We take up, once again, Oliver O’Donovan’s Begotten or Made? We start from the below and carry on:
“The embryo is of interest to us 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’. It is us and not us. In those two assertions we see the movement of self-transcendence taking shape. The embryo is humanity in a form that is especially open to our pinning it down as scientific object and distancing ourselves from it in transcendent knowledge…
It is enough to point out that the ambiguity of the status of the embryo research subject is precisely what is intended. It is what the task of self-transcendence needs, that it should be ourselves and yet not ourselves. If we should wish to charge our own generation with crimes against humanity because of the practice of this experimental research, I would suggest that the crime should not be the old-fashioned crime of killing babies, but the new and subtle crime of making babies to be ambiguously human, of presenting to us members of our own species who are doubtfully proper objects of compassion and love.”
The iTunes feed is here, if you’d like to subscribe (thanks to everyone who has reviewed us so kindly) and an RSS feed for the show lives here.
Special thanks to MK Creative Arts for the audio editing.
Finally, as always, follow Derek and Alastair for more tweet-sized thoughts.
[…] latest Mere Fidelity podcast has gone online. This week, Matt Lee Anderson, Derek Rishmawy, and I are discussing chapter 4 of […]
A baby is an instance of a logikos nature, whether we translate logikos as “speaking” or “rational”. The Baby does not yet do so; but a baby is the same sort of thing as we are.
Also, perhaps more importantly, the Logos was a baby. Which means that even being a silent infant is not foreign to Logos–to speech.