Dignidade humana

"We speak today very easily, if not always sincerely, of the intrinsic dignity of every human person. For us, this is merely a received piety, and one of immemorial authority. And yet, if we take the time to wonder just how old a moral intuition it is, there is a good chance that our historical imagination will carry us only as far back as the “Age of Enlightenment” and the epoch of the “Rights of Man.” But our modern notion that there is such a thing as innate human worth, r...esiding in every individual of every class and culture, is at best the very late consequence of a cultural, conceptual, and moral revolution that erupted many centuries earlier, and in the middle of a world that was anything but hospitable to its principles. And I am tempted to think that the nature of that revolution became visible for the first time only in the tale of Peter’s tears. We cannot quite see it, of course. For us, it does not stand out as an extraordinary moment in the larger narrative. We expect Peter to weep; more to the point, we expect the narrator to record the fact. After all, Peter’s humanity is our own, and so we do not hesitate to recognize his grief as ours also. It is all quite obvious to us: Peter’s shattering realization of the immensity of his failure, his hopeless devotion to his beloved master, the certain knowledge that he will never have a chance to retract his words or seek Christ’s forgiveness for his cowardice. To us, the story would probably seem incomplete if this detail were missing. But that is not how things would have seemed to most of the contemporaries of the evangelists. At least, among the literate classes of late antiquity, to call attention to Peter’s grief would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy, nor could his sorrow possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it a suitable subject of either a poet or a historian. If a peasant’s weeping possessed any interest at all, it might be as an occasion for cruel mirth. Tragic dignity was the exclusive property of the nobly born. It was the great literary critic Erich Auerbach, many decades ago, who perhaps most powerfully called attention to the singularity of the story in the context of late antique literature. According to his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, when one compares this scene to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers that only in Peter can one glimpse “the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.” Yet Peter is a peasant from Galilee, a rural backwater in an obscure and barbarous colonial territory. This was not merely a lapse of good taste; it was an act of rebellion."
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Human Dignity Was a Rarity Before Christianity | Church Life Journal

David Bentley Hart of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study recaptures the oddness of Christianity’s universalization of human dignity.

churchlife.nd.edu