The Human Dimension

PIGEONHOLING HUMANITY IS SOMETHING THE CHURCH will not do as she knows that she is dealing with a mystery, and she is used to handling mysteries, including the mystery of mysteries which she handles with a humeral veil or confects on the altar. With respect to the mystery of man, she disdains the "various reductionist conceptions of the human person," those that are predicated upon ideology and not sound notions of the human person, those that would limit man's personhood to function. Man's ability to limit man is quite prevalent: homo faber, homo ludens, homo economicus, homo loquax, homo politicus, or a homo technologicus, as if man were all work, all play, all about money, all about chatter, politics, or technology.

Instead, the Church's social doctrine "strives to indicate the different dimensions of the mystery of man, who must be approached 'in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being.'" (Compendium, No. 126) (quoting JP II, Redemptor hominis, 14)

What the Church does know is that there is no such thing as homo solus, man alone. "The human person," the Church insists, "may never be thought of only as an absolute individual being built up by himself and on himself, as if his characteristic traits depended on no one else but himself." (Compendium, No. 125) There is no such thing as atomistic man.

"It is not good for man to be alone," says the Lord in the beginning of creation. (Gen. 2:18) Likewise, it is not good to think that man is man alone.

There are certain qualities, certain large features in the landscape of the personhood of man that the Church identifies: a unity of body and soul, an openness to transcendence, the subject of free will, a source of intrinsic uniqueness, dignity, always open to, and formed by, others.

Man is a unit of body and soul, with the soul being spiritual, immaterial, and the "principle of unity of the human being." In Aristotelian terms which the Church has borrowed and made her own, the "unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the 'form' of the body." (Compendium, No. 129) The Church rejects a Platonic notion of that man is spirit, imprisoned, as it were, in a body. She rejects a Cartesian dualistic vision of man as a "ghost in a machine." The body is part of the person every bit as much as the soul. Corpore et anima unus.

The body is not a tool, something separate from man, that he may use for pleasure. Nor is the body to be regarded as something to be despised or unholy. The body is not a pariah, an untouchable. Though wounded by sin, the body remains a holy thing, a temple of the Holy Spirit to use St. Paul's words. (1 Cor. 6:19) The body is intrinsic to man, and for that reason participates in the moral act, and participates in the redemption through the promised resurrection of the body.


The Church travels in between the extremes of spiritualism and materialism: "Neither the spiritualism that despises the reality of the body nor the materialism that considers the spirit a mere manifestation of the material do justice to the complex nature, to the totality or to the unity of the human being." (Compendium, No. 129)

Along with his freedom and with his disposition toward desiring truth, the human person is intrinsically open to others of his kind, but also to the transcendent, the infinite "Other," the holy "Beyond," ultimately He whom we know as God. This openness to the entirety of existence even God was described by the Scholastics as the capax universi and the capax Dei, the capacity towards the universe and the capacity towards God in man.

The Compendium hearkens back to these notions of man as capax universi and the capax Dei, when it says: "The human person is open to the fullness of being, to the unlimited horizon of being . . . . In a certain sense the human soul is--because of its cognitive dimension--all things." Anima quodammodo est omnia, said St. Thomas. The soul is in a manner of speaking all things.

Indeed, the soul is in a manner of speaking greater that all material things, for "in fact, man in his interiority transcends the universe and is the only creature will be God for itself." (Compendium, No. 133) This brings to mind St. Thomas's striking statement: "The good of the grace of one soul is greater than the good of the nature of the whole universe."*

Each human being is also "a unique and unrepeatable being," who "exists as an 'I' capable of self-understanding, self possession, and self-determination." (Compendium, No. 131) Here again the Church rejects a functional understanding of person and insists an an ontological notion of person. It is not function that makes a person, it is the person that allows the function.

"[I]t is not intellect, consciousness, and freedom that define the person; rather, it is the person who is the basis of the acts of intellect, consciousness, and freedom. These acts can even be absent, for even without them man does not cease to be a person." (Compendium, No. 131)

The Church clearly spurns functional definitions of personhood which have their source in John Locke and receive their full flower in the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose functional definitions of personhood as "self-awareness" have led him to justify such evils as abortion and infanticide as well as those in persistent vegetative states.

The openness to the transcendent and his uniqueness give the human person a unique dignity which society and its structures must respect, and which is the foundation of his moral and civil rights and freedoms. "[T]he social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person, since the order of things is to be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around. . . . Every political, economic, social, scientific, and cultural program must be inspired by the awareness of the primacy of each human being over society." (Compendium, No. 132)

Freedom, a gift of God to man, is another essential quality of personhood, and freedom is ordered to the good, to truth, ultimately to God himself from whence it came. "Man can turn to good only in freedom, which God has given to him as one of the highest signs of his image." (Compendium, No. 135)

Yet this freedom so intrinsic to man is not a false autonomy. Man is not an autos nomos, a law unto himself, "self-law." Man's freedom is not independent from God and his law, for it is not in man to define good and evil. Contrary to the teaching of the Greek philosopher Protagoras, the Church maintains that man is not the measure of all things. Rather she sides with Plato who in his Laws maintained against Protagoras that God is the measure of all things.

Man's freedom "is not unlimited: it must halt before the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfillment precisely in the acceptance of that law." (Compendium, No. 136) (quoting JP II, Veritatis splendor, No. 35)

The moral law is therefore fundamental to the proper exercise of man's freedom, and any suggestion that freedom requires man to travel beyond the boundaries of the moral law is nothing other than an argument that a proper use of freedom is to fall into the abyss of immorality. No. The moral law is a reality, which is only ignored to the peril of freedom.

"The proper exercise of personal freedom," the Compendium insists, "requires specific conditions of economic, social, political, and cultural order that 'are too often disregarded or violated. . . . By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth.'" (Compendium, No. 137) (quoting CCC, § 1740)

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*St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIa, q.24, a. 3, ad 2.

The Human Person as Imago Dei

ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS of the Church's social doctrine is the concept of personhood. The notion of personhood is a philosophical concept, but it finds its inspiration and deepening in the revealed doctrines that man is made in the image of God (imago Dei), and that man is called to a supernatural destiny, or, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts it, "is constitutively related to God in the most profound manner." (Compendium, No. 108)

The Medieval scholastics had wonderful aphorisms that encapsulated this latter notion, that man is "constitutively related to God in the most profound manner," that both heaven and God hound him. Homo est Dei capax. Man has a capacity for God. This capacity for God is what gave man a supernatural dignity. Homo non proprie humanum, sed superhumanum est. Man is not properly human, but superhuman. The Compendium quotes Ecclesiastes 3:11 in saying that God "has put eternity into man's mind," and also refers to St. Augustin's beautiful saying in his Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

Only persons are made in the image of God, have a capacity for God, and have supernatural destinies. Remove God from the picture and invariably the concept of person becomes unintelligible. The dignity of man, the concept of personhood, cannot be built upon agnostic, much less atheistic, foundations. It is philosophical, but it is also theological.

Man is Imago Dei, Capax Dei, that is to say, a Person

"All of social life," the Compendium states eliciting an image of the drama of human life, "is an expression of its unmistakable protagonist: the human person." The origin of social life, as well as its subject, foundation, and goal, is the human person. (Compendium, No. 106) The centrality of personhood in Catholic social doctrine cannot be underestimated. "The whole of the Church's social doctrine, in fact, develops from the principle that affirms the inviolable dignity of the human person." (Compendium, No. 107)

Being ordered to the good of the human person, the whole of social life can therefore be critiqued by reference to whether it promotes or instead redimensions or distorts the human person and the human dignity that follows in its train. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church therefore focuses on this concept.

It is essential to understand the concept of personhood as an ontological concept, and not a functional concept. Man is a person because of who he is, because of his being what he is, not because of what he is capable of doing or becoming, because of what functions, mental, psychological, biological, etc. he is capable of performing.

Insidiously, when many moderns use the word "person," they have a functional concept in mind, a notion that most have traced to John Locke's definition of self in his Essay on Human Understanding as "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places."

Such a functional conception of personhood is convenient when you want to dispose of men who do not have all the functions you happen to think are important. Hence, fetuses, those in a persistent vegetative state, and the mentally infirm are not persons under a functional dimension, though under an ontological dimension they are. This is the sort of redimensioning of the concept of person against which the Compendium warns.

The concept of personhood, of course, transcends the distinction of sex, and so man and woman, being both persons, "have the same dignity and are of equal value." (Compendium, No. 111) They are complementary expressions of the human person, and this complementarity finds its apex or epitome in the reciprocal giving that is part of the I-Thou and Thou-I covenant of marriage, a relationship that "gives life to the 'we' in the human couple," which itself is an image of God and and image of God's love for the Church.

There is a certain tragedy in this creature that is imago Dei and capax Dei, and that is the notion of original sin, and man's fallen nature. Philosophy knows nothing of it, though, as G. K. Chesterton quipped in his book Orthodoxy, it is a fact "as practical as potatoes" that there is "indisputable dirt" on the countenance of man, and "is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."

The Church will not allow man to divert himself, indeed to deceive himself by hiding himself, from the fact that he suffers from original sin. She will prevent him from trying to use foils to avoid having to confront his deep guilt, and his deep need for God the Redeemer:

This doctrine [of original sin] encourages men and women not to remain in guilt and not to take guilt lightly, continuously seeking scapegoats in other people and justification in the environment, in heredity, in institutions, in structures and in relationships. This is a teaching that unmasks such deceptions.

(Compendium, No. 120)

Original sin not only divided man from God, but also man from woman, and man from man. Though the doctrine of the fall of man and original sin are revealed doctrines, a cursory look at man's history, a quick assessment of the personal and social divisions which plague us, a brief introspection of oneself ought readily prove the existence of original sin and our fallen nature which predisposes us to personal sin, to wounding both self and others.

"The mystery of sin is composed of a twofold wound, which the sinner opens in his own side and in the relationship with his neighbor. That is why we can speak of personal and social sin." As the Compendium correctly notes, there simply is no such thing as a "victimless sin." All sins have both personal and social dimensions.

Every sin is personal under a certain aspect; under another, every sin is social, insofar as and because it also has social consequences. In its true sense, sin is always an act of the person, because it is the free act of an individual person and not properly speaking of a group or community. The character of social sin can unquestionably be ascribed to every sin, taking into account the fact that "by virtue of the human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and concrete, each individual's sin in some way affects others."

(Compendium, No. 117) (quoting JP II, Reconciliatio et paenitentia, No. 16)

Though all sins have a social component in addition to their foundational personal one, it is true that some sins particularly offend the social fabric in that they represent direct and intentional assaults on another person. Every act that intentionally takes the life of another, that attacks the physical integrity of another, that violates the human rights of another or offends the dignity or honor due another, that vitiates the common good are clearly social in nature.

One of the horrible consequences of personal sins and their invariable social nature is that they become institutionalized, consolidated in what are called "structures of sin." (Compendium, No. 119) These "structures of sin" give rise to a vicious social inertia which is difficult to overcome, since they result in certain self-interest in sin, they condition those who grow up or participate in such structures, and they tend to normalize behavior which is sinful. One might favorably cite to Pascal's Pensées (No. 458):

'All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life; libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi." [1 John 2:16] Wretched is the cursed land which these three rivers of fire enflame rather than water!

The Compendium cites in particular to two categories of such structures prevalent in the modern world, structures built upon the "all-consuming desire for profit," and structures built upon the "thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one's will upon others."

The Church's understanding of original sin and of man's fallen state is therefore realistic. The Church is fully cognizant of the tragic flaw that is resident in the intimate parts of man which tends to bar him from his destiny. However, she is not, by any means pessimistic. She does not cry as it were with a leaden echo the words: "despair, despair, despair, despair." At her heart is an optimistic and positive conception of man because she has in her ken the mighty solution to man's problems. The Church yells as with a golden echo, "Spare!" and points us "Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, yonder."*

Christian realism sees the abysses of sin, but in the light of the hope, greater than any evil, given by Jesus Christ's act of redemption, in which sin and death are destroyed . . . . The new reality that Jesus Christ gives us is not grafted onto human nature nor is it added from outside: it is rather that reality of communion with the Trinitarian God to which men and women have always been oriented in the depths of their being thanks to their creaturely likeness to God. . . . The universality of this hope also includes, besides the men and women of all peoples, heaven and earth . . . . According to the New Testament, all creation, together indeed with all humanity, awaits the Redeemer: subjected to futility, creation reaches out full of hope, with groans and birth pangs, longing to be freed from decay.

(Compendium, No. 120-23)

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*Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Maiden's Song from St. Winefred's Well."

Veritatis Splendor: Part 15--Corpus Humanum et Lex Naturalis

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NATURE AND FREEDOM, and the relationship between the nature of man and law, is an area which today is the center of heated argumentation: one might even say it is a sort of war on two fronts. The sides of an intense debate may roughly be categorized as: (i) advocates of an extreme form of scientific empiricism who unduly "narrow" human nature to scientific facts, and then, based upon these narrow scientific bases, advance an extreme scientific determinism, and (ii) advocates carrying a banner of an excessive human liberalism. At the center is the much beleaguered traditional, classical morality, which finds itself under siege, if not outright hostilities, with its implacable foes.

At the heart of the debate is the very notion of "nature," in particular human nature. The empiricist sees "nature" in solely empirical terms, limiting himself to "the world of the senses within space and time." The empiricist narrows his field of vision of human nature to dimensions that can be measured by instruments, by observation, by statistics. For the scientific empiricist, human nature, then, is nothing other than an amalgam of biological, psychological, cultural processes. By limiting man's nature to such empirically-verifiable measures an ethicist succumbs to the temptation to take these measures and the principle criterion of what is moral. At the extreme edge, some of these empiricists may even suggest that man cannot free himself from these unbreakable biological, psychological, and social laws, and thus is not free at all, but circumscribed by his own materialism. These view nature in a sort of mono-dimensional view: a one-dimensional man whose entire existence can be relegated to physical and biological processes.

In reaction, perhaps, to this excessive empiricism comes liberalism, which views human nature as something separate and distinct from human freedom and morality. Nature is viewed as something that is amoral, and not the source of any normative moral value. The liberal overlooks the "created dimension of nature," and therefore fails to grasp its "integrity," the message that is contained within it. Nature for these moralists is something over which man exercises power, including his moral power. It is not something which may be the source of moral norms or value. Nature is seen as a restriction to be overcome by man, and the source of man's morality is not nature, but is something constructed by man from his freedom which progressively must be exercised over and against nature which limits him. Others define man's nature as freedom, thus confusing the two categories resulting in making freedom "selfdefining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values." In this latter instance, man ultimately does not even have a nature: it is essentially "his own personal life-project," man and his nature being "nothing more than his own freedom." VS, 46.

Either camp--scientific empiricism or moral liberalism--has misunderstood the notion of human nature. This misunderstanding is, in fact, displayed in the very objections the liberals commonly hurl against the traditional conception of natural law. Confused by their own principles, by their own limited understanding of nature as something empirical and divorced from creation, they accuse the traditional doctrine of natural law as being nothing other than forms of physicalism or naturalism, where physical or biological laws are simplistically extended to become moral laws.

Man is body and soul.

Such a view has even entered into the minds of "certain theologians," who accuse the Church's magisterial teachings as suffering from antiquated physicalism or naturalism, one which limits man's freedom, and fails to account for "both man's character as a rational and free being," and fails also to take into account "the cultural conditioning of all moral norms." These theologians would give to man the power to "freely determine the meaning of his behavior," so that, at best, "natural inclinations" would give rise only to a "general orientation towards correct behavior," but they in no way could "determine the moral assessment of individual human acts." For the liberal theologian, man, it would seem, is in the final analysis unmoored from his nature: that is a necessary implication of his freedom.

It is in the context of these notions that the Pope feels the need to "consider carefully the correct relationship existing between freedom and human nature," with a particular focus on "the place of the human body in questions of natural law." VS, 48.

The essential point of John Paul's view is that the human body is a significant aspect of man, and is an essential component of man's entire reality--who he is and what he is--and therefore is something that has within it moral meaning, a moral message. It is false, even in the name of freedom, to treat the human body as something without moral meaning.

A freedom which claims to be absolute ends up treating the human body as a raw datum, devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design. Consequently, human nature and the body appear as presuppositions or preambles, materially necessary for freedom to make its choice, yet extrinsic to the person, the subject and the human act. Their functions would not be able to constitute reference points for moral decisions, because the finalities of these inclinations would be merely "physical" goods, called by some "pre-moral". To refer to them, in order to find in them rational indications with regard to the order of morality, would be to expose oneself to the accusation of physicalism or biologism. In this way of thinking, the tension between freedom and a nature conceived of in a reductive way is resolved by a division within man himself.

VS, 48. The Pope's assessment of such a theory is abrupt: "This moral theory does not correspond to the truth about man and his freedom." VS, 48. It is false to suggest that the human body does not inform man's freedom, and therefore has no intrinsic meaning in informing us who man is, and how his freedom ought to be exercised. The essential error stems from a misunderstanding of the human person.

It contradicts the Church's teachings on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body.* The spiritual and immortal soul is the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole — corpore et anima unus — as a person.**

VS, 48. In a sense, these modern theologians suffer from a sort of Gnostic deprecation of the body, a Manichean or Catharist tendency of viewing matter as evil, an evil that must be overcome in the name of freedom. They suffer further from the philosophical error that one may ascribe to Plato and Descartes, where the body is merely a sort of repository for the soul, and the only noble thing in man is his reasonable soul which is incarcerated or which pilots through the means of the human body, as if reason were a pilot separate from the ship.

This deprecatory view of the human body is philosophically false and unchristian, and fails to consider the dignity to be accorded the human body in God's natural and supernatural plan. It ignores, for example, the reality that "reason and free will are linked with all the bodily an sense faculties," and so misunderstands man in his nature. Moreover, it forgets that the "body . . . has been promised the resurrection," and therefore shares in man's "glory," in his redemption and salvation. Man is not saved from or apart from his body, but in his body.

There is therefore not one morality for the body and another for man's soul: morality for man involves the entire person of man, which necessarily involves man, body and soul:

The person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts. The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator. It is in the light of the dignity of the human person — a dignity which must be affirmed for its own sake — that reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined. And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as a mere means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods, without which one would fall into relativism and arbitrariness.

VS, 48. That is the philosophical error behind a false opposition of body and soul. There is also a theological error behind this notion, a theological error relating to human anthropology and moral theology:

A doctrine which dissociates the moral act from the bodily dimensions of its exercise is contrary to the teaching of Scripture and Tradition. Such a doctrine revives, in new forms, certain ancient errors which have always been opposed by the Church, inasmuch as they reduce the human person to a "spiritual" and purely formal freedom. . . . In fact, body and soul are inseparable: in the person, in the willing agent and in the deliberate act, they stand or fall together.

VS, 49.

The philosophical and theological errors, therefore, separate the personhood of man, which necessarily is composed of a union of body and soul. The traditional doctrine of the natural law does not suffer from these philosophical or theological errors. Quite the contrary, it is insistent that man must be treated as a person in his entirety, as a person in the unity of soul and body:

At this point the true meaning of the natural law can be understood: it refers to man's proper and primordial nature, the "nature of the human person", which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of his spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his end. "The natural moral law expresses and lays down the purposes, rights and duties which are based upon the bodily and spiritual nature of the human person. Therefore this law cannot be thought of as simply a set of norms on the biological level; rather it must be defined as the rational order whereby man is called by the Creator to direct and regulate his life and actions and in particular to make use of his own body."

VS, 50.***

The inclinations of the entire person--both spiritual inclinations and biological inclinations--must be considered in any doctrine of natural law. It is an error to predicate morality solely on biological inclinations, just as it is an error to predicate morality solely on rational or spiritual inclinations.

Only in reference to the human person in his "unified totality", that is, as "a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit," can the specifically human meaning of the body be grasped. Indeed, natural inclinations take on moral relevance only insofar as they refer to the human person and his authentic fulfillment, a fulfillment which for that matter can take place always and only in human nature. By rejecting all manipulations of corporeity which alter its human meaning, the Church serves man and shows him the path of true love, the only path on which he can find the true God.

VS, 50.†

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*For the principle that the soul is itself (per se) and essentially (essentialiter) the form of man's body, the Pope cites to the Ecumenical Council of Vienne, Constitution Fidei Catholicae: DS, 902 and the Fifth Lateran Ecumenical Council, Bull Apostolici Regiminis: DS, 1440. The first source reads as follows:

(De anima ut forma corporis.)
Porro doctrinam omnem seu positionem temere asserentem, aut vertentem in dubium, quod substantia animae rationalis seu intellectivae vere ac per se humani corporis non sit forma, velut erroneam ac veritati catholicae inimicam fidei, praedicto sacro approbante Concilio reprobamus: definientes, ut cunctis nota sit fidei sincerae veritas ac praecludatur universis erroribus aditus, ne subintrent, quod quisquis deinceps asserere, defendere seu tenere pertinaciter praesumpserit, quod anima rationalis seu intellectiva non sit forma corporis humani per se et essentialiter, tamquam haereticus sit censendus.

[The soul as a form of the body]. Furthermore, with the approval of the above mentioned sacred council we reprove as erroneous and inimical to the Catholic faith every doctrine or position rashly asserting or turning to doubt that the substance of the rational or intellective soul truly and in itself is not a form of the human body, defining, so that the truth of sincere faith may be known to all, and the approach to all errors may be cut off, lest they steal in upon us, that whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic.

The second source reads as follows:

Cum ... zizaniae seminator ... nonnullos perniciosissimos errores, a fidelibus semper explosos, in agro Domini superseminare et augere sit ausus, de natura praesertim animae rationalis, quod videlicet mortalis sit, aut unica in cunctis hominibus, et nonnulli temere philosophantes, secundum saltem philosophiam verum id esse asseverent : contra huiusmodi pestem opportuna remedia adhibere cupientes, hoc sacro approbante Concilio damnamus et reprobamus omnes asserentes animam intellectivam mortalem esse, aut unicam in cunctis hominibus, et haec in dubium vertentes, cum illa non solum vere per se et essentialiter humani corporis forma exsistat, sicut in canone felicis recordationis Clementis papae V praedecessoris Nostri in (generali) Viennensi Concilio edito continetur, verum et immortalis, et pro corporum quibus infunditur multitudine singulariter multiplicabilis, et multiplicata, et multiplicanda sit . . .

Since in our days (and we painfully bring this up) the sower of cockle, ancient enemy of the human race, has dared to disseminate and advance in the field of the Lord a number of pernicious errors, always rejected by the faithful, especially concerning the nature of the rational soul, namely, that it is mortal, or one in all men, and some rashly philosophizing affirmed that this is true at least according to philosophy, in our desire to offer suitable remedies against a plague of this kind, with the approval of this holy Council, we condemn and reject all who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal, or is one in all men, and those who cast doubt on these truths, since it [the soul] is not only truly in itself and essentially the form of the human body, as was defined in the canon of Pope Clement V our predecessor of happy memory published in the (general) Council of Vienne, but it is also multiple according to the multitude of bodies into which it is infused, multiplied, and to be multiplied. . . . And since truth never contradicts truth, we declare every assertion contrary to the truth of illumined faith to be altogether false; and, that it may not be permitted to dogmatize otherwise, we strictly forbid it, and we decree that all who adhere to errors of this kind are to be shunned and to be punished as detestable and abominable infidels who disseminate most damnable heresies and who weaken the Catholic faith.

**For the principle that the body and soul are united as one in man's personhood (corpore et anima unus), the encyclical cites to Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 14.
***For the first quote, the encylical quotes Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 51. For the second, the encyclical cites to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation Donum Vitae (February 22, 1987), Introduction, 3: AAS 80 (1988), 74, and refers, further to Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968),10: AAS 60 (1968), 487-488.
†The quotation is from Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio (November 22,1981),11: AAS 74 (1982), 92.

Et Creavit Deus Hominem ad Imaginem Suam

GOD CREATED MAN, BOTH MALE AND FEMALE, in his own image. These are some of the first words in the Scriptures, found in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. They are at the foundation of any Jewish or Christian anthropology. Man is b'tzelem elohim (בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים) (Gen. 1:27), the image of God, imago Dei. It is a revealed truth, surely one that has its counterpart in reason. For man is able to perceive through the use of his reason that he shares in some dignity as a result of his creation, and as a result of his knowing that his end is the contemplation of God, the First Cause. This notion shows itself, in very corrupt form, in the anthropomorphic concepts of the gods that the pagans had. Man made the gods in his own image, which is a back-handed way of acknowledging the real truth: that man was made in God's image. No inkling or hunch that might be obtained by the use of reason of man's personhood and dignity, however, reaches the cardinal truth of human anthropology: man as imago Dei. The dignity of man seen as a fellow intellector of being and a fellow doer of good is different from the dignity of man as the very image of the Source of all reality, all reason, all love, in fact the Source who is Reality, Reason, and Love. To see only man and not the one in whose image he was made is like wearing blinders. "Trying to understand man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving." Budziszewski (2003), 70.

It is not that some semblance of man's dignity cannot be gleaned from reason; it can, but it is arduous and rarely something compelling. "Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk," said John Henry Cardinal Newman in his Idea of the University, "then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.” And so the history of man is replete with man abusing his own fellows, of man being a wolf to man; homo homini lupus, said Plautus. Reason alone seems an ineffective governor. It is too easily circumvented. There is too much static in hearing its insistence that man has a special dignity we call personhood.

Man is B'tzelem Elohim

In every man--it matters not his stage of development, the color of his skin, the tribe or people from whence he came, the language that he speaks, or the God he worships or fails to worship--is made in the image of God. Man is therefore impressed by the seal of God, as it were, and those who claim to love God will perceive the very image of God in their neighbor. This linkage between God and his image is what leads St. John to say succinctly: "If any man says I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar." (1 John 4:20). It is not that believing that man is made in the image of God infallibly assures we will treat our fellow man properly, but it constitutes a great bulwark, nevertheless. "For the most part," notes Budziszewski, "the ones who stay on the trail [and accord man his proper dignity] are the same ones who acknowledge the biblical revelation of the imago Dei." It was the imago Dei the abolitionist saw in the black slave that compelled him to institute the reforms to banish that "peculiar institution." It was the imago Dei that Hitler suppressed that compelled the Nazis to place the Jew in the concentration camp.

The notion of man as imago Dei is encapsulated in the philosophical notion of man as a person. Man is a person, not unlike God, who is three persons in one God. Unfortunately, the philosophical concept of a person has undergone corruption at the hands of secularists, who, beginning with John Locke, began to define human personhood as a matter of function, and not as a matter of being or nature.* But defining personhood in terms of function (memory, ability to communicate, concept of self, whatever it may be) is a contradiction in terms. It is a bizarre hijacking of a philosophical term. "In short, a person is by nature someone whom it is wrong to view merely functionally . . . . And so the functional definition of personhood does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is incoherent." Budziszewski (2003), 72.

There is a certain ominous characteristic in the loss of the sense of man as imago Dei, something that hints at a future far worse than merely a new paganism with new gods and idols of man's own making. A dog who has vomited the toxic contents from its stomach is one thing. A dog who returns to it to eat it after having had the taste of a hale meal is quite another.

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*For a short description of the change of the meaning of person from one based upon intrinsic qualities to one based upon functionality, see Tribute to Moloch: Beethoven from Zygote to Death.

Tribute to Moloch: Beethoven From Zygote to Death

IN A SORT OF PERVERSE SLEIGHT OF HAND, some apologists of abortion invoke the concept of personhood only to deny it to the fetus so as to justify morally its slaughter. What these advocates of abortion do is use a functional definition of person (in contrast to a more traditional notion of person as concept of numerical or ontological identity). The functional definition of personhood is vague, and the abortion apologist then exploits the confusion of thought that vagueness can engender. These thinkers are not like a trustworthy Virgil guiding Dante through the Inferno or a loving Beatrice guiding the poet through the Paradiso. Rather, they are more akin to the less reliable, even treacherous guide that Gollum was to Frodo, or that the Nabataean Syllaeus was to the Roman prefect of Aegyptus, Gaius Aelius Gallus in his catastrophic expedition to Arabia Felix. Of the many that could be cited--and their name is Legion--we might mention one of the more notable false guides, Michael Tooley. Unlike Virgil, Tooley does not lead you in and out of hell into heaven, but into hell, the inferno of abortio infelix, to leave you there. Abortion, more than war, is hell, and Tooley is one of hell's minions, hell on earth where women spread their legs and open their wombs for all men to come in, but for no men to come out:

Tantum artes huius, tantum medicamina possunt,
Quae steriles facit, atque homines in ventre necandus
Conducit. Guade, infelix, atque ipse bibendum
Porrige quicquid erit: nam si distendere vellet,
Ex vexare uterum pueris salientibus, esses
Aethiopis fortasse pater . . . .

So great their arts, so powerful the drugs,
Of he who makes them sterile, paid to lead mankind within the womb
To death. Rejoice, unhappy wretch, and give her with your own hand
The stuff to drink whatever it be: for were she willing to let her belly grow
And trouble her womb with bouncing babes, you may be
Per happenstance, the father of an Ethiopian . . . .

Juvenal, Satires, VI.594-99

The artifice of these apologists of death, of feticide and infanticide, comes from their notion of person.* Traditionally, a person was in the category of "is," and not in the category of "has" or "does." A person was something that related to being, to one's substance, and not to one's possession of something or one's activity, one's becoming or doing. Traditionally, one could be a person and not necessarily act like a person or have all the characteristics or qualities of a person. In other words, the notion of "person" was, traditionally, ontological or related to numerical identity. The notion of person was not a qualitative notion (what one "has") or functional notion (what one "does"). Since traditionally a human person was what is, there was no real distinction between a human being and a human person. All men were persons, though not all persons were men (e.g., angels, devils, or most eminently God). Modernly, the functional or qualitative definition of person is the ideal tool to force a separation between a human being and a human person, because a human person is, under the modern view, something one has, or something one does and not something one is. This allows the abortion advocate to slip by the undeniable fact that there is a continuous numerical identity, an ontological though perhaps not functional or qualitative continuity, which is apparent from the first moment of a human being's conception through the entirety of his or her life: from zygote to newborn to adult and into old age there is an identity, an "is"--the "is" is the person--they choose to ignore. Put simply, Christina Rosetti said it best:

I am not what I have nor what I do;
But what I was I am, I am even I.

Christina Rosetti, "The Thread of Life."

In other words, the abortionists avoid the question of personhood, except as they define personhood. They have to, because if they used the concept of personhood used by those who are pro-life, the abortionist would lose the argument:

The argument from continuity of development is about the question of the identity of the foetus--is it the very same thing throughout its development? More precisely, is it the same human being as the baby/child/adult into which it develops? The argument is not based on the setting up of a series of entities that can be compared according to some characteristics admitting of degrees, such as more or less heavy, more or less tall, or more or less bald. The argument is not that the child is a human being because it has some large set of properties and you can (conceptually) go back in time to the foetus, observing those properties dropping away one by one and lessening by degrees, so that because there is no point at which humanity clearly ceases to apply to the gestating entity it must therefore be human all long. The argument is, rather, that there is a single human organism from zygote to adult, because at every stage of development the gestating entity is doing precisely what any organism does in its movement from immaturity to maturity, namely growing, differentiating, taking on a mature shape and form, and acting in a way that shows it to be numerically distinct from its environment. . . . These properties do not shows [sic] themselves to greater or lesser degree in the gestating entity at different stages of its existence: the gestating entity always has those properties. . . . Hence there is one single organism at all stages; that organism can only be human; all human organisms are human beings; hence there is a single human being.

Oderberg, 12-13.

Beethoven's person is one and continuous from zygote to death

That's where the abortion advocates lose the argument: with an ontological notion of personhood. To put it in concrete terms, let us take Ludwig van Beethoven. The zygote of Beethoven was contiguous and one with the infant Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the child Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the adult Beethoven, was contiguous and one with the Beethoven who wrote the Emperor's Concerto (Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73), was contiguous and one with the Beethoven in his death throes. The Beethoven as a zygote was the same person as the Beethoven shown in his death mask. Beethoven was Beethoven all the way through his remarkable life, from beginning to end, and never anything but Beethoven. Beethoven was the same "I" when he was arrested in Vienna by order of the town's Commissär because he appeared to be a roving bum with no hat, an old coat, and no identifying papers, and defended himself by saying "Ich bin Beethoven." He could also have said "Ich war einen Zygote," "Ich war ein Embryo," "Ich war ein Jugend," "Ich war ein Mann," und "Ich bin Beethoven."**

During the continuum of Beethoven's life, he did not become the person of Beethoven at one discrete moment of time, and then lose his person at another discrete moment of time. He existed at conception, and died, at least physically, at death when Beethoven's soul parted from his body. He was Beethoven the entire time through. But of course, this ontological concept of personhood as identity of being is fatal to the abortion project. To kill Beethoven anytime during the continuum of his life from zygote to the moment before death is to kill . . . the person of Beethoven. If we would have aborted Beethoven's zygote, we would not have ever heard, and wept, at the beautiful second movement, Adagio un pocco mosso, nor have been relieved by following light-hearted and uplifting Rondo, of Beethoven's Emperor's Concerto because the person of Beethoven who wrote this wonderful opus was once the very same zygote in his mother's womb. Beethoven's life began, as everybody else's life, when his father's sperm fused with his mother's oocyte:

It is quite clear that what was known more than 100 years ago, even intuitively before that, is that the fusion of sperm and oocyte begins the life of a new individual human being. In Human Embryology the terms understood to be integral in the common sense language are: human, being, person, individual, human being, life and human life. Unfortunately, every one of those terms has been parsed and corrupted to mean something it is not.

C. Ward Kischer, Ph. D., "When does human life begin? The final answer."

Instead of seeing the obvious identity and ontological equivalency of a human being between zygote and adult, and accepting the moral implications that the zygote is a human being and therefore a human person, these false guides lead us into a vague concept of personhood* which they understand qualitatively or functionally as an amalgam of discrete characteristics and not a matter of numerical or ontological identity. A person is no longer a being, but is something one becomes, or what one does, or what one has. Then, taking advantage of the inherent vagueness of the term person as a functional or qualitative amalgam of discrete characteristics and the "sorites paradox"*** into which any vague term encompassing a group of discrete elements invariably leads, they nimbly excuse themselves from the paradox by advocating arbitrary and result-driven qualitative or functional definitions of personhood that conform to their goal of justifying abortion.

Michael Tooley has put together his morbid apologia for feticide and even infanticide between the densely packed covers of a book (more than 400 pages) called Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), and we certainly do not intend to tackle a full exposition or criticism of those views in this blog. We shall only give it a glancing blow. But in keeping with the topic of this posting, Tooley steers his reader into a sorites paradox by focusing on a vague functional or qualitative concept of the personhood of the fetus as an abstraction from particular qualities (mainly self-consciousness), side-stepping the status of the developmental numerical identity of the fetus as a human organism or human being. By invoking "personhood" as a functional abstraction of discrete characteristics, (something one becomes) and rejecting a concept of personhood as linked to the numerical identity of a human organism or human being (being), Tooley has led us to a vague term and into the sorites paradox. Surely a zygote is not a human person since it has no consciousness of self that we can measure? If a zygote is not, neither is a morula, or a blastula, or gastrula, embryo, or a fetus, or an infant!

Ahh, but do not despair! Tooley to the rescue! The "absence of significant differences between successive members of some series, or between successive stages in some process, provide no reason at all for concluding that there are no significant differences between non-successive stages or members." (Tooley, 169-70, quoted in Oderberg, 12.) (emphasis added).**** So the fact that we cannot be assured of personhood at any one stage does not mean we cannot perceive personhood at some stage. Or, more precisely, he argues the opposite since he seeks to de-personalize, not to personalize: that "the clear existence of a person at some stage . . . [does not mean] there will be a person at every stage of development." Oderberg, 12. And therefore, we ought to use Tooley's definition of personhood which, Tooley says, doesn't happen until there is a capacity for self-consciousness, rational thought, an ability to envisage a future for oneself, and of remembering one's past, and so forth. This Tooleyan definition of personhood is really or virtually a definition of adulthood, and so it automatically excludes the fetus. Is that result-driven or what?**** The power of definition lies in Tooley's hands, and he uses it against the fetus? What if the fetus held the power of definition? Would he use it against Tooley? Should personhood be defined by the one who has something to gain? Should the definition of person reside with the one that holds power over another?

But those latter questions are to stray from the subject.

People like Tooley do not confront the argument of the opponent of abortion; they avoid it. The argument of continuity of development or numerical identity of a human being, that is, a notion of personhood that is ontological, not functional, does not lead one to a sorites paradox. The issue of a person as an individual substance is vastly different from the issue of a person as defined by the likes of Tooley. This is because the issue is properly one of identity, of contiguity, of a being traveling down the continuum of becoming, not an issue of generalization or abstraction from particulars or discrete instances. It is the difference between the contiguity of a thread or cloth or traveling down a road or a river versus the non-contiguity of abstracting from numerous discrete instances, such as abstracting a heap from many grains or a forest from many trees, or a hirsute man from his many hairs.

Personhood is not something abstracted from particulars, such as a heap from individual grains. Personhood is something that is a contiguous, non-discrete continuum or path. Personhood is not something that we receive at a point in time, as if it were an office like knighthood. We are not dubbed a person once we acquire the enumerated prerequisites, or reach the requisite number of years, an adequate IQ, or ability to speak. Personhood is something that we have from our first moment of conception, and only later discover that we have. Personhood is both being and becoming; it is not becoming alone, and certainly not doing or having alone. Being precedes becoming, doing, or having. Becoming, having, and doing do not precede being.

Personhood is a journey, a thread. Persons grow. Persons are conceived, grow, go through phases, and die their physical death. Persons are threads, threads of Ariadne in the labyrinth of life, threads subject to the Fates. Persons are not heaps composed of discrete parts, living in discrete moments.

Thinking humans are heaps means they end up in heaps by the hands of those who think them so.

Thinking as human as heaps leads to heaps of dead humans

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*The term "person" is not only a philosophical term, but it may also be a legal term, in which case it could be defined positivistically and with greater precision, and it ought to follow the philosophical or moral concept of "person." We focus on the philosophical meaning of the term "person." Philosophically, the term "person" has undergone some significant shift since the Enlightenment, and the effect of the doctrine of the Empiricists, particularly John Locke, on the concept of personhood, and hence the understanding of man, would itself be an interesting study. The result is that often the advocates of abortion are using a different, functional notion of person than the opponents of abortion who rely on a non-functional, ontological notion of person. The word "person" comes to us from the Latin persona and the Greek prosōpon (πρόσωπον), a word originally meaning the mask worn by an actor. Ultimately, the term was used to express the concept of an individual. Boethius is the source for the classic definition of person. In his De persona et duabus naturis, c. ii, Boethius defines person as "naturae rationalis individua substantia," an individual substance of a rational nature. St. Thomas expanded on the Boethian definition, in particular on the notion of substance, and in his Summa Theologiae, explains that the Boethian individua substantia signifies a substantia, completa, per se subsistens, separata ab aliia. S. T. III, Q. 16, art. 12, ad 2. That is, individual substance means "a substance, complete, subsisting per se, existing apart from others." A human being's personhood, therefore, consisted of soul and body conjoined. The concept was ontological, not functional, and therefore no one could be a human being without also being a person. Empiricism's blinders do not allow it to recognize such spiritual or metaphysical realities such as "soul," and so it has tended to define "personhood" by empirical data alone, which has resulted in a functional definition of personhood. For an empiricist, personality was constituted not by any underlying reality which self-consciousness or rational operations revealed (and so one could be a person without self-consciousness, e.g., while asleep, or without rational operation, e.g., a brain damaged individual, or even without all functions operating because of biological limitations, e.g., a fetus), but by the self-consciousness or rational operation itself. Thus Locke defined a person (self) as "a conscious thinking thing (whatever substance made up of, whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends." John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, c. 27, ¶ 17 (emphasis added). So Locke, by his emphasis on personhood as being something functional or qualitative (conscious), appears to have been one of the first to separate the human being from the human person. The result has been nothing sort of bizarre confusion. For example, H. Tristam Englehardt adopts this corrupt notion of personhood in his book The Foundations of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1996), 138-39:

[N]ot all humans are persons. Not all humans are self-conscious, rational, and able to conceive of the possibility of blaming and praising. Fetuses, infants, the profoundly mentally retarded, and the hopelessly comatose provide examples of human non-persons. Such entities are members of the human species but do not in and of themselves have standing in the secular moral community. Such entities cannot blame or praise; they cannot make promises, contracts, or agree to an understanding of beneficence. They are not prime participants in the secular moral endeavor. Only persons have that status. . . . but do not have standing in the moral community. . . One speaks of persons in order to identify entities one can warrant blame or praise. For this reason, it is nonsensical to speak of respecting the autonomy of fetuses, infants, or profoundly retarded adults who have been never been rational.

Tooley's definition of person, which fits with Englehardt's description, simply expands on Locke's, and relies on the existence of psychological characteristics, qualities, or functions, some sort of "mental life," which obviously requires a significant development or maturation in the individual before they exist. "Tooley toys with the idea that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood and provides a list of likely characteristics, but the ones he and other personists such as Singer focus on are (to use Tooley's words): 'the capacity for self-consciousness', 'the capacity for rational thought', 'the capacity to envisage a future for oneself', 'the capacity to remember a past involving onself' and 'the capacity for being a subject of non-momentary interests'." (Oderberg, 32, citing Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide, 349). In his encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope John Paul II has clearly rejected a functional, qualitative measure of personhood:

Some people try to justify abortion by claiming that the result of conception, at least up to a certain number of days, cannot yet be considered a personal human life. But in fact, "from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. This has always been clear, and ... modern genetic science offers clear confirmation. It has demonstrated that from the first instant there is established the program of what this living being will be: a person, this individual person with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization the adventure of a human life begins, and each of its capacities requires time-a rather lengthy time-to find its place and to be in a position to act". Even if the presence of a spiritual soul cannot be ascertained by empirical data, the results themselves of scientific research on the human embryo provide "a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of the first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?"

EV, No. 60 (quoting Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Procured Abortion (18 November 1974), Nos. 12-13 and Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (Donum Vitae) (22 February 1987) In their book Embryo (New York: Doubleday, 2008), Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen attribute this division between body and personhood to philosophical dualism, and advocate a philosophical animalism in equating human personhood with human being. Dualism is eventually self defeating. Id. at 83-111.
**Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anectdotes (New York: Free Press, 1985), 193.
***The word "sorites" comes from the Greek σωρείτης (sōreitēs) meaning "heaped up," the word, σωρός, (sōros) meaning "heap." The sorites paradox, or paradox of the heap, is called that way because of the first formulation of the problem by the Megarian logician Eubulides of Miletus. The paradox comes from vague predicates such as "heap." If a grain of wheat does not make a heap of grain, then it follows that two grains does not, and so on for three, four, five, etc. grains of wheat. When, then, if ever is there a "heap" of grain? A similar puzzle involves the use of the vague term "bald." If a man with one hair on his head is bald, then a man with only two hairs is bald, as is a man with three, four, five, six, etc. hairs on his head. It follows that a man will be bald no matter what number of hairs he has on his head. This paradox was called the falakros puzzle (from falakros [φαλακρός]=bald man), but since it involves the same puzzle as the sorites paradox, it is usually not accorded a separate existence. The problem, of course, is that the paradox can go either way. ("One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens." Oderberg, 14) For example, if a man with 10,000 hairs on his head is hirsute (the opposite of bald), then a man with 9,999 hairs is likewise hirsute, as is a man with 9,998, 9,997, 9,996 hairs, etc. This means a man with one hair on his head is hirsute also. A similar paradox involves replacement of parts of the whole and the principle of identity, a paradox known as Theseus's paradox, or the paradox of grandfather's axe, Trigger's broom, or Jeannot's knife.
****Note the obvious nominalism in Tooley's thinking. Everything is discrete. In Tooley's thought, there is no reality to a continuity of substance in man during time.
*****In her notorious article, "A Defense of Abortion," published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971), Judith Jarvis Thomson does something similar in arbitrarily defining a "person" to mean essentially a fully or at least virtually adult member of the human species:

Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say "before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person" is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is. or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak trees, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are.

This is like extricating oneself from the sorites paradox by arbitrarily stating that a heap constitutes 5,000 grains of wheat, no more and no less, and a bald man constitutes a man with less than 600 hairs, no more and no less. Who gave Tooley and Thomson the rights arbitrarily to set the standard of personhood to include only adult or at least significantly matured humans so that their argument was a sure win?