Today, Developments in Christian Thought. There’s a lot in nineteen centuries from the time of the apostles. We’re going to touch on a few things briefly: antiquity, Thomism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and into the last century. Fifteen people are cited by name in this section, and that’s just a beginning.
13. As Christian thought developed, it also prompted and accompanied the progress of humanity’s reflection on the concept of dignity. Drawing from the rich tradition of the Church Fathers, classical Christian anthropology emphasized the doctrine of the human being as created in the image and likeness of God and the unique role of the human person in creation.[For example, see Clement of Rome, 1 Clem. 33, 4f: PG 1, 273; Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Aut. I, 4: PG 6, 1029; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. III, 42, 5-6: PG 8, 1145; Ibid., VI, 72, 2: PG 9, 293; Irenaeus of Lyons, Adv. Haer. V, 6, 1: PG 7, 1137-1138; Origen, De princ. III, 6, 1: PG 11, 333; Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. VI, 12: PL 34, 348; De Trinitate XIV, 8, 11: PL 42, 1044-1045.] By critically sifting through the inheritance it had received from ancient philosophy, Medieval Christian thought arrived at a synthesis of the notion of the “person” that recognized the metaphysical foundation of human dignity. St. Thomas Aquinas attested to this when he affirmed that “‘person’ signifies what is most perfect in all nature—that is, a subsistent individual of a rational nature.”[Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 29, a. 3, resp.: «persona significat id, quod est perfectissimum in tota natura, scilicet subsistens in rationali natura».] The Christian humanism of the Renaissance later emphasized this ontological dignity and its preeminent manifestation in free human action.[Cf. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his well-known text, Orartio de Hominis Dignitate (1486).] Even in the writings of such modern thinkers as Descartes and Kant, who challenged some of the foundations of traditional Christian anthropology, one can still strongly perceive echoes of Revelation. Building upon some recent philosophical reflections about the status of theoretical and practical subjectivity, Christian reflection then came to emphasize even more the depths of the concept of dignity.
Given the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and colonialism, and the massive exploitation of persons in the developed world and in the peripheries, it’s not a surprise that philosophers would push back against reducing people to things, to being used or to be useful, toward the ends of the 1%. Missed opportunity for emphasis, I’d think, as some of the world’s aristocracy has weaponized various factions being used against one another to maintain something of a status quo.
In the twentieth century, this reached an original perspective (as seen in Personalism) that reconsidered the question of subjectivity and expanded it to encompass intersubjectivity and the relationships that bind people together.[For a Jewish thinker, such as E. Levinas (1906-1995), the human being is qualified by his freedom insofar as he discovers himself as infinitely responsible for another human being.] The thinking flowing from this view has enriched contemporary Christian anthropology.[Some great Christian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—such as St. J.H. Newman, Bl. A. Rosmini, J. Maritain, E. Mounier, K. Rahner, H.‑U. von Balthasar, and others—have succeeded in proposing a vision of the human person that can validly dialogue with all the currents of thought present in the early twenty-first century, whatever their inspiration, even Postmodernism.]
That is a dialogue worth exploring.
Click this link to read the DDDF document on the Vatican site.
Catholic Sensibility 