, behaviour, medical procedure, or piece of technology is: Does this shape the social imaginary in a way that makes us treat others as objects or things or commodities, or does it encourage us to think of the mas persons make in the image of God?
• There is no quick fix here.
• we are playing the long game

Conclusion

• if desecration is the problem then a sentimental commitment to “cultural Christianity” is not sufficient to address it.
• renovation of the heart, redirecting it toward God… that only takes place in the context of the church, where humanity by creed, cult, and code can once again realize what being made in the image of God truly means.
• To repeat: The creed and the cult cannot be separated from the code
• Our chief end is to glorify God end enjoy him forever. Only when we realize that we will also realize what it means to be truly human here and now.

Postscript

• The questions “Who is God?” and “What is man?” re inextricable
• We have to accept Christianity on its own terms, or we have to become gods ourselves
• Christianity does not claim to be true because it justifies our cultural preferences and delivers the results we desire. It claims to be true because Christ, God incarnate, is risen from the grave.