Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made is 86 pages that will change your life.
Readers of Mere-O know my ongoing fascination with O’Donovan, whom I regard as the best living theologian in the English-speaking world. After slowly digesting his trilogy on Christian ethics, I have finally turned to what is perhaps his most influential book.
Begotten or Made is a sustained critique of the eradication of nature in favor of technological mastery. This isn’t a full review–the book simply must be read and re-read in its entirety.
But in my favorite section, O’Don0van highlights that one of the central features of our age is that man is that the notion of ‘transcendence’–the mastery of matter by spirit–has allied itself with the scientific enterprise, such that when we make things the object of experimental knowledge “we assert our transcendence over them.”
But this notion of transcedence has expanded in our contemporary age to become a project of self-transcendence. Here, man is both the subject and object of scientific inquiry. We simultaneously look through the microscope, but look at objects that are us. He muses that the contemporary fascination with the brain is driven by this paradoxical relationship, by the desire to identify the material basis for the free subjective consciousness of the knower–the “spirit,” if you will.
It is in this context that the practice of embryo experimentation (i.e. embryonic stem-cell research) occurs. “The embryo is of interest to us,” writes O’Donovan, “because it is human; it is ‘ourselves’. On the other hand, it is considered a suitable object of experiment because it is not like us in every important way. It has no ‘personality’.”
At this point, O’Donovan is worth quoting in full. This may be my favorite bit of writing of his from anything I’ve read:
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