By IHE Fellow Kevin Kambo
To speak of human dignity today is a fraught task because we inhabit a pluralist culture with competing cosmological visions. Dignity is a central theme of John Paul II’s magisterial teaching, grounded in his view of man as made in the image and likeness of God; for sympathetic but theism-shy theorists, dignity is likely a self-evident truth, a first principle that many are simply too corrupt to see in their irrational blindness; for Darwinian materialists like Daniel Dennett it is a fiction worth maintaining, a contemporary noble lie necessary for safeguarding liberal democracy; and for critics like Steven Pinker it is mainly a rhetorical device, an unearned trump card deployed to manipulate debates on difficult ethical and political questions.
The contemporary appeal to dignity is, customarily, an assertion that something has worth independent of its utility, and, on account of this value, an affirmation that it may or should be protected from violation. Dignity, therefore, is often invoked in opposition to instrumentalization and/or violence. It is in response to the dignity of workers, for example, that we oppose their exploitation under rapacious agents and systems, just as recognizing the dignity of the unborn inspires the defense and protection of their lives. Indeed, the core value of liberal education, with its insistence that human beings are not just tools valued for their social utility, rests on the intrinsic dignity of the learners—and of what is learned. So, given the popularity of dignity in our political speech, it is worthwhile to ask what—if anything—the idea stands on. I propose that the most robust conception of dignity is grounded in Christian-Platonist understandings of the cosmos as the effect of a good and wise transcendent cause. Beings have dignity because they derive their intrinsic goodness from a necessarily good cause.
In this intellectual tradition there is an order to the whole cosmos, in view of which Augustine of Hippo defines peace as tranquillitas ordinis, the tranquility of order. From this vantage, we may understand each being—not just the human being—to have its dignity because it is ordered to its proper peace, i.e., its ‘place’ in the universe. The world of secular humanism, with its fundamentally random or accidental ‘cosmos’, is not even a world, classically speaking, and therefore has no order, no peace, and no dignity. This demythologized and deracinated world (i.e., without a transcendent, stable source of order) cannot defend dignity, except, as Daniel Dennett attempts, as a useful device for refereeing our selfish politics: dignity is subordinated to utility. But, instrumental dignity is ultimately counterfeit, a fragile fiction: instrumental dignity eliminates the intrinsic value needed to justify appeals to dignity. Secular humanism grounds its dignity in mere human purposes and desire, ultimately leading to conflict and incoherence, such as in the attempt to assert abortion as a woman’s right even while claiming the right to treat woman as undefinable, or as in the general struggle between political Liberty and Equality. The more willful our rights, the more they dissolve. Lacking a unifying principle, secular, instrumental dignity confuses and consumes itself.
In contrast to secular humanism’s instrumental dignity, consider patristic commentary on the seventh beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Mt 5:9):
“When you have made your inward parts clean from every spot of sin, that dissentions and contentions may not proceed from your temper, begin peace within yourself, that so you may extend it to others.” – Ambrose of Milan
“The peacemakers are pronounced blessed, they namely who make peace first within their own hearts, then between brethren at variance.” – Jerome of Stridon
“The blessedness of the peacemakers is the reward of adoption, ‘they shall be called the sons of God.’ For God is our common parent, and no other way can we pass into His family than by living in brotherly love together.” – Hilary of Poitiers
“Or, if the peacemakers are they who do not contend one with another, but reconcile those that are at strife, they are rightly called the sons of God, seeing this was the chief employment of the Only-begotten Son, to reconcile things separated, to give peace to things at war.” – John Chrysostom
The Fathers speak of making peace from the perspectives of interior (Ambrose, Jerome), interpersonal (Jerome, Hilary), and cosmological (Chrysostom, Augustine) life. Their testimony is a fruitful basis for illuminating dignity’s relevance to ethics, politics, and ecology. Common to all the accounts is a recognition of the call to serve or restore order, fulfillment of which call is one expression of man’s likeness to God, and thus exhibits humanity’s special dignity as sub-creator and sub-redeemer, which dignity man possesses by virtue of a nature ordered to knowing and loving God. God’s ruling order, which exists as an authority over us, thus guides us in judging which of our human purposes and desires are in accord with true dignity, discerning which appeals to political rights are legitimate, and loving the world we steward. A critical aspect of human dignity, then, is the capacity to respond to the dignity of the cosmos, i.e., the peace ordained by the Creator.
