In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea
‘In God’s Image’ Review: Sharing a Sacred Form
Conceptions of individual rights that have guided modern civilization are rooted in an idea with biblical origins.
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The Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik and the French jurist René Cassin had little in common. When they met, in 1947, Malik was a devout Orthodox Christian, Lebanon’s first ambassador to the U.S. and a spokesman for Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Cassin, who had lost many relatives in the Holocaust, was a prominent Zionist. Nevertheless, they became unexpected but staunch allies on the Human Rights Commission that drafted the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified in 1948.
In the face of ideological challenges and pragmatic objections, both men insisted that the dignity of each individual person was sacred and inviolable, and that individual rights must prevail against states and ideologies. For Cassin, human dignity was a bulwark against another Holocaust. For Malik, whose defense of rights would become legendary, it was also a matter of faith, based on the words found in the book of Genesis: Each individual had rights, he argued, by virtue of being created by God “in his own image.”
The history of human rights and human dignity is a site of heated controversy. Some historians find its origins in the secular individualism of the 18th-century Enlightenment, or in the earlier political thought of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes. A few historians have excavated rights in the Middle Ages. Others assert that rights were “invented” in the 20th century and used to justify Cold War interventionism.
Tomer Persico’s “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea” takes a bold new position. Mr. Persico, a research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, does not mention Malik by name but essentially agrees with him: The inviolable rights and dignity of the individual are grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition and trace back to the earliest pages of the Bible. God creates man in his likeness and image: Mr. Persico follows the reception of this short phrase through the centuries, revealing how it unfolds into a full-fledged defense of individual human worth. He makes a further, more radical claim: “the idea that all human beings were created in God’s image was seminal to the creation of the modern West.” What the West considers its most cherished secular ideals—human dignity, personal autonomy, conscience and individual rights—all find their origins in the Bible.
Mr. Persico’s account is sweeping, encompassing a vast amount of compelling evidence. He begins with the Israelites, whose belief in humanity as God’s image sharply distinguished their faith from those of their Near Eastern neighbors. The Jewish prohibition against the worship of material idols, for example, stemmed from their respect for the human person as a the true “idol” or image of God. Jewish purity rituals likewise revered the sacred nature of the human body. For the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, kings were created in God’s image, but for the Israelites, this honor was bestowed on every individual. In ancient Israel, the unique history of the West began.
Christianity deepened and broadened this Old Testament legacy. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul transformed Jewish tradition by moving God’s image from the physical body to the spiritual soul. External ritual gave way to interior experience, and this inward turn, Mr. Persico tells us, effected “one of the most momentous revolutions” in the history of the West. In Christianity, the individual believer was untethered from a wider religious community and became the locus of meaning and authority. From there, it was a short step to the “individual universal subject,” who could claim independent legal and political status. The earliest Christian arguments against slavery in the fourth and fifth centuries, from theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa, stemmed from the Christian assertion that no one could buy or sell a creature that shared God’s likeness.
From St. Paul onward, the development of individual rights and dignity remained a Christian project. Mr. Persico sides with scholars who find the rudiments of natural rights in the medieval period. As early as the 12th and 13th centuries, philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas identified reason as the home of God’s image in every person. Reason granted each individual the potential to understand the natural order and discern good from evil. Later Spanish theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas, used innate reason to defend the inviolable humanity of Native Americans.
In Mr. Persico’s account, the Protestant Reformation completed the project that Genesis began, entrenching individual autonomy and selfhood in Western culture. Here the author covers more familiar scholarly ground. Martin Luther’s personal spiritual struggles brought St. Paul’s inwardness to its fullest expression; after Luther, Mr. Persico writes, “God no longer resided in the heavens, but in the human heart.” Conscience became the Christian’s guide to religious truth, replacing church and tradition, and birthing a radical individual autonomy that could challenge governments and rulers. In this manner, Protestantism begat modern liberalism and individualism. Mr. Persico declares Locke “one of liberalism’s founding fathers” for weaving all of these strands together—“the image of God, natural law, reason and rights”—in his political philosophy. The originally Christian defense of the individual autonomous subject became a liberal cultural and political worldview.
Mr. Persico’s narrative is persuasively linear. This may leave the reader unprepared for the book’s final, provocative twist. It is an ingenious argument: The value and freedom of individuals are gradually asserted against God himself. It is not science and technical progress that nurtures modern atheism but rather the very “image of God” tradition revolting against God. Atheism is thus a normative rather than a scientific position: An all-powerful God eventually becomes the obstacle to individual flourishing, where human value “comes not from realizing the image of God inside us” but from denying God’s very existence. Mr. Persico might have added the well-known words of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” The “image of God” tradition contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Mr. Persico’s erudite account is at times reductive. “In God’s Image” often brushes past fierce debates about the value of the human person. The fourth-century Christian attacks on slavery were later met with vociferous defenses of the practice, and the persistence of slavery into modern times requires accounting. Las Casas’ arguments about Native Americans softened the hearts of very few Christian conquistadors. Mr. Persico mentions that Martin Luther hated Jews and persecuted heretics, and he acknowledges that Locke excluded Catholics and atheists from toleration. But his story would be enriched by lingering on these contradictions, demonstrating how the “image of God” was an uneven standard intermittently applied. The line from Genesis to modern human dignity and rights is neither straight nor unbroken.
Most importantly, however, the history of “God’s image” cannot stop short in secularism. By 1947, Malik and Cassin were not the only 20th-century philosophers and theologians who, in the wake of historical catastrophes, sought to rebuild selfhood, dignity and rights on religious foundations. The 20th-century story of the battle for human rights and dignity, which culminated in the U.N. declaration, should have a place in Mr. Persico’s narrative. He ends his book with a call to rethink the “image of God” tradition, but the recovery of this tradition has already begun.
Mr. Persico has produced a provocative account of a vital subject, uncovering the religious roots of the West’s enduring commitment to individual dignity and value. The question that looms, however, is whether that commitment—sustained by the belief in humanity’s reflection of God—can survive in a godless world.
Ms. Siljak is a professor of humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.
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