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Human Person |
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A correct understanding of the human person is not only of the greatest importance in its own right; it is also important because it underlies so many fundamental Christian teachings. This is particularly true with the moral teachings of the Church, which depend entirely on the Church’s understanding of the human person. That is why John Paul II often says, in discussing some erroneous idea, that it rests ultimately on a “mistaken anthropology,” that is, on some mistake about what it is to be a human person. We can approach our personhood most readily through our moral experience. We all understand that human beings are never rightly used as mere instrumental means, but should be treated as ends in themselves. We also understand that human beings are never rightly owned as mere property, but should be recognized as individuals who each has a certain ownership of his or her own being. In understanding this, we grasp the personhood of man; it is in virtue of our personhood that we can never be used or owned. We also come to understand why each human person is a subject of rights. To violate another’s basic human rights is to invade the sphere of what is his own; a person has rights because he belongs to himself. The Church welcomes this modern sense of personhood. In her social teaching the Church opposes the philosophy of society known as collectivism (as found, for instance, in socialism) on the grounds that it absorbs individual human beings into society in such a way as to disregard them as ends in themselves, as beings of their own, and that it thus depersonalizes them (cf. Pope John Paul II, The Hundredth Year, Centesimus Annus, 13). In insisting that each human being is a whole of his own and never a mere part of any collectivity, the Church seeks to vindicate the personhood of human beings. If we consider the way in which John Paul II has explained the sexual teaching of the Church, we find the same focus on man as person. He says that by sexual intimacy outside of a marital commitment the man and woman are using each other for their gratification; he explains the immorality of fornication, and even of contraception, in large part in terms of men and women showing contempt for each other as persons. Though this sense of the human person as end in himself has gained great currency since the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, it goes back many centuries. Already the Roman jurists said of the person, Persona est sui iuris et alteri incommunicabilis: “A person is a being of its own and does not have its being in common with any other.” The sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius gave this definition of the person, which was accepted by almost all of the great medieval philosophers and theologians: Persona est substantia individua naturae rationalis: “A person is an individual substance having a rational nature.” The idea of individuality in this definition corresponds to the idea of incommunicability in the earlier one, and both correspond to the idea of a being that is its own end and is not an extension or part of any other. Uniqueness of Each Person • Let us look more closely at the note of incommunicability, which is often also expressed as the unrepeatability of each person. There is no such thing as several copies of the same person, as there are many copies of the same book. We say that a species exists in various individuals, and is not tied to any one of them; if one individual dies, the species can as well live on in another. But with persons it is otherwise: A person cannot be instantiated in multiple individuals that can replace one another; a person is inseparable from one individual. If an individual human person were to be completely destroyed, no subsequent human person could replace or could be again that person; a “hole” would be opened in the world that could never be filled. This concrete individuality or unrepeatability discloses to us in a particular way the mystery of personal being. We now have to speak of the consciousness of human persons. Without consciousness there is no personal life and acting. Many Christian philosophers (including Karol Wojtyla – Pope John Paul) have recently given greater attention to the self-presence and the self-possession of persons, thereby exploring personal being from within. Thus many have explored the “interiority” (even the Fathers of Vatican Council II speak of this in one place) that is so expressive of persons existing on their own and not as parts of any totality; others speak of interiority in terms of “subjectivity.” All are saying that it is deeply revealing of personal being that persons are not just beings existing objectively in the world next to nonpersons but also live their being from within, consciously performing it out of a center, being present to themselves in all their lives as persons. Regarding the place of consciousness in the human person, there are two extremes to be avoided. On the one hand, one should not overestimate personal consciousness, thinking that persons are their consciousness, and nothing but consciousness, so that in the absence of consciousness and interiority there can be no person. No, we clearly have to distinguish between the being of the person, and the conscious acting of the person. On the other hand, persons would remain completely dormant if they had only the being of the person and never developed interiority, or subjectivity. And the philosophy of the human person would remain impoverished if one studied only or primarily the being of persons, neglecting to approach persons through their most intimate experience of themselves.
Freedom and Truth • In exploring the subjectivity of persons we are led to the freedom of persons, and so are led into the heart of personal being. In our conscious self-presence we find that we possess ourselves, are handed over to ourselves, left in the hand of our own counsel (cf. Sir 15:14), and so can make disposition of ourselves; and with this we find the freedom of ourselves as persons. We are not just acted upon by other beings, but are capable of acting through ourselves; we do not just transmit what originates outside of ourselves, but can originate activity ourselves; we are not only created by God, but in a certain sense we are also creators of ourselves (cf. Pope John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, Veritatis Splendor, 71). When we live in too passive a way (as by being subject to coercion, or by being too susceptible to manipulation, or living too absorbed in our social group), then we tend to disappear as persons. It is by acting through ourselves, acting with an acting that is radically our own, that is, by living our freedom, that we show ourselves as persons, and give evidence of being ends in ourselves and beings of our own. This is why the Church at Vatican II opposed more emphatically than ever before all forms of coercion in matters of religion (cf. Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae). If human beings are to be treated as persons, then they must be allowed to decide on their own about Christ and his Church; but if they are coerced into professing Christ, then they are violated as persons and their profession is worth little. It is not only the Church that renounces coercion, however. God renounces it in his way of dealing with us. He does not overpower our freedom, coercing believers into believing. He instead appeals to us in such a way that we are never so free as in believing, and thus never so alive as persons as when we believe. The modern world would agree with most of what has just been said about freedom and autonomy. The Catholic understanding of freedom, however, parts ways with many of our contemporaries by insisting that the fullness of freedom is a freedom grounded in truth. There is a hierarchy of goods that we did not set up, and a law that binds us though we did not enact it. It is not a foreign law that remains outside us, for when we let our actions be judged by it, there awakens in us the dimension of conscience, which is “man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary” (Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 16). In his encounter with the “truth about good,” or the moral law, the person “quickens” in his deepest interiority. The law, then, does not do violence to the person, as so many modern thinkers fear, but engenders in him the fullness of personal life. The freedom of human persons can only be understood in relation to their transcendence toward the objective order of truth and good that is the norm of freedom, as John Paul II has repeatedly taught, especially in Veritatis Splendor, 31-64. As soon as persons depart from the moral law, they are handed over to their appetites, living at the beck and call of each latest urge, and with this they, in a sense, forfeit their birthright of freedom, though even then they retain freedom in the sense of being accountable for turning away from the moral law. Many modern thinkers object that if the moral law is not of our making, then it is harmful for human persons, since only coercion can induce us to live in accordance with it. They overlook that the moral law is such that we are able to understand it: We can understand the goods and values on which it is based and can see for ourselves why the moral law is what it is. This understanding enables us to internalize the moral law, making it our own, willing it for ourselves, and thus needing no coercion in order to live by its commandments. One sees why so many philosophers, beginning with the Greeks, have insisted so much on the rationality of man (recall Boethius, who stresses our “rational nature” in his definition of person). It is through our rationality that we gain our relation to truth, which in turn underlies our freedom. Embodiment of Human Persons • We come now to a point in the Christian understanding of the human person that is far more important than one might at first think. We human persons are not purely spiritual, like the Divine Persons and even the angelic persons; we are incarnate persons, and ours is an embodied personhood. The modern world, for all its materialism, also presents – surprising as this at first may seem – a great deal of false spiritualism. Many of our contemporaries think of the human body only as raw material to be used for our purposes like any other raw material. On the one hand, they do not do justice to the self-control and self-mastery to which we are called in the moral life; on the other hand, they exaggerate our freedom, ignoring its embodied character, degrading the body to a mere object of manipulation. All of Catholic sexual morality turns on the right understanding of the embodiment of human persons (cf. Veritatis Splendor, 48). For if we are really incarnate persons, then our bodies command respect in all our acting, whereas if our bodies are just things that we use, then they are morally neutral, completely available to whatever manipulation we find useful. It is a remarkable fact that Christianity is the great defender of the human body against the many pagan detractors of it in the modern world; Christians understand better than non-Christians how the human body shares in the dignity of the person. For all of the individual selfhood of each human person, it is at the same time true that persons are made for communion with one another. Although man is “the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake,” nevertheless he “can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 24). A world in which there could be only one person would make no sense. Such a solitary person would suffer a devastating deprivation by being unable either to utter a word to another person or hear the word uttered by the other. This is why we were created as man and woman. This is why God exists as a community of Persons and not as a solitary Person. Philosophers commonly distinguish two basic forms of interpersonal life: the “I-Thou” form and the “we” form. In the I-Thou form, persons encounter each other face to face. All the main kinds of interpersonal love unfold here, including the love between man and woman. By approaching each other in respect and in love, each mediates the other to oneself, so to say. Each is enabled or empowered to love oneself as a result of first being loved by the other. But there is also the “we” form of interpersonal life, which occurs whenever we stand next to one another in a community. The citizens in a state are bound together in the solidarity of the we, just as all human beings are bound together in the same kind of solidarity. Christians esteem all such solidarity. They do not think of themselves as isolated selves who become bound to others only by contractual acts; they understand themselves as deeply embedded in various levels of solidarity, often without their prior consent, and as profoundly nourished as persons by some of these. The social teaching of the Church takes such solidarity seriously, deriving from it many of the responsibilities that we have toward one another. The Church also derives from it many of her teachings about the way in which good and evil do not remain shut up in individuals but spread out through the communities in which we participate, raising or depressing their moral level (cf. Pope John Paul II, apostolic exhortation On Reconciliation and Penance in the Mission of the Church Today, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 16). Of course, as was observed above, the social teaching of the Church is also quick to recognize the chronic danger of many forms of solidarity, namely, the danger of the individual’s coming to think of himself as a mere part of the social whole and thus depersonalizing himself. The ideal is what Vatican Council II called a communio personarum, that is, a communion among those who live closely together in such a way as to remain distinct persons and indeed to thrive as such. The Image of God • In various respects we can discern the image of God in human persons. Traditionally, Christian philosophers have recognized in the rationality of persons a godlike power. In modern times they have given particular attention to the freedom of persons (cf. CCC 1705; Gaudium et Spes, 17). We belong to ourselves and possess ourselves in such a way as to image the supreme self-possession of God. He possesses himself by existing through himself and on his own; and we, who do not exist through ourselves, show forth something of God’s being insofar as each of us is one’s own end, a kind of whole of one’s own, an unrepeatable being. Another aspect of the image of God in us also has been stressed recently by many Christian authors: We resemble the Trinitarian God through our interpersonal communion (CCC 1702). When previous Christian thinkers spoke of the image of God in man, they typically referred to a single person and to the noblest faculties found within each person. It is a relatively new, but entirely authentic, Christian development to look for the image of God in persons who are united with each other in love. John Paul II is the first Pope to recognize an image of our Trinitarian God in the man-woman difference and in the ordering of man and woman to each other (as in his On the Dignity and Vocation of Woman, Mulieris Dignitatem, 7). It is in connection with the image of God in us that Christian writers commonly speak of the incomparable dignity of human persons. By resembling God so strongly as to exist in his image, we share in his divine dignity and holiness. But one should at the same time remember that our dignity as persons, while grounded in God, is also intrinsic to us as human persons. It is not conferred on us from without, as if God could also withdraw it whenever he liked. This is why it can to a great extent be understood by sincere people who have not yet found Christ.
See: Body and Soul; Conscience; End of Man; Faith, Act of; Freedom, Human; Hierarchy; Human Life, Dignity and Sanctity of; Imago Dei; Natural Law; Religious Liberty; Sexuality, Human; Social Doctrine; Theology of the Body.
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