Most of us remember the story of the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It is a singularly disturbing and memorable image. I find it doubtful that Nero simply stood agape with idiot glee while the smell of burning human hair wafted over his palace. He was far too committed to the image of himself as a delicate artist for that. No, I think his evil must have had an aesthetic – almost philosophical – air to it. One pictures him deliberately and calmly playing his fiddle in accompaniment to the shrieks of the slow-footed hags who couldn’t escape the flames. It is impossible not to imagine him weeping over the beauty of his own performance as Rome of the silver towers and golden fountains, mistress of the Mediterannean and queen of cities, snowed back upon the earth as ashes. The point is not the sheer horror of it all. The point is the sheer horror combined with the artistic, intellectual, and philosophical seriousness of which Nero made a pretense. It is my contention that human rights language occupies a similar place in the modern world to Nero’s fiddling. This is not to say that the idea of human rights is evil, any more than it is to say that the fiddle was evil. It is to say that in the hands of a Nero-like culture of death, human rights talk has become at best an idle sound made while the world burns, and at worst a farce shot through with malice.

The main argument of this paper is that human rights conceived without reference to God is a mere fiction. This is because the sheer fact of shared membership in the human species does not suffice to give one rights. To recognize someone’s rights is ipso facto to recognize value of a very important kind and degree in them. But if there is no transcendent source beyond the world which values all human beings within the world, it follows that all that is required for human beings to not have value and therefore rights is that no source within the world values them. That this can and does happen is proven by past examples such as institutional slavery, historical genocides, infant exposure, black-lynchings, and the current precarious status of any fetus gestating in a womb.

This last fact is especially worth notice nowadays. Whether one hails or hates the fact, one quarter of those who are biological members of the species homo sapiens are pulled to pieces in the womb, which means that insofar as human rights exist at all, they are the rights of the other three quarters who make up a privileged class. In other words, to be human does not necessarily mean to have rights. This is where “human rights” talk begins to take on the tragi-comical character of Nero’s fiddle. My conclusion is that the only way one can posit inherent human value and rights is to say that there is a source which values all human beings even when no one else does. Since God is the only non-human contender for such a role, it follows that the only way to coherently posit human rights is to do so theologically. The implication is that without God, the idea of human rights is just magnificent-sounding nonsense.

To say that human beings have rights is to say that they have value of the most morally momentous kind. We often forget the momentousness of rights talk, but if we really believe that, e.g., the right to a fair trial is a human right and not merely a political right, then it follows averting the collapse of civilization itself is not a good enough reason for violating the right of someone to a fair trial; for they are still human, and that is the criterion for them not having their rights violated. It follows that any State which tried to violate this right would be a political body subverting a human right, and since to be human is prior to being part of the State, any such act would be tyrannous.

I am fairly confident that most ancient Greeks or Romans would have felt bad about putting someone’s head in a vice until their eyeballs popped out - even if doing so was the only way to save their village from massacre. But I am certain that no ancient Greek or Roman would have said that to do so would have violated a human right. Why is that? Because the only “rights” of past civilizations were citizen’s rights, not individual human rights. To have crucified a fellow Roman would have been to violate his rights; to crucify a meddling horde of Scythians, Gauls, or other barbaroi in the tens of thousands would not. That is because they were not citizens of Rome or another State recognized by Rome. This doesn’t mean that ancient people thought it was a good idea to show extravagant cruelty. The Greeks and Romans especially believed there was a natural justice, and that one ought to have it. But this justice didn’t have to do with rendering others’ their rights; it had to do with possessing the virtue of justice oneself, and with patting oneself on the back for being a fair-minded fellow who wouldn’t sink to the level of brutes. A typical Greek could easily have made some such speech as: “It’s true that torture is too good for those wretched Persians, but I’m not the sort of person to torture.” The Greek’s self-consciousness of his own goodness, not the outsider’s claim upon him for a certain sort of treatment, is the basis of it all. In other words, the Persian or any other outsider has no “human” rights.

Our civilization is unique in that we say that even if someone is not a citizen of one’s own State or another State recognized by one’s own, they still have rights because they are human. This would have struck any other past civilization as quite odd. For one thing, it is obvious that the reach of the State does not extend beyond the State’s powers, which would seem to imply that since laws only pertain to States, and every enforceable right exists in law, then the only human institutions capable of rendering rights are States. That is why I think an old Greek or Roman, upon being told about our human rights, would probably have said something like: “I have rights as a citizen of Corinth or Rome, and it is the duty of Corinth or Rome to render me my rights. But you come along saying that every human has rights. Whose duty is it to render you those rights: humanity? But who has jurisdiction over humanity? Rights, like lawsuits, exist only within specific bodies of law, but there is no law over all of humanity because no one has jurisdiction over all of humanity.”

So where does the idea of human rights come from? Originally from the medieval period. Back then it was called “natural rights” and was based upon a Christian version of “natural law” which said that all humans had rights because God made and owns creation, imbued human beings with sacred value, and therefore willed that they should treat each other well. Since God exercises full proprietary rights over creation, to deny natural or human rights was to disobey God, and since God created one and upholds one in being at every moment of time, to disobey God is to slip a metaphysical noose over one’s neck.

Then came the Enlightenment, when thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Mill re-drew the map of ethics and politics for all of subsequent humanity. What they really wanted was most of the ethics of Christianity without actually keeping Christianity. The Bible became a kind of Brother’s Grimm or Aesop’s Fables with useful morals, but no one wanted anything to do with all its talk of original sin, prophecies, miracles, and the need to be washed in the blood of Jesus. Immanuel Kant was perhaps the most influential Enlightenment thinker, and he saw himself as the gravedigger of classical philosophy and Christianity. Hume had woken him from his “dogmatic slumber” so that he no longer believed we could contemplate anything like the celestial beauty of eternal forms, or get revelations from God. There was thus no place for metaphysical or theological “star-gazing” anymore, since knowledge of God, the soul, the transcendent, and the eternal were shut out from us in this life. The result of this is that the impetus of philosophy shifted inward to the ethical life of action. Thus for Kant things like salvation, prayers, sacraments, the Church, etc. were subordinated to the purely moral religion of the categorical imperative. In Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the Deists, religion has likewise become the handmaiden of ethics. Ethics used to be a means to preparing for union with God. Now God has become a means for keeping people ethical. The whole idea is best expressed in Voltaire’s maxim: “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Even Marx is not so much theoretically convinced that God does not exist, as that God is no good for human affairs and therefore must not. The political or ethical “cause” (whatever it is) has now become the non-negotiable a priori which makes or unmakes all else. The legacy of this view is that in the modern world, religion must seek justification at the bar of ethics. To put it in modern parlance: truth depends on values, rather than values on truth. As in Baconian science, the task is not so much to know the world as to change it.

Whereas in the medieval period “natural” or human rights were based upon a theory of creation rooted in God, the Enlightenment god rid of any celestial or God-based theory of human rights for a secularized version which allowed religion to stick around only insofar as it fit in with the project. The Enlightenment therefore gave birth to a human rights tradition quite different from the Christian medieval one by saying that human beings, simply as human beings, possess equal and inviolable rights such as the rights to life and liberty, regardless of any questions having to do with God. The problem is that the very notion of natural or human rights was both chronologically and logically dependent upon the Judeo-Christian revelation that humans are made in the image of God, therefore possess a kind of infinite dignity, and are inviolable.ⁱ Because Western secularism is the heir to centuries of Christian thought and language as filtered through the Enlightenment, the idea of human rights has persisted even though it has been wrenched out of the context which made it intelligible in the first place. The result is that human rights discourse and sentiment persists like the lingering scent of an empty bottle.

Part Two: Rights as Predicated upon Value

This section will argue that unless a being possesses value, worth, or dignity of some sort, the notion of assigning it rights is incoherent. Secondly, it will be claimed that if God is taken out of the picture, then someone’s value, worth, or dignity will depend entirely upon their fellow humans’ estimation of them, with the corollary that their actual rights will therefore exist only at the pleasure of those in power. (As Rabbi David Novak once put it: “Truth will be defined by whoever has the biggest guns.”)ⁱⁱ

As to the first point, to say that someone has certain rights, whether negative like the right to not be unjustly killed, or positive like the right to free speech, is to say that they have some sort of value, worth, or dignity. This is because to claim that someone has rights is to make them an object of regard and concern. To be concerned and manifest regard to something is to treat them as valuable. And to show concern and regard beyond just mere care and all the way up to giving them full rights is to claim that they have value of the highest variety. In the jargon of moral philosophers, to be an object of concern or regard is to possess moral status, a being which possesses moral status is called a moral patient, to be a moral patient is minimally to be an object of care and maximally to be an object of rights, and a moral patient who possesses rights is considered a person in the morally and legally relevant sense.

To be a rights-bearer is therefore to be a person, with the corollary that one possesses just about the highest value, worth, or dignity that can be imagined. It might be useful to point out that the word “value” can be used intransitively as a predicate, or transitively as a verb. When we say “That has value,” we are using the first sense of value. When we say “I value that,” we are using the second sense. For ease of reference, I will refer to these as Value 1 and Value 2, respectively.

If follows from this that the only basis for objecting to the destruction of something is an appeal to its value. Note well that the sheer conferral of rights upon someone already implies that they have value, for it means that their welfare ought to be provided for, which in turn implies they are being treated as an object of regard and as such, are being valued. Now if something is without value either in the sense of possessing no value in itself or in the sense of not being valued by anyone, then to object to its destruction will be seen as unintelligible. For in that case, whether one uses the word or not, what is then being spoken of is waste and this is precisely because no case for valuing it can conceivably be made out.

Before applying this claim to human beings, it will be interesting to look at objects less morally charged for the sake of analysis. Here we might ask: e.g., if no one valued diamonds, gold, stars, beaches, or animals, would they be valuable? The question is not whether they ought to be valued but whether they still would possess value, since if they did not possess value one could not say that they ought to be valued except with reference to something else valued, which just brings us back to the original question. But this just raises the further problem of how something can possess value or worth (Value 1) if it is not valued or esteemed (Value 2). All our prejudices are against thinking that something or someone’s worth or value is contingent upon their being esteemed or valued, and as a matter of normative ethics, this is rightly so. But when it comes to meta-ethical conceptual analysis, a little probing is required.

The difficulty here being exposed consists in the fact that terms like value, worth, and dignity have to do with estimation, approbation, and being pleased-with; and are therefore inherently personal terms not empirically deducible from impersonal matters of fact. That is why even if a chemist could demonstrate the superior rarity, subtlety, and complexity of gold over copper, he could not prove by science or mathematics that the former was worth more or more valuable. Likewise the biologist’s proof to the effect that humans have a much more complex brain than that of the higher primates, while it is relevant to the question of human worth, is not itself a proof of human worth.

It is here that the counter-intuitive claim will be made that something cannot possess value or worth (Value 1) unless it is valued or esteemed by somebody (Value 2). Though counter-intuitive, this is proved from the fact that valuation or estimation cannot be present where personality is absent, since impersonal objects cannot value or esteem other objects. Hence value and estimation identify that upon the basis of which we object to the abuse of something – or, ultimately – someone. In fact, to intelligibly speak of “abusing,” “misusing,” or “maltreating” someone at all is to assume from the outset that they possess value, worth, and dignity. This is because what conceptually distinguishes abuse and misuse from proper use, treating well from maltreating, and rendering rights from infringing them, is the notion that someone deserves and therefore ought to be treated well, and this in turn is an indication that they are believed to have value. That is why, e.g., one does not speak of “abusing” a piece of asphalt, of “maltreating” dust, or of taking away the “rights” of a bag of garbage.

To return to the original example, it follows that diamonds or gold would not be valuable if there were not someone to value them, since their valuation depends upon some will or other, and a universe which lacked a personality capable of willing and therefore of appreciating and valuing would mean that the very notion of value would be unintelligible. In other words, Value 1 depends upon Value 2. Notice this does not mean that human beings would need to exist to value diamonds or gold for us to say that they are valuable, for a doctrine of creation implies that whatever God creates he values and therefore that every created thing has value prior to the human entrance upon the scene. But since God is personal and not impersonal, this just illustrates the prior point that value and worth are personality-dependent terms.

If one moves the question from aesthetics to ethics, and from the non-human to the human, it is at once seen that similar problems are posed. Most human beings are valued by someone and therefore most human beings have someone to object on their behalf if they are maltreated on the basis of a real or imagined infringement of their rights. This raises the question of what to believe if someone is valued by no one else. Are they valueless and therefore may they be treated as waste? If not, why not?

One possible reason for saying one’s value is not dependent upon other’s valuing is to say that if a person values himself then presumably he still has value since the personality-dependent requirement of valuation is still present with the oddity that it is embedded solely in their own personality. Thus Value 1 is still dependent upon Value 2, but it is self-referential rather than other-referential. But what if they are neither valued by anybody else nor do they value themselves, as is the case with a non-conscious fetus, newborn infant, severely handicapped person, or the elderly with crippling dementia? What purely secular or this-worldly objection could there be to viewing such a person as being without value, since they are neither valued by others nor do they value themselves, and therefore of treating them as such? If one considers the matter carefully, the only possible answer is: no good objection.

Some pro-lifers speak as though the inherent capacity for rationality and consciousness which human nature possesses is enough to ensure inherent value and to confer the rights proper to personhood even where the normal functions of personality are absent. Seeking to defend such a position, John Finnis speaks of “radical” versus “present” capacity.ⁱⁱⁱ Thus an English-speaker has the “present” capacity to speak English, and the “present” capacity to learn and then speak Icelandic. But as a fetus, that same person would not have had the “present” capacity to speak or learn any language; and yet it still would have had the “radical” capacity by virtue of its nature to do so. Thus some sort of capacity is still present in such a way as to relevantly distinguish between the rights and value of, e.g., a human fetus and a mouse fetus.

But there is no solution along these lines. For it ought to be obvious that a “capacity” which cannot function is not yet a capacity, since one cannot be “capable” of doing what one cannot do. This “radical” capacity in plain English is really just the potential to attain a “present” capacity. To be sure, that potential is inherent to the species that individual belongs to; but it is still merely a potential. No doubt one may even speak of it as a dynamic rather than static potential, where “static” potential is like the potential of an arrow in a quiver to be shot at a bull’s eye, and “dynamic” potential is like the potential of an arrow perfectly shot and in flight to hit the bull’s eye. But however “directed” or “dynamic” this potential to attain the capacity for rationality is, the fact that it is merely potential returns one to the original problem that the potential for a trait that confers moral status and rights is just that: a potential, and therefore so are the moral status and rights that go with it.^iv

I hope I am as convinced a pro-lifer as any man out there, but the foregoing means that while the pro-life position may be true, it is not not, to my knowledge, provable to those who deny a theistic Creator God, and who thereby render the notion of inherent human value absurd. The fact that even Plato and Aristotle could not see what was wrong with leaving a retarded infant in the cold to die of exposure or be eaten by ravens means we shouldn’t be too confident about the ability of heathen humanity to all act like closet Christians. Those of us who have been misled to the contrary ought to re-read Romans 1.

This means that on secular terms there is no such thing as the inherent value of human life,^v and therefore that the rights talk based on that assumption is itself mistaken. The reason for that mistake is that Western society for centuries believed that humans had intrinsic value and therefore inviolable rights because they were made in the image of God. The Enlightenment got rid of the metaphysics that made this view possible, but wanted to keep the normative conclusion behind it.^vi That this loss of theistic metaphysics will lead to the ruination of human personhood will be seen from the following example. The ancients thought that trees and springs were sacred because dryads and nymphs dwelt in them, but such a view has long-since been rejected. No one believes there is a spirit in a tree anymore; it is only so much wood. Likewise Judeo-Christian revelation saw the human person as sacred because an immortal soul made in God’s image was housed there. In addition to this, to say that Christ is God, that we are made in God’s image, that Christ became a man, and died for human beings even while we were God’s enemies, is to give the highest form of endorsement to human dignity. If that does not make human life sacred, no metaphysical latticework will.

Once such a view is lost, the notion of personhood loses the metaphysical grounding which created it, and the human being is reduced to mere biology, as the tree without the dryad became reduced to mere wood. The woods were demythologized of their dryads when secular reasoning made nature into its object, and now that human beings have become the objects of secular reasoning, our bodies are being demythologized of their souls.

The consequences of this are very grave, as even a passing acquaintance with 20th century history - or even today’s secular bioethics - shows. Many Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials appealed to the fact that they passed legislation as a sovereign nation state make legal what others had deemed abominable. The argument was that this justified the Holocaust because it took place according to the laws of Germany as a sovereign state. They challenged their Western judges by in effect asking: “Are you saying that there is a law above our law?”^vii It would not do to say international law supersedes German law, for no one thought the reason why the Holocaust was evil was that international law might make out a case to the effect. The truth was exactly the reverse, and if international law had endorsed German law, the Nazi question: “Is there a law above our law?” would still remain. In effect, it would be more ultimate, and would mean: “Is there a law above human law? Is there a higher reckoning?” Notice how difficult it is to answer this question affirmatively on secular grounds.

Once demythologized of their dryads the groves were no longer sacred, and could be cut down to make way for roads or houses. When human persons are no longer sacred, they too will be gotten out of the way if inconvenient, or pillaged for stem cells, or tinkered with genetically. That is why it might be said that secular humanism is something like a benevolent oxymoron. In retaining the dignity of personhood while divorcing it from the metaphysics which makes such dignity possible, it suppresses the cause and demands the effect, like someone who castrates and then bids the eunuch be fruitful.

Part Three: What of the Natural Law Tradition?

The foregoing may seem to a denial of the Catholic natural law tradition. For it was common to that tradition to believe that certain moral norms were accessible to all people apart from revelation. From Francisco Suarez, who pioneered international law in the Renaissance, to Jacques Maritain, who helped draft the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Catholic ethicists have often tried to make natural law the background to natural rights, or what we would now call human rights.^viii They have done this by interpreting natural law to be that portion of valid morality which is known to reason alone without divine revelation. Since this is precisely all that secularists have, they were in theory the perfect audience for natural law arguments; and since natural rights or human rights was an offshoot of earlier natural law thinking, it seemed that there was a felicitous correlation.

Theologians who utilize natural law for such purposes often fasten onto Aquinas’ claim that the inter-human commandments of the Decalogue are identical to the primary precepts of the natural law. This leads to the notion that while the “First Tablet” of the Law stipulating duties to God belongs to a “special” revelation of which the gentiles are ignorant, the “Second Tablet” of the Law stipulating duties to neighbor belongs to a “general” revelation which they have access to by reason alone. Since the First Tablet of “special” revelation deals with the transcendent or supernatural and corresponds to the “theological” virtues, and the Second Tablet of “general” revelation deals with the immanent or natural and corresponds to the “cardinal” virtues, this strategy seems to make sense. The “natural” duties and virtues seem to correspond to “natural” law, and the “theological” duties and virtues seem to correspond to “divine” law. Thus natural law theorists such as Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and J. Budziszewski, proceeding from the notion that the Second Tablet prohibition of murder is entailed by the cardinal virtue of justice and is self-evident to all human beings, try to prove that fetuses are human beings in the expectation that such a proof necessitates the prohibition of abortion as a matter of justice.^ix The problem with such an approach is that even if it is true that both biblical believers and secularists would agree that, e.g., murder ought to be prohibited, the fact remains that these audiences strongly disagree on who is a person, and therefore on who is protected by the prohibition of murder.

This means that a difference in metaphysical anthropology makes what looks like an agreement in normative ethics come falling apart at the level of applied ethics. The notion of personhood is pre-moral and pre-political, for it defines in advance who constitutes the “we” to whom morality and politics are addressed. Thus even if gentiles or secularists agreed with believers as to a list of moral precepts, it would matter very little if they did not agree about who they were to be applied to. The fact that the ancient Romans prohibited murder was of no comfort to Gauls or Scythians, since to slaughter the barbaroi in the tens of thousands was not morally problematic to a people for whom the only “persons” in the sense of “rights-bearers” were citizens of their own polity, or of another polity legally recognized by their own.^x

Although the list of Unpersons has been modified over time, the fact of Unpersons has not. Nor can it be solved by natural law, for natural law concerns how people ought to relate to each other. The question of who is a person is therefore strictly prior to natural law. This is especially true when a distinction is made between “human beings” and “human persons.” For in that case, possession of a human nature does not necessarily make one a person. With those fortunately normal human beings who think all humans are persons, I have no quarrel. My quarrel is with: a) those Christians who think they can prove inherent value, rights, and personhood using the functionally atheistic metaphysics of secular reasoning, and b) those absurd secular humanists who jingoistically repeat the cant of human rights while contradicting themselves at all points through their pro-choice advocacy, and who have no metaphysical basis for their human rights anyway, since human rights is just a napkin filched from the Christianity’s table. These are those modern aesthetes who fiddle while Rome burns.

Part Four: Towards a Coherent Basis for Human Rights

It has been claimed that if there is no God, then there are no human rights. Since most human rights discourse does not invoke or appeal to God, this claim reinforces Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous remark that “universal human rights have the same status as witches,”^xi the point being that neither one exists. My conclusion is that either rights based on personhood and shared humanity must be grounded in a transcendental Creator, or they must cease to be inviolable and intrinsic. It is here claimed that to guarantee a self-referentially coherent and metaphysically grounded view of human rights the following criteria must be met:

1) Human beings must be thought of as having a transcendent source or origin, such that if all immanent or this-worldly sources and authorities state that they are less than they are, this is false with reference to their ultimate source.

2) Human being must be thought of as the objects of a transcendental intentionality, meaning that whatever they are and whatever nature they bear, this is a matter of divine design rather than mere happenstance. Here it is useful to point out the difference a doctrine of creation with “transcendent intentionality” makes in something’s value. Aquinas pointed out that for human beings love was caused by attraction to some good or value in the beloved, but for God the order is exactly reversed in that the cause of good or value in the beloved is God’s love. Humans are attracted to and love a good which was already there; God’s love causes the creation of a good being which was not there before. The love of God is therefore the cause, not the effect, of a creature’s goodness or value.^xii The difference hinges on the fact that God’s love is effective rather than affective, being characterized by caritas rather than amor. This means that God does not passively “feel” love as an attraction to the good; God actively “wills” the good of the beloved as the cause of that good. Because God creates ex nihilo (“the Maker of all that is, seen and unseen”), it follows that nothing would exist unless he loved or valued it, for God’s love and valuing are the very cause of the existence of all creatures. This means that if a doctrine of creation is presupposed, the sheer fact that something exists means that it is loved or valued.^xiii Absent this metaphysics, inherent as opposed to contingent value in any given created thing will be lacking.

3) The foregoing does not suffice to produce any rights, for it might be predicated of grass just as much of human beings. Inherent value is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition of inherent rights. The question of inherent rights (which, when applied to humans, are called “human rights”) hinges upon precisely the kind and degree of something’s goodness or value as willed by God. For inherent human rights it is necessary to postulate that human beings have a transcendental quality, e.g., as imago dei not reducible particles of atoms or temporary bits of consciousness. Here again it is useful to draw upon Aquinas. From the consideration that God’s love is a cause not an effect, the Angelic Doctor logically concluded both that God loves all things, for otherwise they would not exist; and that God loves better things more, for it is because God loved them more that they are “better” in the first place. God as Trinity loves himself “best,” but because God loves humans (and angels) “better” than all other creatures in that he has made them in his image, they enjoy a pre-eminent dignity over all creation. Non-rational creatures, not being made in God’s image, are loved or valued “instrumentally” for the sake of serving rational creatures. Since rational creature are made in God’s image, they are valued by God “intrinsically” or for their own sakes.^xiv This is not exactly what Peter Singer calls “speciesism,” for the mark of being in God’s image is the possession of rationality (“individual substance of a rational nature.”) Since rationality transcends the human species (at least in its presence in God and the angels), it is not intrinsically bound up with the human species. In other words, hypothetically if there were rational species in the universe other than the human species, full rights would belong to them for the same reason they belong to human species.

4) From this it follows that human beings must have transcendent valuation, meaning they have not simply contingent “quality,” but intrinsic “sanctity” of life, both because God values them and because they are icons of God. Hence to abuse or maltreat them is not simply a matter of wrong-doing; it is further describable as a form of blasphemy or sacrilege since it is an attack upon God’s image. Note also that it is not good enough to say “Human life is sacred, therefore it is inviolable.” The fact that human persons are sacred was in many religions the very reason for killing them in sacrifice to God or the gods – for one does not sacrifice what is worthless. It is not enough for human life and human beings to be sacred: they must be sacred in a certain way, i.e., as images of God.

Since to be a rational creature or image of God is also to transcend matter to the extent that survival after the death of the body is certain, it follows that God’s valuation of human beings is transcendent also in that it has rendered human beings themselves partially transcendent and susceptible to a plan of eternal life. It is often forgotten what an enormous difference this makes to an anthropology. Augustine had written that the justification of a single sinner was a greater miracle than the creation of heaven and earth, because heaven and earth will pass away, but the justification of God’s elect will not pass away. He further wrote that God’s salvation of the human race was a more wonderful act than the creation of the angels, in that it bore witness to a greater mercy.^xv Not only does the kind of dignity such considerations confer surpass the Enlightenment talk of the dignity, brotherhood, and equality of all men; it surpasses it in a staggering fashion strictly impossible to those who lack the metaphysics and soteriology of Christian revelation. When an individual human being is said to be the possible carrier of a miracle greater than the creation of the whole universe, it can hardly have its rights deprived of it for any reason that seems to make sense within that universe. This ought to at least help remove the temptation, and make intelligible the condemnation, of a consequentialist or utilitarian logic which makes statements such as: “Slavery is needed for the sake of our economy,” “This abortion is needed to get my degree,” “This atomic detonation is needed to avoid too many casualties in what will otherwise be a protracted war,” etc.

5) Lastly, there must be recognition of transcendental authority, since without this, divine intentionality would not be acknowledged as binding. In other words, if God does not have authority over us, then what God values and wishes us to value would not necessarily be binding. Since to be a creature is to have all one has from God up to the very fact of one’s original and continued existence, to rebel against God is to rebel against the very source that gives one the ability to rebel. In other words, if a doctrine of creation is presupposed, then whatever else disobeying God may be, it is ontological suicide. To summarize, the completed list of what is required for a coherent view of inherent human value, dignity, and rights, consists of humans having: 1) a transcendent source or origin, 2) transcendent intentionality or design, 3) a transcendent quality, e.g., as imago dei, 4) transcendent valuation or “sanctity”, 5) a recognition of transcendent authority or God’s proprietary rights (so to speak) over creation.

Conclusion

The primary implication of this paper for theologians and Catholic ethicists is that to try to construct a natural law alliance with human rights discourse for the sake of finding common ground is simply a distortion. Offering a “reason alone” or this-worldly natural law or human rights theory to the secular world is not a promising venture. It is no surprise that the “disredeemed” or “apostate” nature that has rejected grace and revelation went from Enlightenment philosophies which denied that nature was normative to postmodern nominalisms and existentialisms which deny that humans even have a nature. Natural law theorists cannot do an “end run” around the Hebraic and Christian categories above to the Hellenistic ones that preceded them; any more than a divorcee can do an “end run” around marriage back to a state of virginity. There is no return to Aristotle or Cicero, and no hope in the Nero’s fiddle of secular humanism. I therefore think it is safe to say that Catholic ethicists who fight for human rights using the terms secularism itself provides are selling pagan wares hopelessly out of date to apostate societies that desperately need Good News.