Anthropology source of problems, says Moscow Patriarch

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Most Western reporting of the speech of the Patriarch of Moscow to the Council of Europe has ignored the main thrust of it, and the deeper questions raised, and concentrated entirely on the issue of sexual morality. Perhaps this reflects the Western obsession with sex. For those who find such things irresistible, there’s a fuller report here.

But most of reporting completely ignores what the Patriarch said about other aspects of morality, such as economic morality — perhaps because the Western capitalist press does not like to see its gods criticised

Many societal problems have no solution unless human person, state power, and nation as a whole are subject to moral evaluation. For example, in Russia and many other European countries – both Eastern and Western – the gap between the rich and the poor is growing while any idea of social justice is blurring. In Russia, our church has many times called to discuss the miserable condition of millions of honest workers whose very few compatriots are extremely rich and glaringly extravagant. We are glad to see this initiative supported by many societal and political forces today. We can see that preconditions for proper economical and political decisions are already there.

Some of the reports twisted what the Patriarch said to imply that he said the opposite. The Daily Telegraph report implied that the Patriarch said that Christian morality and human rights were somehow opposed to each other, and led at least one blogger to understand it in this light, whereas in fact he said that the notion of human rights in Europe had grown from Christian morality.

But central to what the Patriarch said was the following:

Recently, the Council of Europe has made some new, unprecedented steps towards bridging with religious communities. In our sight it is the long-awaited response to many calls of religious leaders. Understanding of human person could become an important theme for such a dialogue since it is around anthropology that many problems and sometimes even conflicts arise between faith traditions and secular humanism.

There has been little notice taken of that, and little discussion of it. The central question, the point at issue, is the anthropological question: What is Man?

Sex is part of it, of course, because man is a sexual being. From the Christian point of view God made man male and female. But it is at that very point that we see the clash of anthropologies, as there is one school of thought that insists that the word “man” should be used only for the male of the species. As the sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger point out,

Sexist language is an invention of the feminist movement… Taken literally (it) is a theory that elevates infantile misunderstandings to the level of hermeneutics. But it would be a mistake to take this literally. It matters little, in the final analysis, that here is a theory of language that rests on little or nothing beyond the emotions of the theorists. What matters a lot is that the theory legitimates a linguistic offensive that is part of a general political strategy. In this strategy, every masculine pronoun purged from a text, every insertion of ‘person’ as a generic suffix, constitutes a symbolic victory in the larger struggle.

As a language pedant and former professional editor, I like that, but the question actually goes far beyond that too. The main significance of the war against the inclusive use of “man” is that it is an attempt to deprive us of the very language in which a Christian anthropology can be expressed.

One of the questions, based on anthropology, that the Patriarch raised was:

Technological progress calls us to look at human rights anew. The believers have their say in the issues of bioethics, electronic IDs, and other technologies that concern Christians. Human being should remain what he or she is without becoming a commodity or a fully controlled element in an electronic network or a subject for laboratory experiments or a cyborg. That is why science and technology cannot be estranged from the moral evaluation of their goals and fruits.

The question of anthropology, the nature of the human person, is central to this. One of the questions arising from it is the question of deriving morality from neuroscience, which I have discussed more fully at Notes from underground: Consciousness of absurdity and the absurdity of consciousness. One of the features of that debate, in my experience, is that those who claim to derive morality from neuroscience almost completely misunderstand the sources of Christian morality. They believe that Christian morality is based on the notion of punishement in a future life. But Patriarch Alexey has drawn attention to the real source: anthropology, that is, the Christian belief about the nature of the human person.

You may not agree with everything the Patriarch said, but if you disagree, then at least disagree with what he actually said, rather than the distortions of the Western media. You may find the full version of his speech here.  The translation  is not the best, but it is understandable.

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Filed under Christianity, human rights, moral regeneration, religion

Tags: anthropology, Europe, homosexuality, human person, human rights, humanity, man, moral regeneration, Orthodox theology, religion, sexual morality, ubuntu, worldview