CHAPTER TWO

      Human Dignity, Free Human Action, Virtue, and Conscience

1. Three Kinds of Human Dignity

According to the Catholic tradition — as found, for example, in St. Thomas Aquinas¹ — there is a threefold dignity proper to human persons: (1) the first is intrinsic, natural, inalienable, and an endowment or gift; (2) the second is also intrinsic, but it is an achievement, not an endowment — an achievement made possible, given the reality of original sin and its effects, only by God’s unfailing grace; (3) the third, again an intrinsic dignity, is also a gift, not an achievement, but it is a gift far surpassing man’s nature and literally divinizing him — it is, moreover, given to him as a treasure he must guard and nurture and which he can lose by freely choosing to sin gravely.

The first dignity proper to human beings is the dignity that is theirs simply as living members of the human species, which God called into being when, in the beginning, he “created man in his own image … male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27).² Every living human body, the one that comes to be when new human life is conceived, is a living word of God. Moreover, in creating man, male and female, God created a being inwardly capable of receiving our Lord’s own divine life (see below on the third dignity predicable of human beings). God cannot become incarnate in a pig or cow or an ape because these creatures of his are not inwardly capable of being divinized. But, as we know from God’s revelation, he can become incarnate in his human creature, and in fact he has freely chosen to become truly one of us, for his Eternal and Uncreated Word, true God of true God, became and is a human being, a man. Thus, every human being can rightly be called a “created word” of God, the created word that his Uncreated Word became and is precisely to show us how deeply we are loved by the God who formed us in our mothers’ wombs (cf. Ps 139:11-18). Every human being, therefore, is intrinsically valuable, surpassing in dignity the entire material universe, a being to be revered and respected from the very beginning of its existence.³

This intrinsic, inalienable dignity proper to human beings is God’s gift, in virtue of which every human being, of whatever age or sex or condition, is a being of moral worth, an irreplaceable and nonsubstitutable person. Because of this dignity, a human person, as Karol Wojtyla has said, “is the kind of good that does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such a means to an end.” Because of this dignity, a human person “is a good toward which the only adequate response is love.”⁴

When we come into existence, we are already, by reason of this intrinsic dignity, persons; we do not “become” persons after a period of development. As God’s “created words,” as persons, we are endowed with the capacity to discover the truth and the capacity to determine our own lives by freely choosing to conform our lives and actions to the truth. A baby (born or preborn) does not, of course, have the developed capacity for deliberating and choosing freely, but it has the natural capacity to do so because it is human and personal in nature.⁵ Yet when we come into existence we are not yet fully the beings we are meant to be. And this leads us to consider the second sort of dignity proper to human beings, a dignity that is also intrinsic but is an achievement, not an endowment.

      The second kind of dignity is the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free persons capable of determining our own lives by our own free choices. This is the dignity we are to give to ourselves (with the help of God’s never-failing grace) by freely choosing to shape our choices and actions in accord with the truth. In other words, we give to ourselves this dignity and inwardly participate in it by making good moral choices, and such choices are in turn dependent upon true moral judgments.

      The nature of this dignity has been beautifully developed by the Fathers of Vatican Council II and by Pope John Paul II, particularly in his encyclical Veritatis splendor, and a summary of their teaching will help us grasp the crucial importance of making true moral judgments and good moral choices if we are to respect our God-given dignity and participate in the dignity to which we are called as intelligent and free persons.

      In a document hailed by almost everyone as one of the most important of the entire Council — namely, the Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae) — the Council Fathers declared: “The highest norm of human life is the divine law — eternal, objective, and universal — whereby God orders, directs, and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community according to a plan conceived in wisdom and in love.” Immediately after affirming this truth, the Council Fathers went on to say: “Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of divine providence, he can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth” (no. 3). Precisely because he can come “to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth,” man “has the duty, and therefore the right, to seek the truth” (ibid.). The truth in question here is evidently not a contemplative or speculative truth but a truth that is to shape and guide human choices and actions, i.e., a practical truth.

      This passage concludes by saying: “On his part, man perceives and acknowledges the imperatives of the divine law through the mediation of conscience” (ibid.). The role of conscience in helping us to know the “unchanging truth” of God’s divine and eternal law and its “imperatives” is developed in another document of the Council, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes). There we find the following important passage:

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. The voice of this law,⁶ ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment, do this, shun that. For man has in his heart a law written by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths. By conscience, in a wonderful way, that law is made known which is fulfilled in the love of God and of one’s neighbor [no. 16; emphasis added].

      Fidelity to conscience means a “search for the truth,” and for “true solutions” to moral problems. Conscience, this passage notes, can indeed err “through invincible ignorance without losing its dignity” (so long as there is sufficient “care for the search for the true and the good”); but “to the extent that a correct conscience holds sway, persons and groups turn away from blind choice and seek to conform to the objective norms of morality” (ibid.).

      Such, according to Vatican Council II, is the second kind of dignity proper to human persons. This dignity is acquired by diligently seeking the truth about what we are to do if we are to be fully the beings we are meant to be and by shaping our lives freely in accordance with this truth. According to the Council, the human person has the capacity of inwardly participating in God’s divine and eternal law — the “highest norm of human life.” It maintains that this capacity of human persons is related to their “conscience,” for it is through the “mediation” of conscience that human persons come to know ever increasingly the “imperatives” of God’s law.

      Reflecting on conscience as “man’s most secret core” where “he is alone with God,” Pope John Paul II writes as follows in his encyclical Veritatis splendor: