  Despite the success of the Higgs mechanism to account for the generation of
the masses of Standard Model (SM) elementary particles, the ultimate nature and
origin of "mass" remain open questions in contemporary physics. From a
foundational perspective, mass should be fundamentally related to the
gravitational interaction and, according to Mach, to the structure of the
Universe. In the present letter, a fully dynamical mass generation mechanism
induced by higher-order corrections in the GR Lagrangian is discussed. Notably,
the vacuum energy plays a key role in this process, which applies to both
vector bosons and fermions. We show that, at the classical level, the Higgs
mechanism can be thought of as a particular case of the present mechanism.
