The Sacredness of the Person
There is no religious idea to be grasped apart from history; but there is also nothing historical that is not also more than historical. -Ernst Troeltsch
Human rights are a contested concept in the modern age. Many thinkers today, such as Samuel Moyn, hold that modern human rights originated in Eurocentric (and conservative Christian) conceptions of what the dominant social order should be and that modern human rights are divorced from their revolutionary origins in the French Revolution to serve conservative ends. From a more postliberal angle, like that of Alasdair MacIntyre, human rights are seen as products of liberal enlightenment thought. In MacIntyre’s view, they are at odds with the classical Christian tradition of understanding how we relate to one another politically.
Hans Joas’s book The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights serves as a counter to the arguments that human rights are particularist creations that work against the cause of social justice or that their modern existence is a purely Enlightenment-era creation. According to Joas, the modern generation of rights comes from what he refers to as the “sacralization” of the person. Modern human rights are neither completely derived from Christian natural rights nor from Enlightenment accounts of rights; rather, Joas makes a case that, while the spirit of Enlightenment thought was one of the reasons accounts of modern human rights emerged, it was by no means necessary for their emergence. The idea that an anti-religious Enlightenment project formulated these rights as a purely secular account of how to co-exist in the twilight of religion doesn’t match the historical dynamics of the creation and institutionalization of modern human rights.
Joas argues that the real origin point of human rights in modernity is North America rather than Enlightenment-era Europe. Here, he follows Georg Jellinek’s work The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: A Contribution to Modern Constitutional History (1901). Georg Jellinek was a nineteenth-century Austrian constitutional historian and legal theorist renowned at the time for his contribution to the field of public law. In this work, Jellinek attempts to make the case that human rights had Christian roots but had been institutionalized and universalized for a world beyond Christendom. For Jellinek, all modern rights originated in the struggle for religious freedom. This, to him, was the genesis of legally establishing inalienable, inherent, and sacred rights of the individual.
Joas pushes back on this totalizing account of the religious roots of human rights, showing that Jellinek neglects to describe the concrete reality of the emergence of rights in France and the late development of religious freedom in the American colonies. In both cases, neither can be really said to reflect the underlying social forces by which the values of universal human rights emerged—in the context that these values were emerging from, they could not be taken to be products of an exclusively religious inheritance. He points out that an exclusive focus on religious rights misses the overarching process by which human rights came to be. The legal recognition of freedom of religion may be one of the first forms of universal human rights coming out of history, but it cannot be granted the exclusive role of driving the development of human rights. For Joas, only a dialectical approach between Enlightenment thought and Christianity is capable of grasping the real historical dynamics of the emergence of human rights within the European context. While human rights have been influenced by Christian practice, Christianity is hardly the exclusive reason the development of human rights occurred. Joas pokes holes in both the secularist and postliberal narratives of the emergence of human rights in modernity: neither completely religious nor completely secular, human rights emerged as a result of the interplay between religion and rationality. As opposed to a Weberian account of the development of human rights being a result of the “charisma of reason” (where reason leads modern individuals to derive accounts of secular rights), Joas argues that what has happened instead is a “sacralization of the person.”
The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci circa 1490
For Joas, the emergence of movements and declarations (from those in the eighteenth century to later, modern-day examples) that proclaim the importance of the individual and their rights are the result of the process of the “sacralization of the person.” The sacralization of the person, to Joas, is the development of impulses (some Christian, some secular) against the violation of the individual, slowly taking on universal significance for society as a whole. One of the examples he gives of this process at work is the progressive elimination of torture as a tool for criminal justice in Europe. Contrary to the Enlightenment narrative that torture was eliminated because it was illogical and barbaric (Joas references the case of Cesare Beccaria’s treatise “On Crime and Punishments”), the abolition of torture had multiple motives (both secular and religious) driving it—it was not simply the result of either secularist Enlightenment logic dispelling the “illogical” past or of purely Christian beliefs being put into practice.
Following Durkheim, Joas argues that impulses from the Christian tradition have led to a societal transformation in which a realization of the importance of the individual leads people (both religious and secular) to be especially attuned to the right to personal integrity. The emergence of the modern prison system is a result of the tension between the sacralization of the person and the fact that outrage about violations against persons—the need to punish those who violate the sacralization of the person—is present, with the countervailing factor that even punishment itself can become a violation of the sacralization of the person. Joas is no Whig, however, and he points out that while the sacralization of the person has become more commonplace in modern society, countervailing traditions and ideologies (such as fascism) compete with sacralization of other things (such as the nation-state, race, etc.).
Joas contends that the value commitments that support the overarching social dynamics of the sacralization of the person arise both in positive and negative experiences—both situations of human enthusiasm and finitude can lead to the emergence of value commitments that can reshape history. He uses both the postwar response to the Nazi regime as well as the emergence of the abolitionist movement as examples of negative experiences leading to the emergence of new values. The emergence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, came into being in reaction against the atrocities the Nazis and members of other fascist movements committed against various minority groups. Another example of negative experiences leading to value commitments is the abolitionist movement in the US. The abolitionist turn in America was driven by anti-slavery religious movements, an increasingly interlinked global economic system, and the emergence of a transnational sphere. These factors, combined with an increased awareness of the horrendous conditions of slavery, led to the process of the sacralization of the person, a turn away from the system of slavery.
Following Ernst Troeltsch, Joas discusses the emergence of values in history. Joas is unsatisfied with Kant, Hegel, or Marx’s accounts of how values are developed or how they are to be justified as objective in light of the historical process. Rather than using history to argue for the relativity of all values and beliefs, as Nietzsche did, Joas develops a theory of “affirmative genealogy” which defends the possibility of the genesis of values in history. He uses this method of affirmative genealogy to argue that the emergence of human rights in history is the result of absolute values reshaping how people act and see the world. For Joas, the institutionalization of human rights in the twentieth century is an example of how value commitments in history can go through a process of value generalization—what he refers to as traditions turning to an abstract understanding of their content and becoming expressible in universal form. The intellectual and cultural diversity in the emergence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Joas argues, is a demonstration of this value generalization in practice.
Book of Divine Works, Part 1, Vision 2: The Cosmic Spheres and Human Being by Hildegard von Bingen in 1230
Joas’s work of affirmative genealogy helps us realize that the process of values emerging out of history cannot be reduced to a simple story of choosing between secular and religious narratives of the past. Neither the past nor the present has ever truly been “secular” or “religious.” Rather, the dynamics of history are much more complex. Modernity is a cultural synthesis between the values of the past and the concrete historical conditions we find ourselves in today—it cannot be divorced from the long strand of tradition we find ourselves connected in, and to argue otherwise is to divorce humanity from the values that provide our life meaning. The sacralization of the person continues even now, and as we see movements for social justice rise up, one will notice that the fundamental roots of these movements is to defend the “sacredness” of the person from oppression and destitution. These movements are not purely a product of the modern world—they are a result of the dynamics of sacralization shaping our world, from pre-modernity to now.
Sharon Kuruvilla is a Toronto-based writer with a focus on theology, East Asian politics, and international relations.