Life's Inviolability at the Center of Morality

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

I have finished reading Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. It's a small one, but a great one. To me, the axis around which the whole thought of the book pivots is that of the inviolability of human life.

It it thus a book which even nonbelievers can seek sustenance in.

In fact, the book is aimed more at atheists and agnostics than at believers. The Holy Father argues that atheism contains a fatal flaw: in opposing religious dogmatism, it is itself dogmatic. Agnosticism likewise stumbles over the impossibility of carrying out in practice its theory that one can and should sidestep the question of God's existence as undecidable. When push comes to shove — as it does at every instant of our waking life, the pope points out — we have to decide on moral commitments that, ultimately, find their roots only in God's self-revelation.

Take the notion of the inviolability of human life. Under most circumstances, it sounds good to even the most confirmed non-believer ears, the assertion that no human life ought to be taken by human hands. But without God in the philosophical picture, the principle slips through our fingers like a soap bubble, squirting out in the general direction of a supposed "right" of individuals to free self-expression and personal autonomy. This is the basic "right" which we enshrine today in our secular, post-Enlightenment Western culture.

Thus, when the "right to life" of a human fetus impacts upon the "right to privacy" of a pregnant woman contemplating abortion, the latter wins.


The secular governmental program of "rights" protection quickly becomes much like spin-balancing a tire. In spin-balancing a wheel with a tire on it, the wheel is mounted on a machine that rotates it at high speed. If it wobbles, the machine is stopped and a weight is hammered into the rim. Spun again, the wheel may still wobble ... calling for another weight to be hammered in. Eventually, after enough weights, maybe no more wobble.

Unless, that is, the wheel was originally mounted off center on the machine. Then there's no amount of weight whose judicious application can de-wobble it.

In human culture, when the once-axial idea of an inviolable life given by God to each person, no matter how puny and weak, squirts over into the secular domain, we find ourselves placing individual autonomy rights in the middle of our moral order ... not guarantees of life's sanctity and inviolability.

The wheel of the culture — and the hub of its guiding moral philosophy — is accordingly mounted off center. The neverending secular program of adding weight after weight to society's moral hub to try to get the cultural rim in proper balance becomes a lost cause.


Building our moral house on the foundation of radically free individual self-expression is building it on quicksand. The chimera of "I'm OK, You're OK!" all too quickly turns into "I'm suing you and, what's more, I'm going to slime your name all over the Internet, you self-serving snake!"

You can't balance out self-serving with more self-serving. An ethos of serving others is the only way to spin-balance society. But service to others can only be grounded in seeing their lives as being as sacrosanct as our own ... seeing other persons through the eyes of God, as it were. Ignoring God's affirming gaze, said in scripture to be cast upon us all without exception, gives us no reliable basis for squelching self-serving attitudes and taking the wobble out of our secular culture.


This is why the pope invites nonbelievers to opt to live their life as if God exists. For them to make God a postulate of their moral lives — not necessarily a provable fact, simply a starting point for moral discourse and action — would help get our culture back on center.

I invite all nonbelievers to think deeply about this.