By Stephen P. White
God created man in his image and likeness. God himself, therefore, is the primary point of reference for man’s self-understanding. Consequently, when man loses sight of God, he loses sight of his own humanity.
This is the story of our secular age on a grand scale. It is also, in a vaguely reassuring sense, the story of man in general. I say «reassuring» in the sense that our failures are rarely as novel as we think, which means that the remedies are less inaccessible than we might otherwise suppose.
From the earliest chapters of Genesis, we see how disobedience toward God leads to a diminishment of our humanity. The Fall was a moral event—an act of disobedience and a failure of the will—that caused an obscuring of the intellect. Sin, as is often said, makes us stupid. Each of us understands this because each of us sees that same disobedience in himself. We are all like Adam and Eve.
Our Lord can say (and I can nod along with Him) that «the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.» Knowing this about the spirit and the flesh does not help me choose the good, just as knowing that Jesus knew it does not help me choose it. But knowing that He and I are on the same wavelength—that what tempted Him tempts me—is, nonetheless, edifying. There is this solidarity among the descendants of Adam and Eve.
Even outside a strictly theological or biblical sense, materialism (whether practical or ideological) invariably leads to inhumanity, precisely to the extent that it denies what is highest and best in the human person.
Pope Leo XIII, in his great encyclical on the restoration of Christian philosophy, Aeterni Patris, clearly indicated that the cause of the «struggles of these days» was a confusion about «divine and human things» originating in the «schools of philosophy,» and spreading from there to the State and the masses.
The Second Vatican Council, in one of its densest and most concise passages, sets forth the issue succinctly:
The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man truly become clear. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of the one who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and makes known to him his sublime vocation.
«The fundamental error of socialism,» Pope John Paul II insisted some three decades later, «is anthropological in nature.» And what did he point to as the primary cause of that anthropological error? Atheism. Moreover, the «consumer society,» according to the Polish Pope, «coincides with Marxism» to the extent that it «totally reduces man to the sphere of the economic and to the satisfaction of material needs.»
As it happened in the days of Pope Leo XIII and those of John Paul II, so it happens in ours. Confusion about the things of God and man leads to injustice, conflict, and misery. For those of us who live in a Christian (or post-Christian) society, this seems to be the obvious causal order of the problem: when we lose sight of God, we lose sight of man. For readers of The Catholic Thing, all this is familiar territory.
But it turns out that the opposite is also true: when the nature—and particularly human nature—is lost sight of, it becomes increasingly difficult to glimpse God, particularly the Christian God. And we may be less accustomed to thinking of things in that way.
If we start from an inadequate view of the human person, certain questions about God are not only harder to answer; they may even cease to seem relevant!
Most of the great controversies of the early Church—and the corresponding heresies: Docetism, Arianism, Nestorianism, etc.—were tied to Christological issues. Who was this Jesus Christ? Was he human or divine? Did he have one nature or two? These were existential questions for the early Church because they grasped the implications of the Incarnation, both for what that event reveals about God and for what it reveals about our humanity.
The Church was able to reflect on these controversies not only because it had a clear sense of the divine, but because it possessed a firm knowledge of nature and what it means to be human. Today, our world has lost sight of human nature so profoundly that it often struggles to understand why the Incarnation might have any implications at all.
«The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.» What could such a statement mean for a people who have ceased to believe that «human nature» has any permanent and enduring meaning?
Our world fails to see the relevance of the Incarnation, not simply because it has lost sight of God, but because it has no concept of what God assumed in himself, namely, human nature.
If the world around us consists of mere matter and energy, and if this material world is governed not by «nature» in the sense of the «ends» or «final causes» intended by God, but by laws of nature discoverable by science, and if understanding these laws allows us to manipulate the material world in astonishing ways for the benefit of humanity, then what need do we have for the old metaphysical speculation about «human nature»?
That way of seeing the world could not build a steam engine or develop artificial intelligence. So, what is it good for?
When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of ourselves. But let us all remember also that to see God, to see what He has done for us, we can also ascend from what He has created, starting with the crown of his creation:
In him was life,
and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
About the author
Stephen P. White is executive director of the St. John Paul II National Shrine and a fellow of Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.