God made man in His own image and likeness. God Himself, then, is the primary reference point for man’s self-understanding. Accordingly, when man loses sight of God, he loses sight of his own humanity.
This is the story of our secular age writ large. It is also, in some vaguely reassuring sense, the story of man writ large. I say “reassuring” in the sense that our failings are rarely quite so novel as we think they are, which means 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 diminution of our humanity. The Fall was a moral event – an act of disobedience and a failure of the will – which brought about a darkening of the intellect. Sin, as the saying goes, makes us stupid. Each of us understands this because each of us sees the same disobedience in ourselves. We are, all of us, like Adam and Eve.
St. Paul 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 anymore than knowing that Paul knew it helps me choose the good. But knowing that Paul and I are on the same page – that what ails him ails me – is nonetheless edifying. There is solidarity among us sinners, we who long for God’s grace.
Even outside of a strictly theological or Scriptural sense, materialism (whether of the practical or ideological sort) invariably leads to inhumanity, precisely insofar as it denies that which is highest and best in the human person.
Leo XIII, in his great encyclical on the restoration of Christian philosophy, Aeterni patris, clearly indicated that the cause of the “strifes of these days” was a confusion about “divine and human things” originating in the “schools of philosophy,” and creeping from there to the State and to the masses.
The Second Vatican Council, in one of its weightiest and pithiest passages, states the matter succinctly:
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.
“The fundamental error of socialism,” insisted Pope John Paul II, some three decades later, “is anthropological in nature.” And what did he name as the first cause of that anthropological error? Atheism. Moreover, the “consumerist society,” according to the Polish pope, “agrees with Marxism,” insofar as it, “totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs.”
As for Leo XIII’s day, as for John Paul II’s day, so too for our own. Confusion about the things of God and man leads to injustice, conflict, and immiseration. For those of us living in a Christian (or Post-Christian) society, this seems the obvious causal order of the problem: When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of man. For readers of The Catholic Thing, this is all familiar ground.
But the converse, it turns out, is also true: When one loses sight of nature – and particularly human nature – it becomes increasingly difficult to glimpse God, particularly the Christian God. And we might be less used to thinking of things in that way.
If we begin from an inadequate view of the human person, certain questions about God aren’t just harder to answer; they can cease to appear relevant at all!
Most of the great controversies of the early Church – and the corresponding heresies: Docetism, Arianism, Nestorianism, etc. – were tied up with Christological questions. 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 understood the implications of the Incarnation, both the implications for what that event reveals about God and what it reveals about our humanity.
The Church was able to think through these controversies not only because she had a clear sense of the divine, but a firm grasp of nature and what it means to be human. Today, our world has lost sight of human nature so thoroughly that it often struggles to grasp why the Incarnation might have any implications at all!
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.” What could such a claim possibly mean to a people who have ceased to believe that “human nature” has any permanent, 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 it was that God took upon Himself, namely, human nature.
If the world around us is made up 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 of nature allows us to manipulate the material world in astonishing ways to the benefit of mankind, then what need have we for ancient metaphysical speculation about “human nature”?
That way of seeing the world couldn’t build a steam engine, or develop Artificial intelligence. So what good is it?
When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of ourselves. But let us all remember, too, that to see God, to see what He has done for us, we can also ascend from what He has made, beginning with the crown of his creation:
What came to be through him was life,
and this life was the light of the human race;
the light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness has not overcome it.
