Life in the Balance

Christianity, Not the Enlightenment, Provided the Foundation for Human Rights

The sanctity of human life is woven into the fabric of the Western moral tradition. The West’s high regard for human life is evident in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke writes that all human beings, as creations of “one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” possess an inviolable right to “life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Likewise, Jefferson states in the Declaration of Independence that God endowed all humans with “certain unalienable Rights,” including the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Kant, in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, proclaims that human beings have “intrinsic worth,” adding that they must be treated “as an end” and “not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.”

However, this emphasis on the sacred value of human life runs far deeper. Its origin traces to the Bible and the writings of early and medieval Christian theologians. As the late pastor Timothy Keller explains:

While it is popularly thought that human rights [including the right to life] were the creation of modern secularism over and against the oppressiveness of religion, the reality is that this concept arose … not after the Enlightenment but within medieval Christendom. As Horkheimer in the 1940s and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s recognized, the idea of human rights was based on the biblical idea of all people being created in God’s image.

Imago Dei & Incarnation

Two key biblical doctrines have shaped the Christian attitude to human life: the Imago Dei and the Incarnation. First, Christianity inherited the Old Testament tenet that God created man in his own likeness, granting him dominion over all animals, plants, and the natural world. Though man is inherently sinful in consequence of the Fall, the implication of the Genesis narrative is that human beings are the culmination of creation and are ultimately subordinate to no one but God. Man is qualitatively distinct and superior to other creatures. Each human being bears God’s image. Second, God assumed human form in the person of Jesus Christ and sojourned among humans on earth for the sake of the redemption and salvation of the human race. By taking on a human body, God elevated human worth and sanctified the human body and material world.

Early theologians took note of the implications. Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253) observed that God had become incarnated in Jesus Christ “so that human nature may be divinized.” Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) similarly maintained that God “deified men by becoming himself man.” Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose theology has influenced Western thought for centuries, argued: “He who was God became Man in His effort to make godlike those who were men.” Discussing the impact of the Incarnation on the conception of human beings, the 20th-century medievalist Colin Morris assesses that God’s choice to become man is “an affirmation of human dignity which could hardly be surpassed.”

The Rise & Fall of Human Valuation

Both Imago Dei and the Incarnation prompted Christian thinkers throughout the centuries to assert the intrinsic worth of human beings and to marvel at the dignity of the human body. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) stressed the sacredness and supremacy of man over creation:

For think not that stones, and stocks, and birds, and serpents are sacred things, and men are not; but, on the contrary, regard men as truly sacred, and take beasts and stones for what they are.

Echoing these sentiments, the theologian and mystic Gregory of Nyssa (335–c. 395) affirmed the uniqueness of man as created in God’s image:

The sky was not made in God’s image, not the moon, not the sun, not the beauty of the stars, no other things which appear in creation. Only you (the human soul) were.... Nothing that exists can measure up to your greatness.

Harking back to St. Paul’s statement that the human body is “a temple of the Holy Spirit” and anticipating Renaissance celebrations of the grandeur of the human body in art, Augustine in The City of God expresses fascination with human “appearance, and form, and stature.” He specifically points out the “marvellous nimbleness” of the tongue and hands, adding that all organs contribute to the body’s overall “beauty.”

The Christian esteem for human nature persisted into the medieval period, with the English scholar Adelard of Bath (1080–1152) who argued that man’s “gift of reason” sets him apart from beasts and compensates for his physical disadvantages. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), by common consensus the most important philosophical theologian of the medieval era in the West, hailed human beings as “the most perfect in all nature.”

The value Christian theology places on human nature scaled further heights during the Renaissance, so much so that the German-Canadian theologian Jens Zimmermann interprets Renaissance humanism as an extension of theosis—the Christian idea, as expressed by Athanasius, that “God became man, so that man might become God.” As is typical for Renaissance scholars, the Italian diplomat Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) placed humans at the center of existence:

The world and all its beauties have been first invented and established by Almighty God for the use of man [who]...rendered [it] much more beautiful, much more ornate and far more refined.

In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) exalts man as “the most fortunate living thing worthy of all admiration,” whose “rank” is “to be envied not only by the brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world.” In like manner, Mirandola’s contemporary Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) went so far as to ascribe divine powers to humans, contending that “man possesses as it were almost the same genius as the Author of the heavens.”

These exalted Christian views of human nature stand in sharp contrast with the degradation of man’s cosmic status in modern atheist thought. British philosopher Bertrand Russell and American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described the human race as “a curious accident in a backwater” and “a tiny twig on an ancient tree of life,” respectively. In the same vein, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg reduced human life to “a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents.” Richard Dawkins drew a somber picture of human existence, arguing that humans are nothing more than “machines for propagating DNA” in a universe where there is “no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

From Theory to Practice

The Christian emphasis on the worth of human life was not a mere theoretical concept. It had a revolutionary effect, helping to end, or at least reduce the scale of, barbaric practices prevalent in the ancient world, such as the killing of unwanted infants and the ruthless gladiatorial games. Infant homicide was commonplace in the Greco-Roman world and other ancient civilizations, including India, China, and Japan. So common was the phenomenon of infant killing that the Greek historian Polybius attributed Greece’s population decline to it.

Several ancient philosophers approved of this savage custom. In The Republic, Plato writes that state officials ought to dispose of “the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed.” Even the Roman philosopher Seneca, who otherwise held humanitarian views, wrote in a matter-of-fact tone that “unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.”

However, early Christians defied mainstream norms and strongly condemned abortion and infanticide as murder. The Didache, an anonymous early Christian treatise dated from the late first to early second century, enjoins Christians “not [to] murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” Reiterating this stance, the Epistle of Barnabas, a non-canonical text dated to around AD 130, reads: “You shall not slay the child by procuring abortion; nor, again, shall you destroy it after it is born.” Basil of Caesarea (330–379), also known as Basil the Great, branded women who aborted their pregnancies as “murderesses.” Influenced by Christian morality, the Roman Emperor Valentinian formally proscribed infanticide and abortion in 374, the first Roman emperor to do so.

Nowhere is the Christian regard for human life more manifest than in the early Christians’ fierce opposition to the Roman gladiatorial games. These “spectator sports” were extremely violent fights to the death between gladiators (often slaves, convicted criminals, or prisoners of war whose lives were deemed expendable) or between gladiators and wild animals. According to American historian William Stearns Davis, the games reflect “the pitiless spirit and carelessness of human life lurking behind the pomp, glitter, and cultural pretensions of the great imperial age.”

Christians rejected and boycotted these games, much to the disapproval of Roman pagans. In his book De Spectaculis (The Shows), the early Christian author Tertullian (160–240) decries these contests, stressing that “nothing which is peculiar to the shows has God’s approval” and that “they were instituted entirely for the devil’s sake.” He writes that Christians should feel aversion to these games and calls on believers to refrain from attending them, as they corrupt the soul and evoke corrupting sentiments like “frenzied excitement” and “temptation.”

The anti-gladiatorial attitudes of the early Christians eventually led the Christian Emperor Theodosius I to abolish these events in the East in the 390s while his son Honorius initiated the same step in the West in the early fifth century. In his analysis of the termination of gladiatorial contests, the 19th-century Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky says:

There is scarcely any single reform so important in the moral history of mankind as the suppression of the gladiatorial shows, a feat that must be almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian church.

Grounded in Christ

Along with the Greco-Roman intellectual tradition, Christianity constitutes one of the pillars of Western thought, and as such, its values have provided the foundation for much of Western morality. While Greco-Roman philosophy, especially Stoicism, contributed to the evolution of Western morals, Christian theologians in many cases reshaped and improved upon pagan values as seen in their explicit rejection of common ancient practices such as infanticide, abortion, and gladiatorial contests. The West has drawn its reverence for human life not so much from ancient philosophers or post-Enlightenment secularists but from the biblical vision of humanity as created in the image of God and the conviction that the Creator consecrated human life by taking on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.