If you spend any time at all talking to contemporary Christians about the idea of human dignity, you're virtually certain to hear this: Someone will claim that human beings intrinsically possess a certain quality (called "dignity") that demands from others a certain degree of respect and propriety and they will attempt to anchor that idea in the well-known creation account of Genesis 1 which speaks of man being made in God's image.
Here's the curious thing: Pretty much no one in church history read Genesis 1 that way until very recently. Francis Schaeffer read it that way, for example. But if you read older sources looking for readings that anchor "dignity" in the imago dei you won't really find it. The person you must go to first find what we now think of as an obvious Christian teaching—the idea of human beings possessing a kind of intrinsic dignity simply by virtue of being human—is... Immanuel Kant. If you turn to church history seeking this idea, you will be disappointed.*
Augustine, for example, wrote extensively on the image of God yet did not see in the imago Dei an argument for, say, religious liberty or an argument against slavery. Meanwhile, Calvin holds that the image of God in us was actually destroyed at the Fall.
But the problem can be pushed further: It's not just that no one read Genesis 1 as an anchor text for supporting the idea of intrinsic dignity. It's also the case that basically no premodern Christians even speak about "dignity" in these terms.
Take, for example, the work of Basil the Great. If you are looking for a patristic source friendly to fairly radical social critiques of the sort which would be of interest to someone with a fairly robust idea of human dignity, public justice, and so on, you would be likely to find it in Basil. If a Christian today wanted to say the things Basil says about love of neighbor, you can be almost certain that Genesis 1 and the imago Dei and "human dignity" would all come up in the argument.
But if you read Basil he does not anchor his quite severe moral exhortations around, say, generosity and property, in ideas about "dignity." He does not argue that our neighbors possess dignity and because they possess dignity we rob them when we own two coats and keep one for ourselves—though Basil does make that final claim. He just doesn't ground it in contemporary ideas about human dignity.
Rather, in speaking about the man who planned to build larger barns to hold his abundant wealth the great Cappadocian father writes,
It seems to me that the passion afflicting this man’s soul resembles that of the gluttonous, who would rather burst as a result of over-indulgence than share part of what they have with those in need. O mortal, recognize your Benefactor! Consider yourself, who you are, what resources have been entrusted to you, from whom you received them, and why you received more than others. You have been made a minister of God’s goodness, a steward of your fellow servants. Do not suppose that all this was furnished for your own gullet! Resolve to treat the things in your possession as belonging to others. After all, they bring pleasure for only a little while, then fade away and disappear, but afterwards a strict accounting of their disbursement will be demanded from you.
Note the way he grounds his claim about the man's greed: The chief error Basil sees in greed is not that you withhold something from the needy, though that is an error. The primary point Basil wishes to emphasize, however, is that the greedy man dishonors God by refusing to steward God's gifts in the way God tells us to. Later he continues,
You are so sure that the years of your life will be many; beware, lest death the pursuer catch up to you sooner than you expect! And even your promise is not a token of goodness, but rather a sign of your evil intent. For you promise, not so that you might give in the future, but rather so that you might evade responsibility in the present. At this very moment, what prevents you from giving? Are not the needy near at hand? Are not your barns already full? Is not your heavenly reward waiting? Is not the commandment crystal clear? The hungry are perishing, the naked are freezing to death, the debtors are unable to breathe, and will you put off showing mercy until tomorrow?
Finally, in the most relentless and famous passage of all from this sermon, Basil writes,
“But whom do I treat unjustly,” you say, “by keeping what is my own?” Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone were to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all in common — this is what the rich do. They seize common goods before others have the opportunity, then claim them as their own by right of preemption. For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need.
Did you not come forth naked from the womb, and will you not return naked to the earth? Where then did you obtain your belongings? If you say that you acquired them by chance, then you deny God, since you neither recognize your Creator, nor are you grateful to the One who gave these things to you. But if you acknowledge that they were given to you by God, then tell me, for what purpose did you receive them? Is God unjust, when He distributes to us unequally the things that are necessary for life? Why then are you wealthy while another is poor? Why else, but so that you might receive the reward of benevolence and faithful stewardship, while the poor are honored for patient endurance in their struggles? But you, stuffing everything into the bottomless pockets of your greed, assume that you wrong no one; yet how many do you in fact dispossess?
Who are the greedy? Those who are not satisfied with what suffices for their own needs. Who are the robbers? Those who take for themselves what rightfully belongs to everyone. And you, are you not greedy? Are you not a robber? The things you received in trust as a stewardship, have you not appropriated them for yourself? Is not the person who strips another of clothing called a thief? And those who do not clothe the naked when they have the power to do so, should they not be called the same? The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.
The logic of Basil's sermon is something like this: God made everything not so it could serve itself alone, but for the good of others. You brought nothing into the world with you; everything you have is a gift from God. So how is it that you dare to use what you have been given in ways that defy the wishes—and commands–of the giver? Elsewhere in the sermon he includes quite a delightful passage about the generosity of creation itself which reminded me of one of my favorite passages in Bucer. To men God gives wealth and food and abundance, and he expects from them generosity and benevolence toward others, for the point of the wealth is not to be hoarded but to be given away.
Yet Basil has very little to say about the ontological status of the poor or of them possessing "dignity" or deserving certain things because of the imago Dei. He grounds his argument, rather, in the nature of created reality and in the command of God and, perhaps, in what we now call the universal destination of goods. Indeed, if any modern theological idea about common life and justice is present here it is that teaching now mostly associated with the Roman church, rather than post-war liberal ideas about human dignity and the divine image.
So whither, then, human dignity? How should Christians in particular think about this concept which bears such weight in modern liberal thought, including amongst orthodox Christians in the classically liberal tradition, and yet is largely absent from pre-modern Christian thought?
When I or others have laid out this argument in the past, I have generally observed one of two reactions. On the one hand, there is a reactionary move that says, "Well, if intrinsic dignity is a modern idea and the historic church didn't connect the image of God and human dignity, then clearly intrinsic dignity is a modernist corruption that should be rejected in favor of alternative anthropologies." From there, it often takes rather little time for talk of "natural hierarchies" to arise and from there one is really off to the races.
The other response I have seen, and the more common one, is to suggest that we don't really need to be bothered by this problem. The ideas we now have associated with the concept of intrinsic dignity are obviously good and should be upheld, whatever the pre-modern church might have said.
Put another way: The first response seeks to dispense with modernity altogether out of a purported fidelity to historic Christian teachings—and often gets turned quite quickly toward ends obviously at odds not just with modern sensibilities around Genesis 1 and "dignity" but also quite hostile to the moral teachings of someone like Basil.
The second response dispenses with historic Christian teachings altogether. If this group bothers to justify their response at all, it is likely you will hear a horribly simplistic and uneducated account of sola Scriptura, which in the hands of such clumsy readers becomes an excuse to simply ignore the thought of our fathers and mothers in the faith.
Both of these responses are wrong, and yet they are the easiest, most obvious responses in our context because of the dominant attitudes many of our neighbors have toward history. Some find modernity so thin and existentially intolerable that they feel themselves to be spiritual orphans. Out of such an experience is birthed the move toward more radical, illiberal expressions of Christian faith as a sufficiently thick form of identity set against the dessicated life of the post Cold War west. On the other hand, others find the thought of the pre-modern west to be fairly intolerable and so find it quite easy to simply dispense with anything they regard as coming from that supposedly benighted time.
Here is an attempt at a better response: saHave you ever had a group of friends with whom you have ongoing conversations about various questions and topics that interest all of you? And have you ever, in such a community, found yourself forming connections between the concerns or observations of one friend and those of another? Supposing you did and you mentioned to both friends how one's comment made you think of something another had said, you would likely be taken aback if one party responded with offense, claiming they never used the word the other had used and claimed your entire argument was, therefore, invalid.
This, I think, is closer to the reality of how ideas move and spread across time, how a concept or doctrine is refined or clarified, how new ways of expressing an idea are found and articulated. If you relate to this process in a wooden way, lacking the patience to work through an argument or simply looking for shortcuts to slap labels onto people in the absence of carefully considering the idea, then you aren't really participating in the conversation; you're doing something else. You might be searching for concepts to use like cudgels in debate. You might be engaging in a bit of relatively meaningless intellectual vanity. But you're not participating in the great conversation that has shaped and defined the church's intellectual life since her beginnings.
Applied to dignity, then what can we say?
First, we should not be bothered by the fact that a concept many of us now hold quite dear, that of intrinsic human dignity, is probably best rooted in Kant rather than, say, Augustine or Thomas. The fact that Kant got there first, you might say, does not make the idea inherently wrong, antithetical to pre-Kantian Christian thought, or somehow problematic simply due to its genetic origins.
Second, we can look for resonances between our modern idea of human dignity and earlier ways of thinking about the moral status of human persons. For example, my friend Nathan pointed out to me that older Christian ideas about the chain of being, which explain why, for instance, humanity is distinct from animal life, are obviously relevant to this conversation. And, indeed, if you read Augustine, you will find him arguing that of all things the human soul is the nearest to God—and if every human possesses a soul, then there is something in every human that is close to God. Is that "intrinsic dignity"? Not necessarily. That is not the application Augustine has in mind, at least.
But is it wrong to raise the question? I don't think so. And if you were to set Kantian dignity to the side and ask the question "what do we owe to beings who possess something that is closer to God than anything else God has made?" probably some parts of your answer would start to sound kind of Kantian before too long.
In any case, the point of this little exercise is simply this: Our fathers and mothers in the faith are neither infallible guides to whom we submit as if they were divine, but neither are they irrelevant dinosaurs of bygone days with whom we need not concern ourselves. They are, rather, precisely what I have called them: our fathers and mothers. No wise adult would cavalierly dismiss all their parents tell them, but neither would they mindlessly submit themselves to all their commands.
The point, once one has matured, of having fathers and mothers is that you have trusted guides whose love and good will toward you is sure, whose bond with you is deep, and who have seen more of the world than you have. You can and should listen to them and profit from their wisdom, but to seek to extend their thought or to dispute it at some point is not to disrespect them or demean them. Indeed, when done within the bonds of love such responses are themselves a vindication of our parents; they are a statement that even where we dissent or find their own thought inadequate, we still find their guidance worthwhile and profitable, something to aid us in our own endeavors without chaining us. We honor our mothers and fathers in the faith when we seek to think with them and even to extend and develop the thoughts they have left us, all done beneath the mercy of Christ and in answer to the Word God has spoken.
* Lydia Dugdale will have an essay on dignity in the ideas journal to be published this year by the Center for Christianity and Public Life. Much of the thought in this piece began with conversations we had about her essay.