The Perennial Question: “Who Is Man?”


Modern philosophy flatters itself by claiming it was responsible for the “turn to the subject,” i.e., the human (and, usually, a very subjective understanding of the human).  But focus on the human is hardly a modern discovery.  

St. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop-theologian, is noted for his line gloria Dei vivens homo – “the glory of God is man fully alive.” Nor did the bishop of Lyons pluck that thread out of nowhere: the Psalmist praises the Creator for making man “a little less than the angels.” (Psalm 8:5)  Eastern Christianity long recognized that God’s work of salvation was really deification: of bringing the full image and likeness of God in man to flower. (Genesis 1:27)  

The dignity of the human person was so central to the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II that it was the focus of his inaugural encyclical, “The Redeemer of Man” (Redemptor hominis).  Nor did that pope tire of quoting Gaudium et spes (no. 22) that Jesus Christ “fully reveals man to himself.”  Note what the Council says – and doesn’t.  The Council doesn’t say Christ “fully reveals God to man” (though that’s true).  It affirms Jesus “fully reveals man to himself.”

Carl Trueman brings those insights in his new book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity.  He argues that, in some ways, Nietzsche was ahead of his time.  Proclaiming the “death of God” to a world still coasting on religious gases was ineffective.  As with nominalism, the culture still concealed the gaping abyss the “death of God” entails – not least of which is destroying the divine image and likeness in man.  

In three chapters, Trueman goes on to demonstrate how contemporary man is achieving that in the area of sex (the sexual revolution and abortion), artificial reproduction (IVF and surrogacy), and death (an enemy which, if it can’t be stopped, can at least be forced to bend to one’s wishes about when and where).  

Man as the divine image and likeness is the unifying theme in Trueman’s work: if the human person is made in the image of God who is good, then man’s forays into sin constitute a defacement of that image.  

That too is not necessarily a new insight: already in the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great, in his first sermon for Christmas, admonished Christians to “remember your dignity” (albeit as redeemed by grace through the Incarnation).  But Trueman argues persuasively that moderns are not simply disfiguring their divine image and likeness.  Rather, they are actively and almost with pleasure working to “desecrate” that image, to try to destroy the divine image in man by replacing it by an autonomous human god.

This isn’t just a moral question: what sins people commit.  It’s an anthropological question, the one the Psalmist posed: “Who is man?”

Trueman’s starting point is important for two reasons.  

First, it provides a common ecumenical and interreligious point of departure.  Jews and Christians can share a mutual perspective while, Scripturally based, it may ameliorate some of the notions of radical human corruption that reigned among the classical Reformers.  

Second, it applies to all men: all human persons are made in God’s image and likeness, whether they profess that truth or not.  Man may choose to deny his God; God does not deny His mankind.

On the other hand, the Devil certainly has an interest in denying the truth about the human person.  A certain theological tradition holds that his fall stems from his rejection of the human creation and divine Incarnation: how could God create such a half-breed hybrid as a bodily-spiritual creature, much less consider assuming such a nature?  A creature who even shares co-creatorship through sexual reproduction, something no angel can do.  

Given those perspectives, should one be surprised that the contemporary assault on human dignity has much deeper roots than “commonplace” sin: an infernal fury that questions human existence itself?  Is it then so surprising, as Our Lady said at Fatima, that the final struggle between God and evil would be over marriage and sex?

The reception of Trueman’s book has been positive.  As a Catholic theologian, I welcome it, not because a focus on the divine image in man is novel but because he gives the discussion broader Judeo-Christian appeal.  

What is important and deserves attention is his Nietzschean insight: the contemporary assault on human dignity is qualitatively different because, underlying all the diverse issues Trueman enumerates, is one common thread: a gleeful desacralization of the human person.

St. John Paul II focused his pontificate on the human question: if the Patristic problem was God One and Three, the Reformers’ problem and that of us moderns is man.  

But as Karol Wojtyła repeatedly stressed before becoming pope, in his polemics with Kant, the divine/human relationship is one of direct, not inverse ratio. One does not become, as Kant (and Nietzsche) assume, more autonomously “human” by rejecting God and His law. Rather, to the degree man follows the God in whose image he is made, to that degree he also fulfills his humanity.  

That insight is under assault from two directions.  The frontal assault is a modern culture that wants to create a man who buries his “god.”  But a backdoor assault can be found in certain traditionalist Catholic circles that seem to imagine the current papal focus on man and human dignity somehow undermines a theocentric Catholicism.  

Yes, there are versions of the “Catholic modern” that seem to marginalize God, but that is hardly the robust theological anthropology, built upon tradition and Vatican II, that John Paul and Benedict bequeathed the Church.  

The word in Rome is that Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical will be released Monday, and that it deals with “big picture” social issues like AI and global peace. But the “biggest picture” behind them all (including whether AI can “replace” man) remains: “Who is man that you care for him?” Let’s hope our American-born pope provides fruitful answers to that question.

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