The Missing Lens and the Key Weakness of Dignitas Infinita

'While we can be thankful for what Declaration does right, it may ultimately fuel the ongoing decline of the very beliefs that it champions.'

From Catholic World Report

By David Deane, PhD

While we can be thankful for what Declaration does right, it may ultimately fuel the ongoing decline of the very beliefs that it champions.

Moral beliefs linger on after the reasons for them have been forgotten. We need only look at our own Western secular culture for an example of this.

Morals without moorings

In our culture, those who are “the lowest”—those who are suffering the most—are those who we see as most deserving of attention and care. The victims of oppression have a sacredness in our age. The poor, colonized, and under-represented are our primary concern. We take this for granted, but as thinkers as different as Friedrich Nietzsche and Tom Holland have argued, such ideas betray our utter dependence on Christianity. In contrast to the Christian world and its descendants, the special moral status of the oppressed was never a given in Greek or Roman moral culture, much less Northern European paganism. The secular West holds moral beliefs while forgetting what the rationale for these beliefs is.

At first glance, this situation isn’t that troubling. Yes, our culture has forgotten why we hold moral precepts like “the last are first”, but despite this we still hold them. So, it’s not a big deal, right? Wrong. While beliefs survive for a while after the reasons for these beliefs are forgotten, it’s only for a while.

For example, Christian reasons for moral stances on sexuality and gender, once held in the secular West just as strongly as we hold respect for the downtrodden today, were also forgotten and those beliefs crumbled in the 20th century. The idea of the last as first did too, at least for a while. In fascism, it was rejected in favor of a neo-paganism, and in communism, it mutated. In the USSR, oppressed people were sacrificed to the “idea” of helping oppressed people. Millions of poor people were allowed to die under Stalin in order to build a better world for poor people, not as persons, but as a depersonalized, ideological category.

The trauma of such 20th-century horrors helps explain why Christian beliefs about the oppressed have outlived Christian beliefs about sexuality. The secular West saw the horrors of what happened in the 20th century, when these beliefs were surrendered. Thus, it recoils reflexively from any suggestion that these beliefs are questionable. Like cattle avoiding an electrified fence, it doesn’t know the reason why it stings—but it know that it stings, and so it shuns it.

This, however, only represents a stay of execution for the lingering Christian moral positions the secular West holds to be self-evident. Even now, those positions are crumbling all around us. The secular left once championed the working class, but now the working class, while economically oppressed, seems to be insufficiently environmentally aware. So, too, some of them seem to vote for the wrong guy. Because of this, working-class people, seen as sacred by the secular left in the last quarter of the 20th century, get thrown into a “basket of deplorables” by the same secular left in the first quarter of the 21st.

The point is that when the reasons for a moral belief are forgotten, it is only a short time before the beliefs themselves are discarded. Thus, we need to pay attention to the reasons for beliefs, as well as to the beliefs themselves. If the reasons for the beliefs are undermined, then the beliefs, like a tree whose roots have died, can only stay alive for a short while after.

While we should celebrate the things that Dignitas Infinita gets right, if it enshrines a “forgetting” of the reasons for those beliefs, then it is participating in the collapse of those beliefs.

Some undignified incoherence

Does Dignitas Infinita in fact enshrine a “forgetting” of the reasons for our beliefs?

Partially.

There is a voice within the text that erodes its foundations, a voice whose clearest expression is: “The Church’s Magisterium progressively developed an ever-greater understanding of the meaning of human dignity… until it arrived at the recognition that the dignity of every human being prevails beyond all circumstances” (16). This expresses an idea—far from unique within recent Vatican documents—that Catholicism is only recently waking up to many essential moral truths. It is a principle based on an unnuanced reading of the tradition of Catholic moral theology and soaked through with a “presentism” that can’t see beyond the categories of the modern West.

In Dignitas Infinita, the claim is especially incoherent, not least because the text also states that it is “fully recognizable even by reason alone” that “[e]very human person possesses an infinite dignity… which prevails in and beyond every circumstance” (1). Therefore, not only did Augustine, Aquinas (and the Magisterium which drew on them) fail to recognize a fundamental truth of Christian theology (that is, the intrinsic dignity of every human life) but it was a truth fully recognizable by reason alone.

Shame on them if this were true, but, of course, it’s not true. Why, then, does Dignitas Infinita claim that it is?

One charitable answer is that the authors of Dignitas Infinita expected the concept “dignitas” to reflect for Aquinas, say, what the concept “human dignity” reflects for us. If so, then when Aquinas speaks about people having different levels of dignity, he is flouting the universality of dignity “in every circumstance”. But, for Aquinas, the word “image” (as in the image of God) already reflects that universality and establishes the prevailing value of the human person “in every circumstance”. All human beings are always in the image of God, and so—translating it into a contemporary idiom—they have an absolute dignity prevailing “beyond all circumstances.”

Within the tradition, the imago Dei provides the foundation for what Dignitas Infinita erroneously claims to have been fully understood by the Magisterium only recently. Maybe, then, the authors of Dignitas Infinita aren’t very bright when it comes to the tradition and so, missing this, see the magisterial tradition as informed by Aquinas and Co. as rejecting the notion of intrinsic and absolute human value “beyond all circumstances”?

Alas, no. Dignitas Infinita offers a discussion of image and likeness, which shows that it is aware of what the language of “image of God” did within the tradition. In paragraph 22, for example, it cites Irenaeus and John of Damascus as holding that, while the image is universal and total (and so grants to all people an inherent dignity in all circumstances), our “likeness” to God can be increased and decreased.

Furthermore, the text helpfully offers new categories that are clearly mapped onto older ones. Ontological dignity (para. 7) does the work that “image” did in the tradition, moral dignity (para. 7) functions as “likeness” did, and social and existential dignity (para. 8) are parallel to how figures such as Aquinas used “dignitas”. Ignorance of the tradition, then, doesn’t explain it. While the term “dignity” has different referents in different contexts, “the meaning of human dignity” beyond all circumstances is ever present throughout. Why then, when they know it was there (at least from Irenaeus!), do they make this strange statement that it is an awareness that took a long time to develop?

Could it be that the authors are so committed to the principle of doctrinal “improvement” that they want to establish it in this magisterial text, even if it’s clearly wrong in this case and refuted by the text itself? Or perhaps they wanted to establish the principle to guard against modern, unnuanced ideas such that Church statements about slavery imply a rejection of the principle that all human beings have inalienable value because of the imago Dei? (They do not).

The damage in Dignitas Infinita

Whatever their reasons for this mistake the mistake does damage. It encourages the idea that we have moved from seeing through a glass darkly in the patristic and medieval period to the clarity of the modern age. I do not deny that doctrine can develop and greater clarity can be arrived at. But the universal dignity (as dignity functions in Dignitas Infinita) of human beings is a core tenet of Christian thought from the beginning. To suggest that the Church was wrong about this until quite recently (the UN Declaration on Human Rights is referred to far more than the Fathers and Doctors of the Church) is both erroneous and undermines the authority of Christian tradition as a source for moral reasoning. It seems based far more on modern post-Reformation narratives about progress than in a coherent reading of the tradition.

Dignitas Infinita thus reinforces the narrative that fuels “progressive” positions on abortion, gender, euthanasia, surrogacy and more, while seeking to oppose them. It waters the roots of the ideas it opposes, while hacking at the roots of the ideas that it seeks to support.

It may even do something similar to the logic of Catholic moral theology. Ontological dignity (para. 7) mirrors the dignity inherent in the imago Dei and can never be lost. But when Dignitas Infinita speaks about categories of dignity beyond this (paras. 17-21), it buries the lede a bit. Within the text, the human being acts in harmony with God’s will, a will that is revealed more clearly in Christ. Living in harmony with God’s will moves us toward dignity “in all its fullness” (para. 21). This is good and true.

But as I’m sure the authors of the text would agree, the fullness of likeness to God is not something that we possess by nature. Our likeness to God grows not through our own nature changing but by virtue of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our souls. The difference is significant.

The secular West divorces nature and supernature, separating a wholly banal material world from a God/heaven that may or may not exist. Too many modern Christian perspectives mirror this. For them, in the moral life we act in keeping with or against God’s will/Scripture. This is fine, but for most of Christian history, the moral life is far more than that. “Likeness” to God can be attained as many acts (receipt of the sacraments, prayer, faith, charity, radical peacefulness, martyrdom etc) are only possible through the real presence of God within us. In such acts we accept union with the Holy Spirit, who conforms us to Christ.

Thus, the martyrs are not simply acting in harmony with God, they’re becoming one (to an extent) with God. Without the real presence of the Holy Spirit, a presence accepted in their willing of the act, the act of martyrdom is not possible. This capacity for union with God, more than simply acting in harmony with God’s will (or human dignity in the document) is the “dynamite” in traditional Christian moral theology.

The missing lens

A look at one area of Dignitas Infinita shows what’s at stake here. Dying with Christ, binding our suffering to His, we can accept a union with Christ that is not ours by right but only by gift. In our dying with Christ, we can come to know Him in His suffering. This knowledge is relational; it comes from our accepting likeness to Christ in our dying. This acceptance is not simply a willed mirroring, it is an acceptance of the Holy Spirit who is the source of faith, hope, and love.

When writing of the imago Dei, Aquinas often uses the analogy of the image of a king imprinted on the iron of a coin (for example, ST I, q. 93, a. 1, ad 2, or ST I, q. 42, a. 6, ad 1) but far beyond this, in likeness to God the iron takes on the heat of the furnace and glows orange. The iron is not ontologically removed from the heat that it represents. On the contrary, it represents the heat only because of its ontological union with it. Those who die with Christ represent Him through His presence, thereby they become like the iron which shares in the properties of the furnace (heat, color etc.). They become one with Him in faith, hope, and love, a union that proceeds through their dying and beyond it. Because of this, choosing euthanasia isn’t simply a contravention of human dignity. It is a rejection of union with Christ. It is a conscious choice to die without the Via Delorosa; a choice to die while establishing ourselves as Lord.

It is, in fact, something we hear about only in a single sentence of Dignitas Infinita. It is sin.

This lens is missing from Dignitas Infinita. The tradition that the text casts a shadow upon offers a far more coherent rationale for the beliefs (about the immorality of abortion, euthanasia, etc.) that Dignitas Infinita correctly champions. Instead, it offers a good model of what is and isn’t in harmony with human dignity. In this, it seeks a partner in the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which it breathlessly celebrates. But in seeking to build partnership—a vain hope—it eschews the very rationale that makes the beliefs it supports truly beautiful and coherent.

Despite my pedantic and churlish gripes, there is much good in Dignitas Infinita, which is, overall, clear and helpful and it gets the answers right. It is unfortunate that the Declaration undermines the magisterial tradition and works within a limited, naturalistic, model of the moral life. In so doing, it supports the narratives and methods that lead to the very beliefs (about abortion, gender etc.) that it critiques. While enshrining these narratives and methods, it undermines the narratives and methods on which the Catholic positions depends.

Thus, while we can be thankful for what is does right, it may ultimately fuel the ongoing decline of the very beliefs that it champions. And these beliefs will not survive when the reasons for them have been forgotten.