Stephen A. Jones
Stephen A. Jones is a post-doctoral fellow at Heythrop College, the Jesuit college at the University of London, England. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the topic of gratitude in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and is working on a book-length publication on Natural Law theory.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Stephen A. Jones
The Truth is Freedom
By Stephen A. Jones
October 1, 2015
Is the prevalent sale of human bodies a real-time consequence of reducing human freedom to ideology?
Without this imago Dei — which the Enlightenment thinkers ultimately rejected (sometimes unwittingly) — one must seek a foundation for human freedom and dignity either in social contracts or in reason: in other words, in "natural states" that could substitute for the Divine origins whence an authentically inalienable freedom and dignity flows The bottom line is this: there can be no true defence of Natural Law, and by extension the wrongness of human trafficking, without accepting the fact that the dignity and rights of the human person flow not from human ingenuity but from conformity to the Divine Will For both Rousseau and Voltaire, the dignity of the human person is derived from what was commonly called in the Enlightenment "the natural state But what we find in Enlightenment Europe is a notion of person and dignity that has become detached from the Christian concept of authentic freedom that preceded it; the result is that the Enlightenment concepts of person and human dignity are ultimately incoherent and were unable to withstand the attacks and distortions of later modernity One will not find in either Rousseau or Voltaire, regardless of their opposition to one another's views on human nature, a philosophical foundation on which to build a rigorous or lasting concept of either personal freedom or dignity For Augustine, all sin damages our relationships with God and others; the homo incurvatus in se becomes transfixed on an arbitrary and willful exercise of freedom detached from an understanding that the human person is, by Divine decree, oriented in nature to relationships with others and governed by natural law in conjunction with the Divine law The Judeo-Christian concept of human dignity is rooted in the awareness that freedom is derived from the reality that the human person is made in the image and likeness of God