There is something rather unsettling about the current debate surrounding human dignity. Unlike most such debates, it begins, not with any foundational considerations or a sense of the theoretical importance of the topic, but with the ubiquitous usage of dignity within our legal and media descriptions of human nature and the threats it faces.

For some, this usage is little more than a superficial ornament to a more basic discourse of "rights," and thus "dignity" should be, at best, a subject of rhetorical and not substantive consideration. At worst, "dignity" is a cipher for outmoded, hierarchical and essentialist dogmas that tend to dilute a recognition and extension of the rights of humanity. For others, "dignity" is held in some way to supplement "rights." For a small intellectual minority (myself included), "dignity" is seen as a more valid alternative to "rights."

Yet all parties to this debate concerning dignity agree that it arises not initially from first principles, but from academic reflection on recent public usage.

The origins of this usage can be dated quite precisely. "Human dignity" was initially yoked to "human rights" after 1948 in both the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the old German Federal Republic's provisional Grundgesetz . One can understand this yoking loosely in terms of a double rejection both of totalitarian suppression of human freedom and of unprecedentedly brutal treatment of certain classes human beings which deliberately or effectively denied their human status. But more precisely, one can understand this yoking in terms of the coming together of two quite different - and, indeed, fundamentally opposed - traditions of political and ethical reflection.

The first is the liberal, eventually secular tradition of human rights that had been made the basis of the American Constitution, and more fitfully of the various French constitutions since the Revolution. For this tradition, the high status of human beings is self-given, whether because they "own themselves" (the Lockean tradition of "possessive individualism") or because they are divinely constituted as originally free and must therefore accord themselves a sacred respect as the trustees of an untradeable liberty (the Rousseauian tradition). In both cases, right is derived from the exercise of subjective freedom or from human autonomy and requires no other foundation. No mention is made of "dignity."

The other tradition is largely Catholic, though it has many parallels within the wider Christian tradition. It concerns a defence of human existence in all its modes in terms of the category of "dignity." In this discourse, which arose in the nineteenth century, there is a fluctuation between the notion of respect for the dignity of the human person as such and respect for various human roles - such as, above all, the "dignity of labour." Just to the extent that this fluctuation is coherent within the entire notion of "dignity" as it had been inherited from Classical, Patristic and Medieval times, it would be wrong to see respective emphases upon the dignity of the human as such, or else upon the dignity of roles or groups as theoretical alternatives.

Nevertheless, it is clearly the case (as Samuel Moyn has described) that during the 1930s and 40s Catholic thought gradually moved from a "corporatist" stress on the dignity of groups to a "personalist" stress on the dignity of the individual. This evolution is crucial for understanding how the unlikely marriage of rights with dignity was consecrated after the Second World War.

The other key to understanding this seeming miscegenation is the crucial importance of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in this period, especially in Germany. For Kant had assumed and further spiritualised Rousseau's approach to right and liberty: we do not own our own freedom, which is a divine gift, trumping the mutability and tradability of the material sphere. Hence it is morally illicit to commit suicide, tell a lie or surrender to sensuality for its own sake. Hence the Kantian legacy was able to mediate between the liberal and the Catholic positions.

Can secularism guarantee right?

I do, however, agree with both Samuel Moyn and Michael Rosen that this fusion of dignity and right has proven far more unstable than has often been appreciated. This instability becomes apparent in a number of ways.

For instance, one need only point to the second datable upsurge of discourse about "human dignity." This has occurred since 2001. The reasons for this "second wave" parallel the reasons for the first. People have been horrified by the scant respect for human life, human suffering and the accepted modes of human existence and human interaction exhibited both by terrorists and states since 9/11. One senses a concern that respect for "rights" does not sufficiently cover what counts as humane and respectful treatment of people, especially in circumstances of incarceration. Additionally, there is an anxiety that "rights" supposedly based upon autonomy and contract can be suspended in the case of "terrorists." Even refugees who have been accidentally placed outside state and legal contract often seem to fall in consequence beyond the sway of "right."

In either case, loss of "right" seems to result in a loss of humanity, being cast out into a limbo status unworthy of either the respect we accord to humans or the sympathy we sometimes accord to animals. The resurgence of appeal to dignity besides right, or even as the foundation of right, thus seems to register an anxiety about the limits of secular recognition of human worth as "right."

If this reading is correct, there is another parallel to the post-1948 situation, in terms of a reaching back to the Christian category of "dignity" in the face of modern oppression and atrocity. However, in the earlier case this was far more explicit. What is more, the current reaching back is far more confused and contested. Nazi, Fascist and Communist oppression could validly be understood as secular oppression, but today we are faced more distinctly with the phenomena of politicised religious fascisms - in Saudi Arabia and in Hungary, to give two examples.

While, for some, the perversion of religion combined with the anti-personalist tendencies of technocratic modernity calls for the revival of an authentically religious vision, for many others a refusal of violence deemed religious in origin demands a further insistence on purely liberal, secular norms in public life. There follows from this either a rejection of dignity-talk altogether, or else a Kantian reading of dignity merely as autonomy.

The instability of individual freedoms

Another reason for the instability of the alliance between right and dignity concerns the nature of Catholic social teaching itself. Much early Catholic social teaching shared assumptions and borrowed terms with the legacy of pre-1948 - often religiously-inspired - socialism than is often allowed, precisely because the latter also understood itself as a kind of "third way" between reactionary invocation of the ancien regime, on the one hand, and predatory liberalism, on the other.

Moreover, this overture was by no means merely opportunistic, because it was realised that the political theologies that had supported or defended the ancien regime were by no means in continuity with a Classical, Patristic and Thomistic legacy. To the contrary, they tended to be based upon theological voluntarisms which elevated the power of the one ruler to absoluteness and conceived of hierarchy as given, fixed and arbitrary. This was validly read as a betrayal of the Thomistic support for mixed constitution and a dynamic hierarchy based upon virtue and function benefiting the common good and so each every member of the political community.

It is therefore wrong to say that Catholic corporatism contained no personalist dimension, or that the dignity of the group was entirely disconnected from the dignity of the person, even in the nineteenth century.

What, then, to make of the rupture identified by Moyn between "civil society Catholics" and "Corporatist Catholics" in the 1930s? I would submit that we cannot understand this merely in terms of an increasing reaction against totalitarianism and rapprochement with liberalism. Rather, one should realise that one wing (and one wing only) of Catholic corporatism had moved away from personalism towards a dogmatic group-organicism under the influence of the Comtian, positivist legacy. One can only understand the phenomenon of Action Francaise and the more Catholic variants of fascism in Portugal, Spain and (to a lesser extent) Italy if one realises that these were diabolical alliances between Catholics intent on "re-traditionalising" the Comtean legacy, and secular positivists like Charles Maurras, who had switched from civil religion to an instrumental advocacy of Catholicism.

Because of this alliance, the priority of the dignity of the group came to mean the priority of material, political and secular exigencies with an "integral" role for faith blasphemously subordinate to them. Against this, Jacques Maritain and others prophetically asserted "the priority of the spiritual" and the dignity above all of the human person. However, as the title of his most crucial political work (Humanisme Integrale) indicates, Maritain had by no means abandoned an "integral" politics guided by both faith and reason, just as its contents prove that he had by no means abandoned corporatism.

Therefore, the "change" in Catholic political thinking has to be primarily understood as an equal removal from Catholic traditionalism and secular positivism. In both cases, then, we are not talking about something primarily reactive or compromising. To the contrary, we are considering an aspect of that ressourcement which is the key feature of twentieth-century Catholic theology as a whole: a return to the authentic founts of theological understanding up to 1300 and more sporadically thereafter.

Within this understanding, personalism and corporatism are complementary rather than in tension with each other. For to value the dignity of the person is not to value an abstract bearer of free-will, equivalent to all other such bearers, but to value the individual both as rationally free and as possessing an irreplaceably specific character. It is for this latter reason that each and every person is "more" than the mere totality of people. But character - as Aristotle, Cicero and Aquinas each made clear - is not just given by nature, but is also habitually acquired, ascribed and chosen. It therefore does not exist outside relationality and social reciprocity. In consequence, one cannot respect a man and despise him as a miner, son, father, cricket-player or lover.

It might seem as if stressing the dignity of his role would run the danger of subordinating him to his function for the social organism; but this only follows for traditionalism and positivism, not for an Aristotelian and Thomistic view which defines the purpose of the social and political whole as securing reciprocal justice and the always specific virtuous flourishing of each of its members.

Indeed, one can turn the tables on liberalism here: if we mainly respect a man as a man per se, then this formalism can readily turn out to be compatible with each and every exploitation of him qua miner, son, father, fast bowler, and so on. In consequence these functions do indeed get reduced to merely instrumental functions of a machine-like totality. Functions cease to be personally infused if, with false idealism and piety, we try to divorce personhood from function or, better, "role."

This false idealism informs every liberal constitutionalism (in the modern, Lockean sense) insofar as it only recognises persons as bearers of abstract rights as individuals, and otherwise regards social and economic life as "politically indifferent." This means that it only interferes with the latter in terms of laying down ground-rules for fair-play between independent human freedoms. It does not seek to ascribe any inherently desirable goals for social and economic activities. This asocial and aneconomic theory of the state (wildly discordant with even modern political realities) involves as its concomitant an apolitical theory of the social and the economic.

If, however, as for Aristotle, the aim of politics is to produce virtuously flourishing citizens, then, since people only develop characters through social and economic relations, the nature of these relations and their aims cannot be treated as a matter of political indifference. Inversely, the aim of social and economic relating will not be mainly the satisfaction of private predilections, but relationship as such and the good of the other in the widest possible range. The widest possible range is the polis, seen as the "biggest society" and the widest scope of just reciprocity.

This rejection of "the separation of political from socio-economic powers" is a necessary conclusion of any authentically Christian political thinking, and yet it is the simple core of corporatism. To nurture the person, one must nurture social groups and economic vocations. In order to widen personal political participation or democracy, one must ensure that every individual can exercise political influence through the workplace and with those with which he shares a common purpose.

Understood in these broad terms, corporatism may have been more muted in Catholic social teaching and practice since the Second World War, but it has never gone away. Indeed, quite to the contrary, West Germany adopted (under British rather than American encouragement) powerfully corporatist elements, purged of most fascist statism, into its post-war settlement. And what is more, these elements - such as close alliance of local business and local government, vocational training, vocational associations, high-entry qualifications and alliance of traditional craft-skills with modern technology - have proved capable of delivering sustainable economic success as well as greater personal fulfilment compared with typical "Anglo-Saxon" practice.

Equally, in recent Papal social teaching, the stress on the vocational and its (entirely illiberal) political relevance has been paramount. It is not right, as it is sometimes claimed, that Catholic social thought has abandoned its predication upon metaphysical and social hierarchy. Subsidiarity is clearly a hierarchical doctrine, since it teaches that political, social and economic functions should be fulfilled at the most appropriate levels, preferably at the lowest ones.

Such a conception assumes that there is a socio-political pyramid with rule at the top only authenticated by its guardianship of the common good under both divine grant and popular assent. Equally, the doctrine of subsidiarity remains corporatist, since it seeks to devolve central sovereign powers to groups which are vocational as well as voluntary - regarded as interlocking in function and as contributing to the flourishing of the political whole.

Leaving liberal democracy

How, then, is one to square these conclusions with the very evident embrace of liberal democracy by the Catholic Church and the Papacy since the Second World War? Three observations are in order here.

First, there is a genuine and valid recognition that liberalism does, indeed - especially given a minimal degree of consent about the common good - afford some protection against the worst intrusions upon the freedoms of some by the freedom of others. It is mature and balanced to say that liberalism offers a certain political good, but that this remains insufficient.

Second, modern Catholicism tends to read individual rights in personalist terms which regard the individual, not in isolation, but as the most basic rung in a subsidiarist vision that is in continuity with older distributist notions. What an individual can do for herself, own for herself, grow for herself, make for herself, she should. Inversely, she should be able to appeal against an oppressive group, just as a group has the right to appeal against an oppressive higher body and, ultimately, the state.

But the claim to rights of the individual necessarily closes the circle: she must appeal back to the state, thereby revealing a hidden reciprocalist aspect to subsidiarist hierarchy. The latter is not a kind of "group liberalism" which regards the state as a necessary evil: rather, the state itself should sometimes kenotically reach down to protect the individual person against the group, or smaller groups against greater ones, as in the protection of small businesses against greater ones and against monopoly. Indeed, this was traditionally the populist argument for the need for monarchy as against merely aristocratic power: the One must sometimes defend the Many against the virtuous Few turned corruptly oligarchic.

But the third comment is to recognise that some Vatican II documents did concede too much to liberal democracy. This was understandable, given the reaction to totalitarianism and the apparently optimistic prospects for this ideology in the early 1960s. Neither the growth of a brutal economic neoliberalism nor the rise of a cultural liberalism that would both eventually threaten the very character of our shared human existence, was envisaged. It is, however, clear that Papal and the most sophisticated academic Catholic thought has gradually backed away from this excessive embrace.

Dignity or right?

So far, then, we have seen how both new historical circumstances and the essential continuity of modern Catholic social teaching suggest that the alliance of dignity and right is an unnatural one. For if, prior to 1948, secular rights discourse never mentioned "dignity" then, equally, Catholic dignity discourse scarcely mentioned "right" in the modern subjective sense. It follows that perhaps the most crucial remaining question mark over the post-war liberal-tending legacy in Catholic thought, remains to do with human rights.

At times, Papal and other Catholic writings seem to embrace rights in liberal terms, which would suggest a grounding in autonomy, thus making dignity redundant. This results in often times contorted attempts to defend the unborn and the dying in terms of a rights-talk that is predicated upon the autonomy of the adult human. In reality, the rejection of liberalism with respect to issues of life, death sexuality and gender does not indicate a residual disagreement with liberalism in just these areas, nor a "different" Catholic understanding of subjective right, but rather exposes to view the fact that Catholicism remains at bottom incompatible with liberal notions of rights and democracy.

The Catholic Church would be far better able explain itself, and to explain the genuine core radicalism of its positions in these areas, if it consistently abandoned right in favour of dignity and criticised the abuses of justice consequent upon the hegemony of rights with respect to more political and economic issues also.

The paradox of dignity

The above considerations do not point to some merely "residual" area of disagreement between dignity and right, but rather to the fact that right and dignity stand for two radically opposed political philosophies. Indeed, they stand for the two most opposed political philosophies: the politics of the moderns, and the politics of the ancients.

For the Catholic conception of personal dignity continues to imply that universal dignity can only be expressed by the dignity of group, rank and status, while the Kantian notion of dignity is impotent to dislodge the liberal founding of dignity or worth upon right and so upon subjective autonomy. It would be tempting to say that the liberal view sees dignity as an internal phenomenon of concealed willing, while the Catholic view sees dignity as an external phenomenon of human position within the cosmic order and equally of individual human position within the social order. But this is far too simplistic. The real contrast is not between internal and external, but rather between a modern incapacity to mediate these two aspects, compared with the ancient perspective, especially in its Catholic Christian variant.

Just consider the notion of "dying with dignity." This refers in part to the interior dimension of human life: our capacity for a rational exercise of freedom. A dignified death is, supposedly, a death whose place and hour has, in theory, been freely chosen by the individual who is mortally ill, at a point before he has lost all capacity for autonomous decision and so, for this perspective, all dignity. Yet dignity with respect to death also refers in part to the most external circumstances of human life. A "dignified death" is taken to be one that involves a minimum of pain, discomfort, physical mess or distressing circumstances.

This split clearly reflects a more general modern split between deontological and utilitarian approaches to ethics - especially if we take the utile to refer in the widest possible sense to the convenient and pleasurable. Thus, the same duality of dignity is extended from death to life in general. On the one hand, to live "with dignity" is to live not in any sense as a slave, but as an autonomous being who has chosen or at least assented to her career, dwelling-place, friendships and economic contracts. On the other hand, a "dignified" life is taken to be one where we enjoy enough food, decent shelter and clothing, protection from the natural environment, mechanised transport and access to professional healthcare, educational expertise and informational and social media.

Here we see the conflation of the deontological and the utilitarian. Deontological aspects of dignity more readily apply to human adults, while utilitarian ones extend to children and to a lesser degree are extended to certain animals. "To treat with dignity" as according respect to others tends to mean a respect for both their freedom and their comfort in a sense that extends to their being able to adopt a normative style of behaviour and dress that typifies human status.

It is therefore not simply the case that liberalism thinks of dignity as invisible right, while Catholicism thinks of dignity as visible status. For it also turns out that liberalism combines the invisible dignity of right with the visible dignity of style and convenience. A lack of integration between the two is revealed in the fluctuations of public policy where we possess no criterion by which to decide whether to concentrate on making people freer or more comfortable, ecstatically liberated or soberly healthy. Consequently, we often end up contradictorily pursuing libertinism in one domain and Spartan discipline in others: for example, liberalising drug laws while extending draconian bans on smoking, or permitting adult pornography while forbidding children from even touching each other.

The greatest synthesis we can ever achieve is a banal one that divides and rules the two incompatible modern ethical theories: thus, people are rendered freer to "choose" between ferociously marketed different versions of comfortable indulgence and programmes for self-discipline. The same pseudo-synthesis also works a dialectical reversion: austere deontology deconstructs into self-indulgent choice; sympathetic utilitarianism deconstructs into the rigours of hedonistic spectacle.

However, the political legacy that Catholicism inherits had, from the outset, its own mode of doubling dignity between the visible and the invisible. The Latin dignitas lies close to the word decus meaning "ornament" or "honourable reward," and also to decorum meaning socially acceptable ethical style, and ultimately to the Greek dokein, meaning to show and doxa, meaning glory or honour. On the other hand, dignitas also translates the Greek axia meaning "first principle," as in our derivative "axiom." So for Aquinas, for example, dignitas means both something good in itself and something taken to be true in itself.

This suggests something like a "paradox of dignity." The dignified is self-standing and independent - as such, it is sufficient to itself and reserved. Yet the dignified is equally what gloriously shows itself, and even that which receives a supplement of honour from others. It is (like the number One in ancient mathematics) simultaneously that which requires no addition and yet is the very principle of addition. For example, a "dignified gesture" is one that somehow combines reserve with excess. Like sublime speech in rhetoric, the dignified gesture makes a simpler and greater impact precisely through the exercise of restraint.

In concrete terms, this means that a messy, suffering human body can be, in an evil-suffused world, the most potent witness to human dignity. The same can be said of the dignity-with-pathos of the innocent, wondering, receptive child. (It is extraordinary to me that Michael Rosen claims that children do not possess dignity, when their un-self-consciousness ensures they can possess it far more naturally than can adults.)

The same personalist understanding of dignity implies that a person can remain fully dignified even when she performs a task assigned to her by another, or even if she is forced to do something against her will. For in the first case, she can act as a "representative" which runs with and not against the drift of "personhood," while in the second place she can bear representative witness through suffering to either the justice of her punishment or the inequity of her oppression.

This sense of personhood and dignity as the performance of a role - whether cosmic or cultural - lies at the heart of Pico della Mirandola's posthumously published treatise Oration on the Dignity of Man . For Pico, humanity lacks any specific attribute of his own; his uniqueness is paradoxically in the capacity to combine in himself the material, animate and spiritual, along with the ruling, knowing and loving functions of the three angelic orders. Between all these attributes, he is free to choose. This Renaissance dimension of Pico's work is itself expounded in wholly orthodox Catholic terms: our real dignity is our capacity to elect to be united in the love of the Cherubim to God. While this is our highest destiny, it can only be granted to us by God as an act of grace.

For Pico, dignity is something that we are granted, that we have borrowed. Since we do not possess dignity in ourselves or because of any inalienable property, it would seem questionable, for this outlook, to locate dignity in the conception of a human being as "an end in itself." By contrast, for the Christian tradition, human beings as divine images are more fundamentally means for other human beings to pass with them, but also through them, to God; nor are we ends to ourselves, but rather destined for the contemplation of God, while the human race as a whole is a means first to display and then to restore the divine glory.

The virtue of dignity

For all these reasons, it is incumbent on the Catholic Church to reject all the excessive concessions it has made to liberal democracy since 1948, after Jacques Maritain had unfortunately fallen in love with the United States and totally lost the plot of his own earlier thinking by endorsing the notion of subjective human rights.

For ultimately, the liberal and Kantian fusion of rights and dignity does not so much offer us anything modern or progressive, but rather marks a lapse back into paganism and sophistry that divides internal from external dignity. Moreover, there is nothing necessarily egalitarian or anti-hierarchical about this modern notion of dignity, which instead stockades the established reserve of subjectivity and endorses the arbitrary accumulations of property, money, male violence, female cunning and bureaucratic power by the most powerful subjective agents.

We have never abolished and could never abolish dignity as hierarchical status in favour of dignity as equal human worth based on right. To try to do so is instead to give more worth to the evermore worthless, as we see today. It remains a mystery to our media commentators and to many academics that Britain, since the 1950s, has become less deferential, yet more economically and socially unequal. They are unable to see the obvious - namely, that a collapse in deferential respect for the dignity of representative status and virtuous achievement necessarily results in increased inequality because axia will not tolerate a vacuum: where worth is no longer regarded, only money retains any value.

Instead, we can only acclaim human dignity as universal human talent and capacity for wisdom, love and grace and seek to elevate all in these respects, if we accord also more honour to those in whom these things are more expressed and realised, and diverse honours to the diverse but equally necessary modes of living dignified lives. To do so is the precondition for requiring that those so honoured go on giving to the community, in every sense, more than is expected from others.

Yet this requirement - which rests upon a valuation of the common good and so of the maximum possible flourishing of each and every one - reveals a final paradox that the Christian tradition has always affirmed. Dignity indeed consists in virtue and therefore, though all humans are honoured as capable of virtue, more honour is accorded to the most virtuous.

In the end, however, the dignity of the human community and of all its members trumps even this height as the object of human virtue itself. The whole is more than the height, just as glory precedes dignity and the Triune God, at the highest dignified elevation, is an interplay of personal equality.

John Milbank is Research Professor of Politics, Religion and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, and Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. His most recent book is Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People.