Dignity or Death

Everybody talks about Dignity. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, repeatedly warns of AI’s potential to undermine ‘human dignity’. A month later, he doubled down in Madrid, “Dignity takes precedence over all utility…every truly just society is built upon the recognition of the inviolable dignity of the human person.”

On the other end of the spectrum, advocates for ‘physician assisted suicide’ often ground their argument on ‘the right to die with dignity’. Nice work if you can get it, but…

News flash: Death is the one universal condition and there is nothing dignified about it! This magnificent body that we’ve been curating lo these many years suddenly stops working and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t get it started again…much like an Opel Kadet I owned in the ‘60s. (No, my millennial friends, I did not know Lincoln; the War between the States took place in the 1860s.)   

Add to that the fact that death is usually accompanied by some or all of the following:

Ø  Acute trauma

Ø  Extreme pain

Ø  Cognitive decline

Ø  Incapacitation

Ø  Incontinence

Where is the dignity in that? In fact, death is the antithesis of dignity! We are born to live and death isn’t that. 4 billion years of evolution have honed us to survive and procreate. To die is to fail (sic)…or retire.

There is no dignity in dying. Death is the ultimate indignity and in any event the manner and circumstances of our death are almost entirely out of our control. Those who look for dignity in their demise are confusing the ‘how they died’ with ‘how they faced death’.

It is our response to death that allows us to salvage a modicum of dignity. Our sages confirm this; they tell us how to face the inevitable heroically: From Homer’s warriors on the plains of Troy to Jesus, Stephen, and the Christian martyrs.

But perhaps the best counsel famously comes from a 20^th century Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Ultimately, there can be no compromise with Evil (sed libera nos a malo) and Death is its paradigm. “I set before you life and death…therefore choose life.” (Deut. 30: 19)

But then again, life isn’t a heck of a lot better: I am reminded of the popular turn of the millennium meme, “Life sucks and then you die!” To wit, we are born naked, helpless, and covered in mucus. We spend the next 18 years in survival mode, withstanding the abuse, neglect, and miseducation, known as happy childhoods. But not to worry, we have 40 years of wage slavery, known as successful careers, ahead. Worn out and less functional, we are finally ‘allowed’ (not to say ‘encouraged’) to retire into the marginal life of a ‘seasoned citizen’. Remind me, why did we make this journey in the first place?

We did so because Leo’s not entirely wrong! There is a profound dignity attached to being human, but it’s not the dignity conferred by labor and certainly not by death, even if it is holy or heroic.

We are not dignified by the World (fame, success, power); the World is dignified by us, and not by who we are but by what we do. And I don’t mean building castles of thin air, Ozymandias! We are the image and likeness of God and God is Good, not just ‘good’ but Good per se, and Good (God) manifests in our world as Beauty, Truth, and Justice (BTJ), and we are the creature uniquely qualified to recognize and propagate the beautiful, the true, and the just in our realm.

Based on our reading of Genesis, we imagine ourselves the pinnacle of creation and we mistake species pride for dignity. Just how dignified are we? Let’s see. We let ourselves be hoodwinked by a snake, we traded Paradise for an apple, we hid from God in the garden like 5 year olds, we learned to be ashamed of our bodies, and we sank to the crime of fratricide.

Some dignity! In fact, the mythological indignity of the primordial nuclear family became the launching pad for creation’s ongoing, heroic effort to recreate the Garden of Eden: Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven, Revelation’s New Jerusalem, Arthur’s Camelot, Marx’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Ezra Pound’s City of Dioce.  

Every entity, to the extent that it is good, is a member of the ‘set of all good things’. Lie quiet Russell, I mean that is Bertrand Russell. God is good…and God is Good. Therefore, every entity, to the extent that it is good, imitates God and subsists in God: “Through him, with him, and in him.”

Domine non sum dignus. “Lord, I am not worthy.” Sed tantum dic verbo. “But speak just the Word (logo).” It is the Word of God, the logos, that orders the World in a way that supports the realization of eternal and universal Values (BTJ) in the spatiotemporal realm. It is the Word of God that makes human dignity possible.

Pope Leo asks us to respect the dignity of all human beings because that is the teaching to the church; I would argue that we should respect the teachings of the Church because we have dignity. Dignity is primary. I’ll see Leo and raise him. But my dignity is reflected in and refracted by what I do, not in or by what happens to me.

According to Thomas Aquinas, et al., from God’s eternal perspective, Value is simple…and singular: the Good. But just as white light refracts to generate a rainbow in spacetime, so Good manifests in specific contexts as Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice (BTJ).

The Good is simple; it is the same for me as it is for you and it is the same for you as it is for God. I read the Book of Job as the hypothetical transcript of a case heard in Cosmic Court that confirmed once and for all the primacy and universality of Good.

My dignity does indeed come from God but it comes, not as a perq of birth, but as a mission for life. Just as children imagine that there is dignity in imitating their parents, so we know that there is dignity in imitating God, i.e. in doing God’s work. And what is that work? To manifest Good, i.e. to realize Beauty, Truth, and Justice in our realm.

So, theist, atheist, or agnostic, everything I do begins with a primal appetition for the Good, which is God and which manifests in our World as BTJ. In the 1950’s, our educators told us that our purpose in life was to know, love, and serve God. Not everything they taught us back then was right, but in this instance, they nailed it. I ‘know God’ when I seek Truth; I ‘love God’ when I foster Beauty; I ‘serve God’ when I restore Justice. In this, and only this, consists human dignity. Deo gratia!