Here’s the second installment of the essay.

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Revisiting Humanness

Let’s begin by considering an aged question: what does it mean to be a human being? In today’s world it is all too easy to want to move immediately to genetic considerations in answering this question, but let us resist such a temptation. Genetics may tell us what we are made of biologically, but it cannot resolve what is surely the more difficult issue: how might we know, individually or collectively, whether we are making real progress in becoming better human beings? Is there any distinctive purpose for human existence, are we for anything; and how might we know if we are progressing toward that purpose or regressing from it?

Christian literary critic Marion Montgomery has offered what is perhaps the finest definition of a human being I’ve ever heard: we are, he says, “created intellectual souls incarnate.” Every word in that definition counts. First, if we are to figure out what it means to be human, and how you and I may become what we are meant to be as humans, we must understand that we are created. Your humanity is not simply a blank slate on which you may scribble anything you please (that is actually an allurement, I believe, of the video game: one determines one’s own reality, in some cases even one’s own identity). You are created, which means you’ve got a Creator, which means there is an inescapable “givenness” to your life, and you need to learn what has been gifted to you, and with you, as a human being so you can steward it responsibly.

Second, we are intellectual souls. Man is homo sapiens, he is a knower and a thinker, a reasoner who isn’t left to the tyranny of brute appetite or to mere instinct. To say that this is largely lost on the modern single young male is putting it mildly: your peers today don’t read, by and large, and the discipline of reflection is simply beyond them. Their heads have been turned to hash by amusement – the absence of musement. Which is, incidentally, a huge part of the reason why most of them are unmarriageable (it takes a certain level of brain activity to be a husband and father) and why it’s a matter of bizarre solace that they refuse to commit to marriage – would you really want to see a woman you care about stuck for life with Jack Black?

Third, we are incarnate souls. We are not imprisoned in our bodies, much as they may sometimes drive us to new depths of humility. Our bodies and everything we enjoy with our bodies are a gift of God. There is everything to be celebrated by God’s people in manual labor, athletics, the visual arts, godly lovemaking, stout ales, fish-and-chips, prime rib, and sushi-with-sake. I am no philosopher, but I wonder if, while our Christian tradition has been quick to plunder the gold of Parmenides and Plato, rightly emphasizing the intellectual dimension of humanness, it has not at times rather slighted the gleanings of Heraclitus and of Aristotle, failing to delight as it should in the sheer flux and particularity of our incarnate createdness.

But now from these rather heady ponderings, let us proceed to a more pointed question, one that will help us distance ourselves more concretely from the infantile world of Hymowitz’s child-man.