On the Judaeo-Christian view, by contrast, human beings, despite their frailty (formed of the "dust of the earth"), are, as the Hebrew Bible has it, made in the image and likeness of God. So simply in virtue of our human status we participate in some way in that infinite worth that is God. And building on this foundation, the Christian vision takes the extraordinary further step of declaring that our corporeal human nature is actually "divinised" — raised up to the fullest dignity by Christ's humbling himself to take our bodily nature upon him. As the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins so vividly put it:

 

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

 

Nothing, on the face of it, could be more undignified than this "Jack" — a common, ordinary fellow, of undistinguished worth; this "patch", a mere fool or ninny; this potsherd, a broken fragment, like that with which the wretched Job, reduced to the utmost indignity, scraped his sores (Job 2:8); weak and feeble, as perishable as matchwood. Yet all at once, by Christ's sharing in our bodily nature, this paltry individual becomes "immortal diamond" — of infinite worth and dignity.

None of this, to be sure, counts as a philosophically watertight grounding of the concept of human dignity, since it depends on the revealed truth of the Incarnation. But for those who accept that truth, it does indeed, as Hopkins beautifully expresses it, raise every human being, "all at once", to infinite, Christlike, worth. The secularist can, to be sure, resolve to treat every human being as if they were of such infinite worth; but it is entirely unclear what might ground that resolve, since there is nothing in the way things are, on the purely naturalist worldview, that underwrites it; there is only a plurality of diverse specimens of a certain species of featherless biped, some stronger, some weaker, some outstanding and splendid, some defective and wretched, all subject to infirmity and eventual decrepitude. The universal dignity of humankind is the pearl of great price in our ethical culture. But torn out of the religious seabed that nurtured it, it may not take very long to be swept away on the advancing tide of secularism.