The years after World War II witnessed much discussion about and reflection on the idea of human dignity.\u00a0 In 1949, with the Holocaust and Nuremberg trials fresh in mind, the drafters of the new German Constitution or Grundgesetzt<\/em> included in its opening article the statement that \u201cthe dignity of man is inviolable.\u201d\u00a0 A year earlier, the United Nation\u2019s Universal Declaration of Human Rights referred to the \u201cinherent dignity\u201d of human beings and proclaimed that \u201call human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.\u201d\u00a0 In the 1950s and 1960s, numerous constitutions drafted in the wake of de-colonization also employed the term \u201cdignity\u201d and, decades later, drafters of the Constitution of the European Union affirmed that the emerging political union \u201cis founded on the values and respect for human dignity.\u201d\u00a0 In short, the post-1945 moral-political landscape, in the West and the world, has been powerfully shaped by appeals to human dignity.<\/p>\n The origins of this moral vocabulary have various sources, but few would deny that it owes an immense historical debt to the biblical, Judeo-Christian notion of human beings as created in the image of God (Hebrew: tselem Elohim<\/em>; Greek: eikon Theos<\/em>; Latin: imago Dei<\/em>). \u00a0Indeed, for Christians today, irrespective of confession, the language of dignity has been employed to express the worth of the human person as bearing the impress of divinity.\u00a0 The ultimate biblical rationale is found in Genesis 1:26-27: \u201cThen God said, \u2018Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. . .. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created he them.\u201d\u00a0 Commenting on this passage in his On the Creation of Man<\/em>, the Eastern church father Gregory of Nyssa exulted that \u201ceverything about him [man] manifests royal dignity, by his exact likeness to the beauty of the archetype.\u201d<\/p>\n From the early church to the present, appeals to the image of God and a concomitant assertion of human worth or dignity have been constants in Christian moral reflection about the human person, even if Christian practice<\/em> often fell far short of\u00a0 principle<\/em>.\u00a0 But as those who have preoccupied themselves with human dignity in recent years can attest, the principle, even the word \u201cdignity,\u201d is not always easy to get a handle on, and it faces a number of complex challenges today, both at a practical and theoretical level.\u00a0 Etymologically understood in its Western context, dignity (dignitas<\/em>) arguably owes more to classical than Christian thought: in the Roman world dignitas<\/em> was the amount of personal clout that a male citizen acquired throughout his life\u2014a concept we might today associate more with \u201cesteem\u201d or \u201cprestige.\u201d\u00a0 It possesses an hierarchical, aristocratic connotation that does not sit too easily in our democratic age \u2026<\/p>\n