Human Dignity and Bioethics

Human Dignity and Public Discourse | 227
embraced also by non-Catholic Christians, as is evident, for instance,
in the recent statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, “That
They May Have Life.” 7 It is a concept firmly grounded in the Jewish
tradition and—although not without troubling ambiguities—in that
of Islam. 8
That concept, on which almost all Americans rely, with varying
degrees of reflectiveness and consistency, in deliberating how we
ought to order our life together can be briefly summarized: A human
being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect
at every point of development, debilitation, or decline by virtue of
being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the
spiritual principle of the soul, with reason, and with free will, the
destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in
obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God.
This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected, defended,
and indeed revered.
That is beyond doubt a very comprehensive account of the dignity
of the human person. I have referred to the political sovereignty
of “the people” in our constitutional order. The location of sovereignty—the
authority to which the polis holds itself finally accountable—
has in the post-World War II been, one might say, personalized. Ours
is a period that Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian
of the past century, described as one of “disillusioned sovereignty.” 9
The great disillusionment is with the sovereignty of the state.
If one asked almost all Enlightenment thinkers what is sovereign,
they would not have answered “reason” or “the individual” or “science.”
The unhesitating answer would be “the state.” The darkest and
most relentless depiction of the modern political project was offered
by Thomas Hobbes. He taught that the incarnate and resurrected
God-man who lives and governs is to be replaced in the temporal
world by a mortal god (deus mortalis)—a machine-like man, mythologically
known as the Leviathan. Engraved on the title page of the
1651 edition of his book by that title is Job 41:24: Non est potestas
super terram quae comparetur ei—“There is upon the earth no power
like his.” 10 After Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago, none can
read those words without a moral shudder.
There is on earth Leviathan’s like and, indeed, his sovereign: the
human person. The concept of the dignity of the human person may