Introduction
This article examines the contemporary debate over the sacred and the dignity of the person in a world dominated by science. Readers will discover why a reductionist vision of humanity threatens the foundations of culture and why, according to Roger Scruton, sanctity is an essential infrastructure for social order. The text exposes profanation as a mechanism for escaping responsibility and points to transcendence as a necessary condition for human freedom.
Dawkins vs. Scruton: Reductionism vs. the Person
Richard Dawkins describes the human being as a "survival machine," representing a view from nowhere—a purely biological perspective where meaning is reduced to chemistry. Roger Scruton counters this with a view from here, in which the human being is a person: a source of reasons, not just an effect of causes. The key concept of this anthropology is the face, which reveals the soul and serves as the threshold of subjectivity. In the "I-Thou" relationship, the face of another person becomes an ethical "prohibition against killing" that cannot be explained by the statistics of stimuli. Its commercialization or masking is an act of identity theft and the foundation of the systemic denial of dignity.
The God of Philosophers and Profanation: The Limits of Transcendence
The metaphysical God of philosophers as a necessary being remains a cold abstraction. Scruton argues that faith requires God as a Person with whom communion and covenant are possible. A similar tension is visible in love: naturalism sees it as an evolutionary mechanism but fails to grasp the structure of the gift. The distinction between eros (desire) and agape (selfless love) shows that the sacred sanctifies human impulses. Profanation is the active uprooting of sanctity to silence the voice of conscience and avoid moral judgment. Meanwhile, transcendence is the foundation of freedom—without it, the question of the meaning of actions loses its raison d'être.
The Sacred in Politics, Art, and Architecture
The sacred manifests itself in the material and social world. Faceless architecture and the digital world, where pornography detaches desire from the person, are forms of profanation that destroy authentic relationships. Politics also needs the sacred; without recognizing the dignity of the person as an inviolable value, democracy degrades into a mere auction of interests. Icons and art do not merely represent but make transcendence present, serving as "windows to eternity." The endurance of a community rests on sacrifice, which transcends the calculation of profit. The ultimate argument for the sacred is death—the moment when biology gives way to the need for ritual and silence.
Summary
In the face of loneliness and guilt, humans instinctively seek transcendence, even if they reject it through reason. A culture that systematically flees from sanctity paradoxically reveals its hunger for the sacred, creating new, often destructive altars of consumption. Sanctity is not an aesthetic luxury but a system for protecting the community against nihilism. Without it, everything becomes a commodity, and freedom merely a collection of official licenses. In a world without altars, can we still hear the echo of the Other's face, reminding us of our infinite responsibility?
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