Here’s the last topic of Chapter 2: A Commitment to One’s Own Freedom. We return to some ancient guidance on our connection to God, including more wisdom from the newest Doctor:
22. Every individual possesses an inalienable and intrinsic dignity from the beginning of his or her existence as an irrevocable gift. However, the choice to express that dignity and manifest it to the full or to obscure it depends on each person’s free and responsible decision. Some Church Fathers, such as St. Irenaeus and St. John Damascene, distinguished between the “image” and “likeness” mentioned in Genesis (cf. 1:26). This allowed for a dynamic perspective on human dignity that understands that the image of God is entrusted to human freedom so that—under the guidance and action of the Spirit—the person’s likeness to God may grow and each person may attain their highest dignity.[Cf. Irenaeus of Lyons, Adv. Haer. V, 6, 1. V, 8, 1. V, 16, 2: PG 7, 1136-1138. 1141-1142. 1167-1168; John Damascene, De fide orth. 2, 12: PG 94, 917-930.]
The key principle here is that a person can respond to our experience of grace. We can be inspired to follow God more closely, to imitate Christ as we observe and know him, to be open to the Spirit’s movement. This begins to inch us on the path to a glorious eternity in the eventual goal of our existence, the most intimate union with God. This would be the highest level of dignity after Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection.
All people are called to manifest the ontological scope of their dignity on an existential and moral level as they, by their freedom, orient themselves toward the true good in response to God’s love. Thus, as one who is created in the image of God, the human person never loses his or her dignity and never ceases to be called to embrace the good freely. At the same time, to the extent that the person responds to the good, the individual’s dignity can manifest itself freely, dynamically, and progressively; with that, it can also grow and mature.
Cooperating with the virtues allows the person to be seen as an individual with dignity.
Consequently, each person must also strive to live up to the full measure of their dignity. In light of this, one can understand how sin can wound and obscure human dignity, as it is an act contrary to that dignity; yet, sin can never cancel the fact that the human being is created in the image and likeness of God.
Sin does not erase human dignity. It might be that it is difficult to notice a God-given stature in a person recognized as a criminal or someone showing consistent bad behavior. Perhaps we ponder human dignity as a way God sees us: never giving up on us, always waiting at the gate for us to reappear and return home.
Pope Benedict warns us not to rely too heavily on human intellect to “think” our way through life and its challenges.
In this way, faith plays a decisive role in helping reason perceive human dignity and in accepting, consolidating, and clarifying its essential features, as Benedict XVI pointed out: “Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.”[Benedict XVI, Address at Westminster Hall (17 September 2010)]
Click this link to read the DDDF document on the Vatican site.
Catholic Sensibility 