This comprehensive review article written with my friend Xavier Symons, director of the Plunkett Center for Ethics in Sydney, Australia and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, got thousands of hits within a short time after it's appearance on September 3, 2025 in The New Bioethics!... Not bad for a geeky academic work!
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Narrative Medicine: "Reading" Patients When Illiteracy is What Afflicts Them: A reflection
My commentary on an article from The Intima that described the gradual unfolding of a "diagnosis" of illiteracy in a patient whose care was complicated and delayed by his inability to navigate hospital signage...
Narrative Medicine: Flo owned a beauty shop...
Published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Intima, a leading journal of narrative medicine, the article recounts the story of "Flo", a patient with a difficult-to-diagnose, unintentionally self-inflicted illness.
"Death" at 50: Ernest Becker and the Immortality Project
Shortly after my article appeared in Public Discourse, the New York Times also commemorated the 50th anniversary of Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death". They made it to print just before the end of the year...
Public Discourse October 4, 2023
Even though hardly a day passes without new descriptions of killing and dying–both fictional and factual–invading our consciences, so many of us still choose to remain inattentive to the simple fact that we will all die. This inattentiveness is perhaps the fatal flaw of our culture: some are beginning to believe that death can be overcome with technology; many others–especially those of us enjoying the comforts of affluent Western societies–are distracted by our material prosperity.
The ancients realized that the consideration of our mortality is the beginning of wisdom. In the Apology of Socrates, Plato frames the issue in simple terms:
Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have only a dreamless sleep, or, as we are told, it is really a change–a transfer of the soul from this place to some other. But which it is, God alone knows.
The postmodern footnote to Plato’s assertion might be best summarized by the life and work of the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. In his 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker synthesized and expanded on a long tradition of existential philosophy and humanistic psychology that identified death–understood as annihilation–as “the worm at the core” of the human psyche. His book also sparked a renewed scholarly interest in “fear of death” as a fundamental driver of human action.
According to Becker, the tension generated by our instinct for self-preservation on one hand and the inevitability of our death on the other causes a profound crisis. If we do not resolve this crisis and instead repress thoughts of death, a corrosive “death anxiety” results. This “death anxiety” leads some people to a paralyzing terror and others to a vigorous search for coping strategies. Coping, in this context, means constructing social systems whose purpose is to overcome the dread of personal annihilation, thus facilitating our denial of death.
Becker says that we seek a symbolic personal immortality through cultural worldviews that offer meaning, solutions that offer hope of an existence beyond the here and now. These “immortality projects” are a way of “striving for the heroic,” taking part in activities that lead us to believe we are something more than our physical bodies, someone who won’t just disappear. Failure to deny death through some heroic achievement leads to debilitating levels of stress, anxiety, and eventually, to despair. Becker writes:
We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.
Immortality–for Becker, understood as the desire for a perfect world–compels humans to plan and execute grand projects and great adventures, to leave our mark in the world. Doing so inevitably leads to conflict. Most of the evil we do to ourselves and to the earth results from the clashing of rival immortality projects. Were he alive today, Becker might note that the tensions generated by the decline of our Judeo-Christian civilization and the postmodern ascendancy (the new world order and “the Great Reset”) would serve as a case in point.
We are now fifty years out from the publication of Becker’s work, and it is undeniable that many contemporary scholars have built careers on developing his premise that the basic motivation for human behavior is the need to control the terror that results from discovering that one day we will cease to be.
Six years after the publication of The Denial of Death, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published Broken Connections: On Death and the Continuity of Life, his attempt to explore the place of death in the human imagination. He described his purpose as follows:
The spirit of the work is captured in a parable of the Jewish reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve story told by Nahum Glatzer. According to Glatzer, that description of man and woman being extruded from the Garden of Eden was not a “fall” but a “rise.” It meant “becoming human,” that is, “giving up immortality for knowledge.” For becoming human meant both surrendering ignorance of death (the state of other animals) and the expectation of living forever (a prerogative only of God). “Knowledge” in our sense is the capacity of the symbolizing imagination to explore the idea of death and relate it to a principle of life continuity–that is, the capacity for culture. The parable thus depicts an exchange of literal for symbolic immortality.
This book is a culmination of Lifton’s academic interest in death that began with psychological examinations of egregious acts of violence during World War II–those perpetrated by Nazi doctors on prisoners, and by the US government on the population of Hiroshima–eventually attempting to connect war and violence with the subconscious fear of death. Lifton observed that a “death imprint” could be found in survivors of these atrocities, suggesting that repeated, close-up witnessing of death and destruction generated vivid and indelible images of death in their minds, images they were forced to confront at every moment of their lives.
The distinguished Stanford University psychiatrist and professed atheist Irvin Yalom understood death as existential obliteration and identified it as one of the four key challenges that haunt the daily lives of human beings. The others, he posited, are isolation or loneliness, the experience of the absence of an external structure (an experience he called “freedom”), and a world of uncertain meaning. Yalom believed that most mental illness stems from the inability to manage or confront one or more of these challenges, a powerlessness that would eventually lead to inaction, inauthenticity, avoidance of change, stagnation, and a deepening sense of meaninglessness. On the other hand, attempting to derive meaning from a terminal and meaningless existence poses its own challenges: a catch-22 that easily devolves into nihilism and despair.
Like Becker and Lifton, Yalom’s existential psychotherapy is rooted in the work of nineteenth-century existential philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, fathers of a movement that rebelled against the tradition of seeking order and structure in the world. They suggested that, as humans, it is up to us to find meaning in what is largely a meaningless universe, embrace our meaningless existence, and use our will to choose and fulfill our own purpose.
In 1986, three American social psychologists–Tom Pyszcznski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg–published their “terror management theory” inspired by the work of Becker and Yalom. They postulated that a repressed awareness of death and fear of annihilation are the root causes of most social conflicts today. Their theory inspired a broad current of empirical research in social science and psychology that continues today. Empirical support for “terror management theory” from experiments carried out through the 1990s offered hard data in support of Becker’s insights. Hundreds of studies and thousands of papers have been published since 1986, many proposing that religion is simply a way of adopting a cultural worldview that aspires to achieve symbolic immortality. Cultures, which are usually founded on religious claims, collectivize individual fear and loneliness into a communal exercise. The fear of “existential obliteration” leads us to invent God and a hereafter as a way of coping with our inevitable disappearance.
Ernest Becker began his academic career as a professed atheist, but he was no mortal enemy of religion. Like Plato, he suggested that reason and science can’t give us the answers we seek when confronting death. He concluded The Denial of Death by claiming that behind human yearning, behind our fear of annihilation, there was a driving force: a mystery that could not be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism.
A year later, in his work Spectrum of Loneliness, Becker wrote: “One’s existence is a question which must be answered. And the answer can never come from oneself. A life can only be validated by some kind of ‘beyond’ which explains it and in which it is immersed.” Published the year of his own death, the work seems to punctuate the course of Becker’s own personal transformation from atheist to believer.
Becker’s life ended on March 6, 1974, at the age of 49, but not before he was able to give a deathbed interview to the philosopher and academic Sam Keen for the journal Psychology Today. Becker began the conversation by saying, “Well, now I’m in extremis, and you can see how a philosopher dies.” He went on to explicitly profess his belief in God:
I would want to insist that my awakening to the divine had to do with the loss of character armor. For the child, the process of growing up involves a masking over of fears and anxieties by the creation of character armor. Since the child feels powerless and very vulnerable, he has to reinforce his power by plugging into another source of power. I look at it in electrical-circuit terms. Father, mother, or the cultural ideology becomes his unconscious power source. We all live by delegated powers. We are utterly dependent on other people. In personality breakdown, what is revealed to the person is that he is not his own person.
Thirty-two years after the Becker interview, Keen acknowledged the powerful impact this deathbed conversation had on him. “I’ve never ceased to be moved by it . . . He was a man who thought with everything in him, everything in him. There was none of the dilettante in him, there was none of the academic game player,” he recalled. “He thought with his life.”
So it seems that for Becker–and hopefully for all of us–the end of life may involve a true illumination: a clear perception that death may not be the end, and in fact, it may be the beginning. Becker’s experience of dying involved a recovery of lost innocence, a “growing up” to become a child. He discovered that innocence is recovered by letting go of the protective armor we create for ourselves through fear and anxiety, brought on, perhaps, by an inability to acknowledge our radical vulnerability and utter dependence on others.
By embracing the fact that we do not belong to ourselves, we are not “our own person,” we may discover that responsibility for our dignity in both life and death belongs to God and to others, as it does to our own choices. The acknowledgment of human vulnerability and dependence may well be the antidote to the fear and anxiety at the root of the modern denial of death.
BOOK REVIEW: We all have to die. Why have we forgotten how to die well?
The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom by Lydia Dugdale, HarperOne, 2020, 272 pages
Hardly a day passes without new descriptions of killing and dying -- both fictional and factual -- invading our consciences, and yet so many of us still choose to postpone consideration of our own death. The practical neglect of the obvious fact of our mortality seems to be a distinctively post-modern and Western phenomenon that has become an important source of suffering and despair. This is the central irony that Dr Lydia Dugdale identifies in The Lost Art of Dying and the contradiction she seeks to resolve. The consideration of death is the beginning of wisdom, so why do we live without it?
She writes from the perspective of an academic internist, who -- in the course of her work with the sick -- has identified manifestations of a kind of malady that affects both patients and their doctors. Its symptoms may be subtle and vary widely, but they rise to the surface acutely when mortality imposes itself: families who insist on repeated attempts to resuscitate dying relatives, doctors who offer patients treatment with no hope of real benefit, neglected elderly sick who die lonely and alone, occasional requests for help in dying. Fortunately, these accounts are not necessarily the norm, but neither are they rare events. There are other experiences with persons who die “well”: well accompanied, at times joyful, and grateful for the time their illness has provided to reflect and make amends.
The examples offered by Dr Dugdale of people facing death resonate well with the observations of Dr Balfour Mount, the Canadian surgeon who became a palliative care physician after his own cancer diagnosis. Dr Mount’s work identified the character traits of patients who experienced either persistent anguish and existential distress from their illness, or those who were able to discover wholeness and integrity in it. He found that traits such as a sense of connection to others and meaning in life, the capacity to find peace in the present moment, the experience of a non-adversarial connection to the disease, and the ability to choose one’s attitude before adversity rather than to exert control over it were all associated with healing through illness: a good death. Clearly, achieving this perspective on death is hard work that should not be left to the very end.
Over the course of nine chapters, the journey with Dugdale begins with “Death”, ends in “Life” and pivots on the chapter entitled “Fear”. For Dugdale, it’s the “fear of death” that explains the varied symptoms of despair demonstrated by patients and doctors today. When we are afraid, the reaction to “fight” or “flight” takes over. We “fight” by showing anger, directed at times toward family, professionals attempting to help, or the impersonal “system” surrounding us. Anger may express sadness over lost goals and frustrated plans, or may become a means to “endure”, to hang on, to survive at all costs. Using the language of war to refer to our engagement with illness reflects the same fearful attitude toward death: “His grandfather was battling pneumonia. My friend is a cancer survivor. I’m going to beat this infection. She’s a fighter; she’s going to kick this disease. And so forth. We march forward, as determined as military generals, reminding our loved ones and ourselves that there is no reason to fear the enemy. We have the strongest health-care system of all time; no disease can conquer us.”
Among the more frequent expressions of “flight” in response to imminent death, is the attempt to control its time and circumstances. Assisted suicide provides an escape for those who do not wish to fight death but still want control. Perceptively, Dugdale describes the existential threat of a life-threatening illness in the following terms: “When the natural world threatens, we take refuge in homes and cities. But when sickness threatens, we become homeless. Our own bodies evict us as if we were no longer welcome. Our frames fail, our minds grow dim. Our stamina falters, our work suffers. This, in turn, threatens our carefully constructed fortresses of security. As our physical space closes in, we stop being able to appreciate the beauty of the world. (…) Sickness makes our bodies inhospitable. But it also estranges us from our ideological framework. It is no longer enough to work hard. Ambition seems foolhardy, and prestigious careers offer false salvation. Stripped of our illusions, we find ourselves existentially isolated in our brokenness -- perplexed in body and spirit.” To escape the perplexity, one should learn to abandon our flawed subjective appraisals of what is “important” and attend to the immediate reality of one’s new circumstances.
To die well becomes easier if we grapple early and often with existential questions rather than avoid them. In Dugdale’s account, modern medicine is incapable of offering much help. We have become purveyors of hope through pills and infusions: “providers” rather than “healers”. What is needed instead is common sense: to recover a “lost art” based on the simple premise that people go somewhere forever after they die, and so they should live each day in a way that would help them look forward to a happy transition. Written manuals offering practical advice to help the dying prevailed for 500 years throughout the West as a popular literary tradition. The “Ars moriendi” -- we learn -- began during the European “black death”, probably the nastiest and most persistent pandemic among the many that swept through the peoples of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Two-thirds of the European population died horribly from a disease they could not escape and before which they were powerless. The stench of death was everywhere. And so everyone was directly affected and engaged. In response, a thoughtful and systematic approach to help the dying was proposed for the first time at the Council of Constance (1414 to 1418) by Jean Charlier Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris.
The intent was to offer practical advice for use at the bedside. The result was an explosion of self-help manuals advising those who cared for the dying. They identified the most common temptations encountered at the end of life -- disbelief, despair, impatience, pride and avarice -- and measures to relieve them. They suggested prayers for the dying; acknowledged that the death of an individual affected and so involved the entire community; and emphasized the need to prepare for death long before it happened. And back then -- as today -- it could happen quickly with little warning.
So what happened about 100 years ago that led to the death of the art of dying? We could call it a slowly progressive, insidious pandemic of “affluenza”: the malaise that results from relying entirely on the pursuit of material wealth to achieve happiness. Scientific and industrial revolutions and the prosperity that gradually followed meant that human beings were less subject to the whims of nature. Food and clothing became easy to acquire and replace. Adequate shelter, running water and electricity were eventually assumed by almost everyone. No mystery or threat nature could present seemed beyond the reach of human reason. Once common, often fatal infectious diseases were cured with antibiotics -- beginning with the discovery of penicillin in 1928 -- the average human lifespan more than doubled, at least in developed countries. And the trend toward longer life spans is expected to continue. Today, we can speak without exaggeration of cures for many cancers. The conquest of death -- our mortal enemy -- seems within reach. And thus medicine becomes a means to rescue the doomed. Replacement organs, dialysis machines and ventilators are like life vests for the drowning. “Doctors love to be rescuers, heroes who descend from on high to fight evil disease and liberate patients in distress.
It is part of our common mythology. The bioethicist Howard Brody says that this ‘rescue fantasy is a power trip: it envisions the physician having the power to snatch the patient from the jaws of death.’ (…) For their part, patients seek a rescuer to release them from their life-destroying maladies. (…) The physician’s compulsion to rescue fuels the patient’s burning desire to be rescued, which again stokes the doctors rescue fantasy.” A host of forces -- cultural, economic, technological -- have conspired to medicalize the dying process. Fewer people today die at home surrounded by loved ones. Many die in sterile, standardized institutions run by strangers, at times clinging to false hope of survival that medicine is not able to satisfy.
So is death annihilation or is it just a short nap after which we awaken in the arms of Love? That is the question. Dugdale contends that our best chance to resolve the dilemma is by careful, persistent reflection on the meaning and purpose of life: “the art of dying is really the art of living.” This insightful book accurately describes the widespread dysfunction that occurs when we are distracted from the consideration of our own mortality. It would be great if Dr Dugdale’s next book might offer a specific, practical road map -- a modern Ars moriendi -- to help us help the dying.
Recovering Human Dignity
January 11, 2022 MercatorNet
Dignity is a word in crisis. It is used often in law, ethics and ordinary conversation, yet despite the ubiquity of the term, and the intuition that it rightly describes an aspect of being human, it remains to be seen whether using the word is - in practice - a helpful means to define the parameters of ethical action. For some scholars, “dignity” is incoherent rhetoric, a kind of slogan improperly smuggled into bioethics by religious people who oppose moral autonomy and wish to block progress in medical research. “Dignity” - according to these scholars - is nothing more or less than respect for individual autonomy, and so no other words are needed to describe an established principle of bioethics. Dignity is the property of a being who exercises his or her moral preference without undue constraints. This “autonomy paradigm” of human dignity is rooted in Enlightenment philosophical traditions, which have evolved toward materialist and utilitarian worldviews. For others, every human being without exception possesses an intrinsic, God-given, inviolable dignity which serves as the reliable foundation of human equality and as a safeguard to ensure that scientists respect and serve every human being and not some at the expense of others. This group promotes the “image and likeness” paradigm of human dignity rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition. One is a dignity grounded on the prerogatives of subjective preferences, where truth is defined by consensus of majorities. The other is a dignity grounded on transcendence, where human beings can discover the truth by responding to the invitation of a personal God to love Him and one another. “Love” is understood as one person taking responsibility for the dignity of another. The confrontation of these two approaches might be considered the fault line of today’s dignity debates.
The many meanings of “dignity"
Over the course of history, beginning with the first known use of the term -
dignus or dignitas - by Stoic philosophers in the 2nd century BCE, uses of the
word “dignity” have varied, but they all might exist on a plane defined by
three points, or words.
The notion of worth implies the appreciation of an inherent value within a human being. There is something constitutive of an individual which elicits reverence, honour, or special consideration. This point might include Kantian notions of dignity: worth based on the capacity to will our own ends and the duty to make our choices worthy of our unique moral standing. The “image and likeness” paradigm of the Judeo-Christian tradition would also be included here. The notion of status implies value assigned to the person externally, by a group or society. It is being honoured or honourable. Here we could include Cicero’s stoic conception of dignity linked to the possession of authority; or status conferred by the exercise of power. Although he never offered a comprehensive treatment of the notion of dignity, Thomas Aquinas’ sporadic references to dignity included senses linked to the status of authority – the dignity of a particular office or role – as well as dignity associated with being in one’s proper place in the cosmos, a hierarchical sense of dignity that could be applied to human persons, animals, and even non-sentient objects. There is a “dignity” to be found in “order”: it belongs to the being that fulfils its proper purpose by being in its proper place. Thomas Hobbes emphasized the “status” of a human being - his dignity - as completely “dependent upon the need and judgement of another”. The value of a human being for Hobbes is completely relative: it is the arbitrary price that social consensus might set on a particular human life. Your dignity is your “market value”, your “productivity” in society. The notion of bearing would include the possession of certain external, observable characteristics: a dignified bearing suggests being restrained in one’s behaviour, exhibiting a proper comportment, “stuffiness”, showing no exaggerated emotion. This is dignity as “gravitas”. Stoic philosophers like Cicero and Seneca rooted dignity in rationality: humans possessed dignity insofar as their actions were guided by reason and reflection as opposed to their impulsive, disordered appetites. Not all men could achieve this, and so for the ancients, dignity was not a universal attribute of every human being, but only of some. Here we could also include more contemporary notions of dignity founded on capacities: dementia, disfigurement, incontinence, excessive dependency on others might be assessed as a loss of dignity based on loss of dignified bearing, or acquiring discapacities which make us externally unseemly. Historically, these varied senses of “dignity” seemed to narrow after the massive violations that occurred during the industrial revolution of the late 19th century and under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. It was during this time that Catholic magisterial teaching seemed to elevate “human dignity” - expressed through the “image and likeness” paradigm – as a valuable concept for arguing against those abuses. As a term of art, the word “dignity” arrived late to the lexicon of Christian intellectuals, and today, mostly in response to perceived affronts to our special status.
Christian dignity: lived first, then defined
With the arrival of Christianity, a new and very different understanding of the meaning of human existence entered history and gradually drove the shift from a pagan anthropology toward a Judeo-Christian anthropology. This shift was driven by an implicit understanding among believers of what we call today “human dignity”: they affirmed with deeds the infinite value of each and every human being. From Antiquity to the Renaissance, Christian intellectuals might not have used the word “dignitas” very often, but it is indisputable that early Christians - whether intellectuals or not - thought and acted in ways that reflected a new and distinctive appreciation of the special status of every human being. This was most clearly expressed in their care for the weak and vulnerable, and their refusal to abandon the sick during pandemics, practices which eventually resulted in a more organized system of hospices and hospitals, and in rational scientific inquiry attempting to understand the root causes of diseases affecting humanity. Lacking the more sophisticated scientific understanding of human biology that we enjoy today, they lived out an anthropology of human dignity without calling it that. The Judeo-Christian notion of human dignity is founded on the rare scriptural references to man as created in the “image and likeness” of God, words that appear only three times in the Hebrew Bible (Gen 1:26-27; Gen 5:1, and Gen 9:6) but are referred to often in the works of early Christian intellectuals. By “image” we can understand the accurate reflection of a being - a copy, as in a mirror or a photo - and “likeness” as a “re-presentation” of that being, a “re-production”: recognizable but fundamentally inexact.
Because being human implies possession of spiritual faculties - memory, a rational intellect, free will, the capacity to love - every human being is the “image” of God. The relationship between the original and its image expresses the relationship between God and humans: there is no intermediary between them. God participates immediately in the creation of each human being. We reflect or “image” the being of God. Insofar as humans are images of God, we can re-present the likeness of God in time and space, “enabling” God’s presence in the created world in a way no other creature can, with an active and responsible role, yet inexact and flawed. Through the proper exercise of reason and freedom, we can add certain perfections to material things, and so it may be said that human beings are – or at least should be - “co-creators” with God in the perfecting of the material order. Writing over 1500 years ago, Peter Chrysologus, an early Christian intellectual, speaks to us eloquently of human dignity, but never needs to use the word: ...Why then, man, are you so worthless in your own eyes and yet so precious to God? Why render yourself such dishonour when you are honoured byHim? Why do you ask how you were created and do not seek to know why you were made? …
Was not this entire visible universe made for your dwelling? ….
He has made you in his image that you might in your person make the invisible Creator present on earth; he has made you his legate, so that the vast empire of the world might have the Lord's representative.
Then in his mercy, God assumed what he made in you; he wanted now to be truly manifest in man, just as he had wished to be revealed in man as in an image. Now he would be in reality what he had submitted to be in symbol. In encouraging his audience to view themselves differently, to acknowledge their own dignity, he first points to the image of God which disposes us to re-present God to the cosmos, but then suggests another dimension to dignity: God draws even closer to human beings who may now become more than just an “image” and a “likeness”.
From “image and likeness” to “ipse Christus”
His words echo in more recent documents of the Catholic Church’s teaching authority. Paragraph 7 of Dignitas personae, for example, refers to Gaudium et spes, 22: In the mystery of the Incarnation, the Son of God confirmed the dignity of the body and soul which constitute the human being. Christ did not disdain human bodyliness, but instead fully disclosed its meaning and value: “In reality, it is only in the mystery of the incarnate Word that the mystery of man truly becomes clear”. The “image and likeness” paradigm - dignity based on human nature - seems to undergo a decisive shift with the incarnation. We are brought to a very different understanding of who we are capable of becoming. With the incarnation, the human body becomes a means of divine revelation. With the incarnation, there also seems to be a shift from the universal sense of “dignity” to a particular “dignity”: all human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, are now redeemed by and transformed to Christ - perfect God and perfect Man - by means of the sacrament of baptism. This sacrament is administered once to particular members of the human species. All human beings are created by the same God. Some human beings are baptized and others are not. And so we might speak of the particular dignity of the baptized, who are spiritually transformed into “other Christs”, and potentially - we could argue - into “Christ Himself” through the action of the Holy Spirit and the free cooperation of the baptized person. It is through baptism that God “reinforces” - as it were - the original call to re-present God before creation with the responsibility not only of co-creators, but now of co-redeemers. And with this special, particular dignity comes a greater responsibility before God and before all humanity. So the particular dignity of a baptized Christian necessarily moves toward the universal: the free and responsible participation of the baptized in the redemption of all mankind and of all creation. We may be able to properly speak of the baptized as “Christ Himself”, insofar as baptism - in fact - causes the participation of a particular human being in the hypostatic union: the union of divine nature with human nature in a particular human person. The notion of the Christian as “alter Christus, ipse Christus” has precedence throughout the writings of Saint Josemaría Escrivá (1) who emphasized the universal call to holiness and apostolate; and in the moving, posthumously published writings of Gabrielle Bossis, collected in the book He and I.
So here we might propose an evolutionary step within the “image and likeness” paradigm, expressed as pre- and post-incarnational dimensions of human dignity. A natural and universal human dignity gives way to a supernatural and particular dignity with universal implications. Resemblance to God the Father, becomes identification with Christ. The entire human family is invited to share in this new and exalted dignity through the action of the baptized who cooperate with the action of the Holy Spirit.
Time for action not words?
For many bioethicists today, all this is basically nonsense. We can’t agree on what dignity means because we can’t agree on what it means to be human. Invoking the “hypostatic union” to argue for human dignity probably does not foster consensus, but only serves to entrench and polarize opposing viewpoints. Even though we could reliably trace the empiric, historical development of the “image and likeness” paradigm of dignity over millennia, the metaphysics of this paradigm becomes a stumbling block: our secular-materialist friends have a hard time appreciating a good mystery. So what good is the notion of “dignity” today? Does it unify or polarize? Perhaps it might be best to set aside the semantics and focus - like the first Christians - on actions rather than words: to break out of our autonomous self-reliance and live for others. In doing so - striving to live up to the dignity of our baptism - we may make the metaphysical - the mysterious - a visible reality in the physical world. Adapted from an oral presentation given at the Fall Conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture on November 11, 2021 (1)
(1) Antonio Aranda. El cristiano, “alter Christus, ipse Christus”, en el pensamiento del Beato Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. Scripta Theologica26: 513-570, 1994 and also Paul O’Callaghan. The inseparability of holiness and apostolate. The Christian, “alter Christus, ipse Christus”, in the writings of Blessed Josemaria Escriva. Annales theologici 16: 135-164, 2002
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