The Great Tragedy of our Times

The cult of death is this week becoming the official religion of England. The established church has made no noticeable protest, as the work begun by St Augustine in AD 597 is replaced by a pagan cult that prefers death to life.

A House of Commons majority of 242 decided to allow infanticide, and on Friday the Assisted Suicide Bill faces its final Commons hurdle as Parliament looks to swiften the end of the old, the halt and the lame.

In his wonderful book Dominion, Tom Holland records the work of Macrina. She was the eldest of nine siblings, two of whom were Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. Basil and Gregory are both fathers of the Church and played an important role in developing Christian theology, especially the doctrine of the Trinity as set out in the Nicaean Creed. Thus she was part of an influential Christian family whose intellect still affects the Church today.

Macrina, according to Holland, was “Erudite, charismatic, and formidably ascetic. She devoted herself to a renunciation of the world's pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe, and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’, then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips.”

Macrina toured these tips because that is where unwanted babies were dumped, as rubbish. Often it was baby girls who were disposed of, as little more than the undesired consequence of lustful desire. To the people of her time this seemed most peculiar, an eccentricity; life was not valued, and many of those who grew up would be slaves anyway. There was no intrinsic dignity to life; no understanding, except from the Christians and especially her brothers, that man was made in the image and likeness of God.

This is the spiritual desert to which England is returning. Life has no value beyond its immediate utilitarian one, hence it is disposable. There is no perception of dignity in life itself, and for all that the disabled are protected by the Equality Act, both the laws on abortion and the ones proposed on assisted suicide view them as essentially worthless.