Human Dignity and Bioethics

230 | Peter Augustine Lawler
The Christian Understanding of Human Freedom
Our understanding of the dignity of the individual or the person
originates, I think, with Christianity, particularly with St. Augustine.
We find it in Augustine’s criticism of the civil and natural theologies—the
respectable theologies—of the Greeks and the Romans
for misunderstanding who the human being is. Civil theology—the
gods of the city or political community—is based on the premise
that human beings are essentially citizens or part of a city. But that’s
not true. Human longings point beyond one’s own country and can’t
be satisfied by any kind of political dedication or success. It’s finally
undignified or untruthful for a Roman to identify himself or his fate
with Rome. Augustine didn’t deny there was a certain nobility or
dignity of citizens who subordinated their selfish interests for their
country’s common good. But even or especially the best Romans
were looking in the wrong place for genuine personal security and
significance or immortality. They were looking in the wrong place for
personal meaning or transcendence or perfection. 2
The polytheism of civil theology was also undignified insofar as
it was an offense against the human mind. It required that educated
men degrade themselves by feigning belief in unbelievable gods
and engage in a futile effort to fend off moral deterioration as their
country became more sophisticated. Such efforts were also degrading
to others; they opposed the particular human being’s efforts to free
himself from what are finally selfish communal illusions. Civil theology,
by defining us as citizens and nothing more, hides from us the
dignity that all human beings share in common.
Sophisticated Greeks and Romans, Augustine adds, rejected the
gods of their country for nature’s God, the God of the philosophers.
But that growth in theological sophistication in the direction of impersonal
monotheism was only ambiguously progress. All reasonable
theology is monotheistic; the orderly universe and essentially equal
human beings must be governed by a single God. But Augustine still
saw two problems with nature’s God. First, he is too distant or too
impersonal to provide any real support for the moral duties of particular
human beings; dignified personal action or personal existence
can’t be based on a God that is finally not a “who” but a “what.”
Second, natural theology is based on the premise that the human