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Man is a paradox; and his life is unceasing tension between contradictories. Of fallen man this is true in the sense explained by Plato’s horses and St. Paul’s ‘the flesh lusteth against the spirit’; but it is true also In a yet more primitive sense: of the human per. sonality itself in its inner structure. Man is a paradox because, being one thing, body-spirit, he is at the same time two things. He is a social animal, dependent physically, economically, culturally, spiritually, upon society; he is a ‘part of the universe,’ often at the mercy of natural forces, often determined not only in his behaviour but in his very way of thought by environment, upbringing, the history of the race, the history of the world; against the might of the stars he is a puny invisible speck—it is not only the dead who are
- Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
- With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Yet at the same time there is in the infinitesimal speck a sort of infinity ; for the spirit of man is in Aristotle’s phrase ‘in a manner all things,’ and for Christian theology it is capax Dei—made capable of union with the Infinite. This part of the universe is at the same time not part of the universe: the angels themselves cannot knbw a man’s secret thoughts. The whirling-speck of dust is at the same time ‘the most perfect thing in nature’; the servant of the social and cosmic machines is the master for whose benefit they are made, and the country he inhabits is, in Kant’s phrase, the ‘kingdom of ends.’
The human person is traditionally defined as an individual self-subsistent substance of rational nature.
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- Copyright © 1942 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The human person is not body-spirit merely, but this body and this sprit: hypostasis et persona, says St. Thomas, assunt supra rationem essentiae principia individualia (1a, 29, 2, ad 3m. We distinguish between principia individualia and principium individuationis: the latter is the radical principle of numerical plurality of individuals in a species; the former are the formal principles of uniqueness in of individuals in a species; the former are the formal principles if uniqueness in each individual as such). The modern use the term ‘personality’ thus finds a justification from the point of view ; and should save us from the error of regarding the human person purely statically—the temper of mind which did so much to bring decadent scholasticism into disrepute. The human person is the self-subsistent human individual, free and responsible master of his destiny and so forth. But at the same time he is this body and this spirit : a complexus of gifts, qualities, powers, which are his alone, the heir to spirit: a complexus of the material of a process of partly determined partly self-determinded growth, which together make up this personality in this character or temperament, in distinction from all others. The personality in this sense is never static: it is always growing—or decaying; and every growth is a growth in its uniqueness, and therefore in its mytery. To know a human personality, wholly we should have to know not only its physical uniqueness to the smallest detail but the entire content of its conscious mind, of its personal and collective unconscious heritage, its complexus of habits and tendencies and the way in which its experience from moment to moment was acting ypon, and being acted upon by, them. The heart of man is indeed, in Augustine’s phrase, an abyss.
2 M.Buber: I and Thou, pp. 3-11.
3 Buber, op. cit., p. 28.