In this once dominant conception of dignity, status is conferred by birth or high office. But as so often in Shakespeare, the idea is no sooner developed than it is subverted. When the lovers are discovered, and Florizel is subjected to the furious wrath of his royal father for having risked his dignity, Perdita refuses to be cowed:

 

I was not much afeard; for once or twice 

I was about to speak and tell him plainly, 

The selfsame sun that shines upon his court 

Hides not his visage from our cottage but 

Looks on alike. 

 

Just as the sun shines on all, high and lowly alike, so, she seems to be saying, distinctions of rank and status are irrelevant to someone's true worth. This conception comes not from the classical or pagan world, where considerations of "dignity" as rank were all-important, but from the Judaeo-Christian worldview. In the words of the catechism of the Catholic Church, "the dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God". Or again, "All human beings, in as much as they are created in the image of God, have the dignity of a person."

Nicolas Wolterstorff, in an impressive recent study entitled Justice: Rights and Wrongs, has underlined the roots of this idea in the Hebrew Bible, where he argues, with a wealth of supporting evidence, that there is a clear recognition of the equal value of all in the sight of God. Throughout the Old Testament, widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the impoverished — what Wolterstorff aptly calls the "quartet of the vulnerable" — make repeated appearances. And in the injunctions of the law and the prophets, and the poetry of the Psalms, God is seen as calling on his people to "loose the bonds of injustice" by rescuing these vulnerable groups who have been wronged: to "raise the poor from the dust, and lift the needy from the ash-heap" (Psalm 113 [112]). Injustice is seen both as wronging God and as wronging the victims of injustice by failing to recognise their inherent human worth.

The New Testament continues the same message. The "kingdom" which Jesus set out to inaugurate was to be a kingdom of "justice and righteousness" — the very combination that so frequently occurs in the Old Testament (in the Hebrew terms mishpat and tsedeqa). And the righteous king or Messiah foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures was to be one who (in the words of Psalm 72 [71]), "judges the poor with justice and . . . saves the lives of the needy". On Wolterstorff's reading, Jesus's words and actions (consorting with outcasts, touching and curing those who were ritually unclean, explaining why it was right to heal on the Sabbath) were designed to "appeal to our worth as human beings to explain God's care for each and every one of us".