One of the most brilliant ideas to come across in the history of western civilization is the idea of personhood. It’s the basis of our dignity and liberty; however, we take it for granted these days to the point where we have no issue with sledgehammering its foundations.
There was no fated reason for this idea of personhood to take hold in the west. We certainly had other ideas about the person: some that arrogantly believed there was a grander to man (at least for some more than others), and other ideas that saw us no better than being animals, reinforcing our violent and selfish nature!
But the Greeks and furthermore some early Christian thinkers saw it best to see man as a “middle being”. The notion of “middle being” balanced the person between time and eternity, matter and spirit, body and soul. Plato may have certainly emphasized the soul more than body. For him, the body was something to transcend with its fallibility and finiteness.
Christian thinkers decided this needed to be better integrated. We would no longer be just a soul, but a whole human person, with body and soul together. We were embodied spirits!
Today you’ll see people who want it both ways, but in a way that is completely disjointed: humans are just pure matter, but able to act like gods.
Materialists will note that we share 98% of our DNA with primates, but that other 2% is quite a qualitative difference. It should also be noted we share 25% of our DNA with dandelions, but I don’t find myself acting a quarter dandelion (at least not on most days).
But the embodied spirit leads us back to the purpose for man to exist. W. Norris Clarke remarks,
“Thus the union of matter and spirit in us is not an unnatural, forced one; God has deliberately created the human soul as the lowest of the spirits, one that by its very nature reaches down into matter to take on a body for itself, thereby lifting up matter into the light of consciousness and enabling the material world to return to God in the great circle of being (emanation and return: the basic structure of the whole Summa Theologiae)—through the mediation of the soul as embodied spirit, that is, through the human person as the natural unity of both worlds. Matter is made as gift to spirit” (emphasis mine).
As such, God was in all things, but in different degrees. There was a hierarchy of being, and the human person was ontologically in the center as the mediator between God and nature. This wasn’t pantheism which leveled everything to being the same. Nor was it a dualism of two different substances, but the “same richly complex substance” on different levels.
Clarke further elaborates,
“Saint Thomas resolutely rejected this doctrine of two natural faces of the soul, one looking down into the world of matter, the other looking directly up into the world of spirit. The structure of our natural human knowledge is far more humble, he believed. There is only the one face of the soul, which is turned directly toward the material cosmos around it only, as presented through the senses. Then, by the application of the basic inner dynamism of the mind, its radical and unrestricted exigency for intelligibility—which can be expressed as the first dynamic principle of knowledge: the principle of the intelligibility of being, ‘‘omne ens est verum’’—we can step by step trace back the intelligibility of this material world to its only ultimate sufficient reason, a single infinite spiritual Cause that is God. The human being is the lowest and humblest of the spirits, whose destiny it is to make its way in a spiritual journey through the material world back to its ultimate Source and its own ultimate home” (emphasis mine).
Clarke also makes a good point in that personhood gets further elaborated with later Christian thinkers who saw that personhood is always substance in relationship, and that ‘‘relationality and substantiality are equally valid primordial modes of the real.’’ We are authentically real not as solitary self-sufficient persons but as persons-in-relation. And we can act this out on two levels: “the level of [our] natural potentialities and the supernatural level—that is, act out Christ in [our] own lives.”
Brilliant stuff, but almost forgotten!
Brilliant stuff, but almost forgotten!