What is a human being, anyway?

Recently I have been preoccupied with the question of anthropology. I am convinced that so many of the issues of our day—for example, gender, sexuality, artificial intelligence, IVF, and surrogacy—all point back to the question raised in Psalm 8, “What is man?” The psalmist poses the question of human significance as a motive for doxological wonder. In our day, it has become an expression of paradoxical confusion. We have used our exceptional nature as creative, intentional beings to convince ourselves we have no significance at all.

Augustinian Anthropology

Many books have helped me in this context. Perhaps the most important has been Augustine’s Confessions. I have loved this book since I first read it at university and have reread it regularly in the years since in multiple translations, most recently that of Anthony Esolen. Aside from the brilliant literary aspects of the work, Augustine successfully integrates theology, experience, and doxology into his autobiography in a way unmatched by any before or since. Augustine writes the book as one extended prayer, and in every sentence he assumes human dependence upon God. Confessions strikes hard against the modern anthropological myth, that to be truly human is to be autonomous, unencumbered self-creators. Augustine’s doctrine of God decisively informs his doctrine of man, providing one of the propulsive aspects of the narrative. Along the way his criticisms of the pornography of the gladiatorial shows and the seductive nature of rhetorics and transgression for its own sake all offer insights into contemporary challenges. I first read Confessions for the personal testimony of Augustine to God’s grace. I still read it for that but also for its many insights into the human condition.

Wrestling with Modernity

I have also profited from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (Thoughts). While Pascal draws deeply on Augustine’s anthropology, he brings a modern note to its application. Faced with the vastness of the universe that his scientific knowledge revealed to him, Pascal comments that it makes him feel insignificant, afraid, and alone. That question of modernity—Where can man find significance, if anywhere at all?—presses on him and poses a challenge to his ability to be both a brilliant scientist and a man of Christian faith. While the fragmentary nature of Thoughts can sometimes frustrate readers who want to know what a cryptic sentence or paragraph means, there is a sense in which it also enhances the work by forcing the reader to think. In addition to the theological questions raised, the commentary on the materialist culture of the 17th-century French court has many parallels with our entertainment-obsessed world. Why does the king have a jester? Because he fears death and, having nothing else to worry about due to his material wealth and power, needs to be distracted from his mortality. In this instance, as in others, Pascal forces us to see the anthropological and theological significance of human behavior.

Theology of the Body

Of contemporary writers, I would point to Erika Bachiochi, The Rights of Women, and O. Carter Snead, What It Means To Be Human, as having had a formative impact on my anthropology. The former addresses the history and nature of feminism, reconstructing it for the present day in dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft. The latter examines the bioethics of conception, birth, and death. What both share is a commitment to understanding human beings as those defined not by autonomy but by obligation and dependency. In so doing, they also see the body and human embodiment as morally significant. That is a key move—perhaps obvious to Catholic thinkers like Bachiochi and Snead, but something Protestants need to make more central in our thinking. Particularly given the bodily implications of many modern questions, from sexual relationships to gender to fertility to end-of-life care, a theology of the body in Protestant circles is much to be desired. And there are good indications that such is emerging, with some useful monographs on the topic having been published in recent years. I have also benefited from C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, but it is so well-known no further comment is needed.

The Purpose of Gender

This brings me to the final book: Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender. Favale is a trained gender theorist and Catholic convert. This book offers the most succinct and lucid account of gender theory available (and works of gender theory are renowned for their impenetrable prose and rebarbative argumentation). But it also provides a positive alternative. Perhaps the most important aspect of the book for me was the centrality given to teleology. Again, as with Bachiochi and Snead, the body is important. What Favale does is draw out that importance in terms of sexual teleology. To capture the importance of this, we might reframe the current hot question “What is woman?” as “What is a woman for?” That demands we think teleologically. Is it any wonder it is so hard to answer this question in a world where being human is understood in terms of radical autonomy? In such an anthropology, a teleology that inheres in nature is something oppressive, needing to be overcome. The confusion and suffering caused by modernity’s worldview is increasingly obvious to all. But an anthropology that starts with a given teleology connected to the sexed nature of the body can liberate us.

These books have become constant companions in recent years. I commend them to anyone who wishes to wrestle with the perennial question “What is man?” particularly in light of the faulty answers our current society forces upon us.