In his new book, A Catholic Guide to Being Human, Dr. John Grabowski offers a reminder that the term “person” is more freighted with theological implications than we often consider. Identifying and unpacking those implications is the first step toward answering what is, perhaps, the greatest question of our age: What does it mean to be human?
The Christian West once had a confident answer to that question, one rooted firmly in the mystery of the Incarnation. The strength of that confidence served as a foundation for a great and humane civilization. That is not to say a sinless civilization, but one in which even the most egregious failings prove the rule of its underlying humanity.
Understanding the human person properly requires that we think carefully about man as both a “what” and a “who.”
Today, we seem to have lost confidence in our answers to the great question. Accordingly, as we have lost sight of both God and man, our world has become less humane, even as we have grown in power and technological mastery. Our sense of ourselves and our place in the world is distorted. We are in danger of becoming, as Grabowski puts it, both “technological giants and moral midgets.”
As Pope Leo XIV made clear in Magnifica Humanitas, one of the great temptations of our technological age is, in fact, a very ancient temptation: the temptation to construct for ourselves, in all our hubris, a new Tower of Babel. A world “conceived without reference to God” must necessarily also be a world constructed without reference to man – a world that is quite literally inhumane.
The changing rhythms and patterns of our way of life shape the way we understand ourselves. Sometimes, threats to our self-understanding come about abruptly – as in the case of the advent of nuclear weapons or, today, the rise of AI – and so provoke a great deal of self-reflection. Sometimes the change is much more subtle and, particularly when the change is perceived as benign or beneficial, it proceeds almost unnoticed.
However profoundly our surroundings and circumstances shape us (and they do!), we are never merely the product of our circumstances. Human nature itself guarantees that, as Pope John Paul II insisted:
[I]t cannot be forgotten that the manner in which the individual exercises his freedom is conditioned in innumerable ways. While these certainly have an influence on freedom, they do not determine it; they make the exercise of freedom more difficult or less difficult, but they cannot destroy it.
Even devout Christians sometimes need a reminder that our self-understanding is conditioned by the world around us, often in ways which are not easy to perceive. And even devout Christians sometimes need to be reminded that the threats and challenges which we do perceive – clear and present as they may be – are only a part of the story, and perhaps not the greatest part.
In short, when it comes to understanding ourselves and our place in the world, we must be careful to ensure we are seeing both the forest and the trees. And here is where Professor Grabowski’s new book really shines.
“Some of the Fathers of the Church,” writes Grabowski in his introduction, “saw man as a microcosm of the macrocosm – a miniature version of the universe as a whole. Human beings are both material (like the physical world and animals) and rational and spiritual (like angels and God himself). In this way, the human person stands as a summation of creation and in the center of salvation history.”
It takes a mastery of many subjects to write intelligently about such a vast subject. Yet here Grabowski shows his long years of experience as a teacher and his command of the subject matter. He clarifies without oversimplifying; he condenses without distorting; he writes with precision without relying on jargon or overly technical terms. The result is a compelling account of Christian anthropology which is both eminently accessible and readable yet without any watering down.
Perhaps the most delightful thing about this book is in what we might call its sense of proportion. Grabowski is a moral theologian, and it is clear that he shares many concerns about the pressing challenges of our day. And he writes an entire chapter about what he calls the “Deviations, Distortions, and Deceptions” of the human person we see around us today. He is very aware, as it were, of the trees which stand before us in the wood.
But these urgent moral challenges of our day are never allowed to obscure the broader horizon. They are presented in the vast context of the whole story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. It is precisely in this context, and against the backdrop of Scripture, Tradition, and the sacramental life of the Church, that challenges such as AI, genetic engineering, and artificial contraception (to pick but three examples from the book) take on their proper significance and proportion.
These deviations, distortions, and deceptions seem relatively small in comparison to the whole of salvation history. And yet, it is precisely in understanding that whole history – the story of the dignity that man receives from his Creator, the heights to which man is called, the price of his disobedience, and the inestimable love and mercy of God who takes on human nature to redeem us and make us His adopted sons and daughters – that we see just how precious our humanity is and how wicked it is to disfigure and distort what God has made in his own image and likeness.
A Catholic Guide to Being Human is very much worthwhile for Catholic (and Catholic-curious) readers from teenagers on up. As someone who reads and writes about Christian anthropology all the time, I am grateful for (and perhaps ever so slightly envious of) Dr. Grabowski’s skill in surveying with such clarity both the forest and the trees.
