The human paradox
What does it mean to be human?
Twice this question is posed in the Old Testament – in Psalm 8:3–4 and Job 7:17. And on both occasions the writer expresses surprise, even incredulity, that God should pay so much attention to his human beings. For we are insignificant in comparison to the vastness of the universe, and impure in contrast to the brightness of the stars.
There are at least three major reasons why this question is important.
Personally speaking, to ask ‘What is humanity?’ is another way of asking ‘Who am I?’ There is no more important field for search or research than our own personal identity. Until we have found ourselves, we can’t grow into personal maturity, nor fully discover anything else. ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Do I have any significance?’ are universal cries.
Professionally, whatever our work may be, we are inevitably involved in serving people. Doctors and nurses have patients, teachers pupils, lawyers and social workers clients, members of parliament constituents, and business people customers. How we treat others in our work depends almost entirely on how we view them.
Politically, the nature of human beings is central to any political theory. Do human beings have an absolute value because of which they must be respected? Or is their value only relative to the state because of which they may be exploited? More simply, are institutions servants of the people, or are the people servants of institutions? As John S. Whale has written, ‘ideologies . . . are really anthropologies’; they are different doctrines of humanity. Answers to the question ‘What is humanity?’ tend to be either too naive in their optimism, or too negative in their pessimism, about the human condition.
Secular humanists are generally optimistic. Although they believe that Homo sapiens is nothing but the product of a random evolutionary process, they nevertheless believe that human beings are continuing to evolve, have limitless potential, and will one day take control of their own development. But such optimists do not take seriously enough the moral failings of humanity and our self-centredness, which have constantly undermined progress and led to disillusionment in social reformers.
Existentialists, on the other hand, tend to be extremely pessimistic. Because there is no God, they say, there are no values, ideals or standards any more. And, although we need somehow to find the courage to be, our existence has neither meaning nor purpose. Everything is ultimately absurd. But such pessimists overlook the love, joy, beauty, truth, hope, heroism and self-sacrifice which have enriched the human story.
What we need, therefore, to quote J. S. Whale again, is ‘neither the easy optimism of the humanist, nor the dark pessimism of the cynic, but the radical realism of the Bible’.
Our human dignity
The Bible affirms the intrinsic value of human beings from the first chapter onwards.
Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
So God created mankind in his own image.
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’
There has been a long-standing debate about the meaning of the divine ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ in human beings, and what it is that distinguishes us from other animals. Keith Thomas collected a number of suggestions in his book Man and the Natural World. He points out that a human being was described by Aristotle as a political animal, by Thomas Willis as a laughing animal, by Benjamin Franklin as a tool-making animal, by Edmund Burke as a religious animal, and by James Boswell, the gourmet, as a cooking animal. Other writers have focused on some physical feature of the human body. Plato made much of our erect posture, so that animals look down, and only human beings look up to heaven. Aristotle added the peculiarity that only human beings are unable to wiggle their ears. A seventeenth-century doctor was greatly impressed by our intestines, by their ‘anfractuous circumlocutions, windings and turnings’, whereas in the late eighteenth century Uvedale Price drew attention to our nose: ‘Man is, I believe, the only animal that has a marked projection in the middle of the face.’
Scholars who are familiar with ancient Egypt and Assyria, however, emphasize that in those cultures the king or emperor was regarded as the ‘image’ of God, representing him on earth, and that kings had images of themselves erected in their provinces to symbolize the extent of their authority. Against that background God the Creator entrusted a kind of royal (or at least vice-regal) responsibility to all human beings, appointing them to ‘rule’ over the earth and its creatures, and ‘crowning’ them with ‘glory and honour’ to do so.
In the unfolding narrative of Genesis 1 it is clear that the divine image or likeness is what distinguishes humans (the climax of creation) from animals (whose creation is recorded earlier). A continuity between humans and animals is implied. For example, they share ‘the breath of life’ and the responsibility to reproduce. But there is also a radical discontinuity between them, in that only human beings are said to be ‘like God’. This emphasis on the unique distinction between humans and animals keeps recurring throughout Scripture. The argument takes two forms. We should be ashamed both when human beings behave like animals, descending to their level, and when animals behave like human beings, doing better by instinct than we do by choice. As an example of the former, people are not to be ‘senseless and ignorant’ and behave like ‘a brute beast’, or ‘like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding’. As an example of the latter, we are rebuked that oxen and donkeys are better at recognizing their master than we are, that migratory birds are better at returning home after going away, and that ants are more industrious and make better provision for the future.
Returning to the early chapters of Genesis, all God’s dealings with Adam and Eve presuppose their uniqueness among his creatures. He addresses them in a way that assumes they can understand. He tells them which fruit they may eat and not eat, taking for granted an ability to discern between a permission and a prohibition, and choose between them. He planted the garden, and then put Adam in it ‘to work it and take care of it’, thus initiating a conscious, responsible partnership between them in cultivating the soil. He created them male and female, pronounced solitude ‘not good’, instituted marriage for the fulfilment of their love, and blessed their union. He also ‘walked in the garden in the cool of the day’, desiring their companionship, and missed them when they hid from him. It is not surprising, therefore, that this cluster of five privileges (understanding, moral choice, creativity, love and fellowship with God) are all regularly mentioned in Scripture, and continue to be recognized in the contemporary world as constituting the unique distinction of our ‘humanness’.
To begin with, there is our self-conscious rationality. It is not only that we as humans are able to think and to reason. There is a lot of talk today of ‘artificial intelligence’. And it is true that computers can process vast quantities of data much faster than we can. They have a form of memory (they can store information) and a form of speech (they can communicate their findings). But there is still one thing (thank God!) they cannot do. They cannot originate new thoughts; they can only ‘think’ what is fed into them. Human beings, however, are original thinkers. More than that. We can do what we (author and reader) are doing at this very moment: we can stand outside ourselves, look at ourselves, and evaluate ourselves, asking ourselves who and what we are. We are self-conscious and can be self-critical. We are also restlessly inquisitive about the universe. True, as one scientist said to another, ‘Astronomically speaking, man is infinitesimally small.’ ‘That is so,’ responded his colleague, ‘but then, astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer.’
Next, there is our ability to make moral choices. Human beings are moral beings. It is true that our conscience reflects our upbringing and culture, and is therefore fallible. Nevertheless, it remains on guard within us, like a sentinel, warning us that there is a difference between right and wrong. It is also more than an inner voice. It represents a moral order outside and above us, to which we sense an obligation. We have a strong urge to do what we perceive to be right, and feelings of guilt when we do what we believe to be wrong. Our whole moral vocabulary (commands and prohibitions, values and choices, obligations, conscience, freedom and will, right and wrong, guilt and shame) is meaningless to animals. True, we can train our dog to know what it is allowed and forbidden. And when it disobeys, and cringes from us by a reflex action, we can describe it as looking ‘guilty’. But it has no sense of guilt; it knows only that it is going to be punished.
Third, there are our powers of artistic creativity. God not only calls us into a responsible stewardship of the natural environment, and into partnership with himself in subduing and developing it for the common good, but he has also given us innovative skills through science and art to do so. We are ‘creative creatures’. That is, as creatures we depend upon our Creator. But having been created in our Creator’s likeness, he has given us the desire and the ability to be creators too. So we draw and we paint, we build and we sculpt, we dream and we dance, we write poetry and we make music. We are able to appreciate what is beautiful to the eye, the ear and the touch.
In the next place, there is our capacity for relationships of love. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image . . . So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them.’ Although we must be careful not to deduce from this text more than it actually says, it is surely legitimate to say that the plurality within the Creator (‘Let us make man’) was expressed in the plurality of his creatures (‘male and female he created them’). It became even clearer when Jesus prayed for his own people ‘that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you’. And this unity of love is unique to human beings. Of course, all animals mate, many form strong pairings, most care for their young, and some are gregarious. But the love which binds human beings together is more than an instinct, more than a disturbance in the endocrine glands. It has inspired the greatest art, the noblest heroism, the finest devotion. God himself is love, and our experiences of loving are an essential reflection of our likeness to him.
Fifth, there is our insatiable thirst for God. All human beings are aware of an ultimate personal reality, whom we seek, and in relation to whom alone we know we will find our human fulfilment. Even when we are running away from God, instinctively we know that we have no other resting place, no other home. Without him we are lost, like waifs and strays. Our greatest claim to nobility is our created capacity to know God, to be in personal relationship with him, to love him and to worship him. Indeed, we are most truly human when we are on our knees before our Creator.
It is in these things, then, that our distinctive humanness lies, in our God-given capacities to think, to choose, to create, to love and to worship. ‘In the animal,’ by contrast, wrote Emil Brunner, ‘we do not see even the smallest beginning of a tendency to seek truth for truth’s sake, to shape beauty for the sake of beauty, to promote righteousness for the sake of righteousness, to reverence the Holy for the sake of its holiness . . . The animal knows nothing “above” its immediate sphere of existence, nothing by which it measures or tests its existence . . . The difference between man and beast amounts to a whole dimension of existence.’
No wonder Shakespeare made Hamlet break out into his eulogy: ‘What a piece of work is a Man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’
I wish I could stop there and we could live the rest of our lives glowing with unadulterated self-esteem! But sadly there is another, darker side to our humanity, of which we are all too well aware, and to which Jesus himself drew our attention.
Our human depravity
Jesus once said,
Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.
Jesus did not teach the fundamental goodness of human nature. He undoubtedly believed the Old Testament truth that humankind, male and female, were made in the image of God, but he also believed that this image had been marred. He taught the worth of human beings, not least by devoting himself to their service, but he also taught our unworthiness. He did not deny that we can give ‘good things’ to others, but he also added that while doing good, we do not escape the designation ‘evil’. And in these verses he made important assertions about the extent, nature, origin and effect of evil in human beings.
First, he taught the universal extent of human evil. He was not portraying the criminal segment of society or some particularly degraded individual or group. On the contrary, he was in conversation with refined, righteous and religious Pharisees. Indeed, it is often the most upright people who are the most keenly aware of their own degradation. Take, for example, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961, a deeply committed public servant whom W. H. Auden described as ‘a great, good and lovable man’. Yet his view of himself was very different. In his collection of autobiographical pieces entitled Markings, he wrote of ‘that dark counter-centre of evil in our nature’, so that we even make our service of others ‘the foundation for our own life-preserving self-esteem’.
Second, Jesus taught the self-centred nature of human evil. In Mark 7 he listed thirteen examples. What is common to them all is that each is an assertion of the self either against our neighbour (murder, adultery, theft, false witness and covetousness – breaches of the second half of the Ten Commandments – are all included) or against God (‘pride and folly’ being defined in the Old Testament as denials of God’s sovereignty and even of his existence). Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments in terms of love for God and neighbour, and every sin is a form of selfish revolt against God’s authority or our neighbour’s welfare.
Third, Jesus taught the inward origin of human evil. Its source is not found in a bad environment or a faulty education (although both can have a powerful conditioning influence on impressionable young people). Instead, its source must be traced to our ‘heart’, our inherited and twisted nature. One might almost say that Jesus introduced us to Freudianism before Freud. At least what he called the ‘heart’ is roughly equivalent to what Freud called the ‘unconscious’. It resembles a very deep well. The thick deposit of mud at the bottom is usually unseen, and even unsuspected. But when the waters of the well are stirred by the winds of violent emotion, the most evil-looking, evil-smelling filth bubbles up from the depths and breaks the surface – rage, hate, lust, cruelty, jealousy and revenge. In our most sensitive moments we are appalled by our potential for evil. Superficial remedies just will not do.
Fourth, Jesus spoke of the defiling effect of human evil. ‘All these evils come from inside,’ he said, ‘and defile a person.’ The Pharisees considered defilement to be largely external and ceremonial. They were preoccupied with clean foods, clean hands and clean vessels. But Jesus insisted that defilement is internal and moral. What renders us unclean in God’s sight is not the food which goes into us (into our stomach), but the evil which comes out of us (out of our heart).
All those who have caught even a momentary glimpse of the holiness of God have been unable to bear the sight, so shocked have they been by their own contrasting uncleanness. Moses hid his face, afraid to look at God. Isaiah cried out in horror at his own pollution and lostness. Ezekiel was dazzled, almost blinded, by the sight of God’s glory, and fell face down on the ground. As for us, even if we have never glimpsed the splendour of Almighty God like these men, we know we are unfit to enter his presence in time or in eternity.
In saying this, we have not forgotten our human dignity. Yet we must do justice to Jesus’ own evaluation of evil in our human condition:
We who were made by God like God are disqualified from living with God.
The resulting paradox
Here, then, is the paradox of our humanness: our dignity and our depravity. We are capable both of the loftiest nobility and of the basest cruelty. One moment we can behave like God, in whose image we were made, and the next like the beasts, from whom we were meant to be completely distinct. Human beings are the inventors of hospitals for the care of the sick, universities for the acquisition of wisdom, parliaments for the just rule of the people, and churches for the worship of God. But they are also the inventors of torture chambers, concentration camps and nuclear arsenals. Strange, bewildering paradox! Noble and ignoble, rational and irrational, moral and immoral, God-like and bestial! As C. S. Lewis put it through Aslan, ‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.’
I do not know any more eloquent description of the human paradox than one that was given by Richard Holloway:
I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward . . . riddled with fears, beset with needs . . . the quintessence of dust and unto dust I shall return . . . But there is something else in me . . . Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own . . . I am a riddle to myself, an exasperating enigma . . . this strange duality of dust and glory.
Faced with the horror of their own dichotomy, some people are foolish enough to imagine that they can sort themselves out, banishing the evil and liberating the good within them. The classic expression both of our human ambivalence and of our hopes of self-salvation was given by Robert Louis Stevenson in his famous tale The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Henry Jekyll was a wealthy and respectable doctor, inclined to religion and philanthropy. But he was conscious that his personality had another, darker side, so that he was ‘committed to a profound duplicity of life’. He discovered that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’. He began to dream of solving the problem of his duality by ensuring both sides of his character were ‘housed in separate identities’, the unjust going one way, and the just the other. So he developed a drug by which he could assume the deformed body and evil personality of Mr Hyde, his alter ego, through whom he gave vent to his passions – hatred, violence, blasphemy and even murder.
At first Dr Jekyll was in control of his transformations, and boasted that the moment he chose, he could be rid of Mr Hyde for ever. But gradually Hyde gained ascendancy over Jekyll, until he began to become Hyde involuntarily, and only by great effort could resume his existence as Jekyll. ‘I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.’ Finally, a few moments before his exposure and arrest, he committed suicide. The truth is that every Jekyll has their Hyde, whom they cannot control and who threatens to take them over.
This continuing paradox of our humanness throws much light on both our private and our public lives. I will give an example of each.
I begin with personal redemption. Because evil is so deeply entrenched within us, we are utterly unable to save ourselves. So our most urgent need is redemption. We need a new beginning in life that offers us both a cleansing from the pollution of sin and a new heart, even a new creation, with new perspectives, new ambitions and new powers. And, because we were made in God’s image, such redemption is possible. No human being is irredeemable. For God came after us in Jesus Christ, and pursued us even to the desolate agony of the cross. There he took our place, bore our sin and died our death in order that we might be forgiven. Then he rose, ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, who is able to enter our personality and change us from within. If there is any better news for the human race than this, I for one have never heard it.
My second example of our paradoxical human situation relates to social progress. The fact that people – even very degraded people – retain vestiges of the divine image in which they were created is evident. This is why, on the whole, all human beings prefer justice to injustice, freedom to oppression, love to hatred, and peace to violence. This everyday observation raises our hopes for social change. Most people cherish visions of a better world. The complementary fact, however, is that human beings are ‘twisted with self-centredness’ (as a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, used to define original sin), and this places limits on our expectations. The followers of Jesus are realists, not Utopians. It is possible to improve society, but the perfect society, ‘the home of righteousness’, awaits the return of Jesus Christ.