Nikos A.

Nissiotis

"Secular and Christian Images of Human Person"*

Theologia 33, Athens 1962, p. 947- 989; Theologia 34, Athens
1963, p. 90-122.



Foreword

The alternatives to Christian faith are usually centered around
either philosophical-idealistic or scientific-realistic humanisms. In
contemporary revolutionary society, however, as well as in
theological circles dominated by a political, contextual and inductive
theology, a new type of humanisation is professed and practised,
which is too complicated to be objectively defined. The value of the
human person is now rooted in his identity and solidarity with his
participation in social revolution and resistance to ecological crisis.
This either non-Christian or pro-Christian humanism nourished by
an utopian hope, in most cases, accentuates the movement forward
towards the coming age of authentic selfhood by overcoming a
manifold self-alienation of human beings in modern society of
consumption and social injustice. The human person can be grasped
now only in his struggle for establishing freedom, justice and peace
on a universal scale.

The subject of anthropology, already in the past central and
complicated, becomes in our days for this additional reason more
actual, interesting and imperative for contemporary systematic
theology. The ideological-political activist replacing unconsciously by
his revolutionary impetus his innate religious trends and the
Christian pro-socialist revolutionary interpreting in a radical way the
social message of the Bible converge in a new image of man within
the framework of the Christian tradition challenging all of our
theological concepts of the Imago Dei as unilaterally transcendental
and therefore unrealistic. It is the paramount duty of Christian
theology to face this challenge, which is to a great extent born in its
own milieu, for the sake of elaborating a more authentic Christian
anthropology taking into consideration the new signs of our times.

At the same time, scientific research, by overcoming its
deterministic trends of the past as well as a mechanistic concept of
Creation and its function, invites a new kind of approach to
understand human being, which allows greater flexibility in scientific
humanism and betrays a greater sensitivity (on account also of the
ecological crisis) in face of the non-scientifically observable parts of
human existence. Without pretending that modern science can or
should adopt the category of mystery in its methodologyit would
not be science any more it can, however, become more easily
today a participant in an interdisciplinary approach to
anthropological problems with depth-psychology, anthropological
philosophy and theology of the humanum.

These preliminary and introductory remarks prescribe the structure
of my study. It is evident that we cannot deal directly with Christian
anthropology as an isolated subject within systematic theology: I
mean not simply with Christology, which is easily understandable,
but with cosmology when it is conceived again not only as nature,
but as a comprehensive reality of the whole created Cosmos.
Secondly, we have to be seriously challenged by modern scientific
and societal psychological humanisms, and then thirdly rexamine
our concept of the Imago Dei. At the end, fourthly I would like to
attempt a reinterpretation of the typical, central Orthodox concept
of the theosis of human person (deification of man) as a
contribution to anthropology on the part of the ancient Eastern
tradition.




Note

*This study is an improved and extended text of the Ferguson
Lectures that the author delivered at the University of Manchester
upon the invitation of its Theological Faculty, February, 23rd-26th,
1981.


I. Anthropology and Cosmology: the inseparable link
between man, nature and history

Anthropology is central for all Christian theologies, especially for the
Eastern Orthodox tradition, because of the Logos theology, i.e. of
the Incarnate Word of God, in Jesus, in a historical person. This
centrality, due to the Christology of the Incarnate Word, makes
some Orthodox theologians give priority to anthropology over
abstract and theoretical theology (1). Especially because of the
incarnation and the operation of the Spirit, as Paraclete, comforting
and fulfilling the whole Creation to its maximum highest possible
end, set by God the Creator, the humanum of man is seen in his
divine origin and purpose. In this way, the whole Creation is
centered around the human being in process of transfiguration from
humanity to divinity on the basis of the Incarnation of the Logos
and the operation of the Spirit.

Consequently, man, in Eastern patristic thought, is regarded as
microcosmic (2). He is the link between God and the rest of the
created world because all things have been created for him as the
last and supreme creature, as the King on the earth (3), and he has
to act as such because of the commandment of God and in the light
of the Incarnation of His Logos in the form of a man. In the Bible, to
man are attributed all the characteristics of superiority and
uniqueness over the whole created world, physical and animal,
because Christ as a man becomes by the grace of God the pivot
event in history. The human being becomes the centre of the
universe which has no more value than the soul of one single
human person.

This anthropocentricity belongs to the backbone of the new gospel
of salvation as good news. It is far more radical than the ancient
Greek concept of the centrality of man in nature because of his
rational being and immortal soul or than the ancient oriental
wisdom, because of the identity of man with the Supreme all
embracing One and Whole. In Christianity the uniqueness of man is
grounded in the fact of God humanizing in history, here and now
in the form of a man. The qualification of the uniqueness of man is
not expressed by reference to God's gift or man's similarity on the
basis of man's reasonable nature. The Christian understanding of
man's uniqueness is due to Christ's event in history par excellence.
That is why Christian anthropocentricity in Creation is the authentic
new message of the Christian faith and the most revolutionary
event of history from within.

This human centrality in creation has also nothing to do with all
kinds of evolutionary theories, suggesting that the human being
occupies the highest climax due to his conceptual thought or
orientation towards the future, because he is on the way towards
the point of the Creation (4). The Christian centrality of man is
the entirely new event erupting into history as the one and unique
explosion in the world's physical, biological and historical order. It is
self-caused by the other side of nature and history.

That is why the effects of the Christian anthropocentricity are also
radical and earth shaking. Nature has been desacralized from all
latent religious mythologies and all magic, animistic or totemistic
trends. Man is dealing with it now as superior and from a distance.
His techne (craft) became a process towards technology. His
mechanical power is now extended to increase his thinking
operation by electronic machines. The revolution brought about by
their Christian human centrality had, to a certain extent, an
immediate effect together with other forces on man's behavior vis-
-vis nature.

Dealing with anthropology today we have to face the problems
arising out of this concept of uniqueness and centrality of man in
the creation of God. The question is a double one, first, whether the
authentic Christian understanding of the uniqueness of man implies
such a superiority inside the Creation, especially vis--vis nature;
and second how are we to conceive man as the center of creation
without falling into a kind of egocentric anthropomonism exploiting
nature to the maximum possible point, violating it by using natural
resources and causing a total disorder in human relationships. It
seems to me that without reexamining the notion of
anthropocentricity and uniqueness we should not attempt any
positive encounter between secular and Christian images of man
today.





Notes

1. Paul Evdokimov, in his book Orthodoxie, Neuchtel-Paris
(Delachaux et Nieste) 1959, begins his presentation of Orthodoxy
by Anthropology p. 57 ff.

2. Maximus the Confessor writes that man is introduced at the end
of all other creatures in Creation as the link between God and the
whole Creation. (P.G. 91, 1305).

3. Gregory of Nazianzus uses the term king (P.G. 36, 612) for
man in connection with the Creation.

4. Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phnomne Humain, Paris (Seuil) 1955.


1. Man, Nature, Cosmos, Ktisis and History as an unbroken
continuum

When we speak of the necessary interdependence between
anthropology and cosmology we have to think of the Cosmos as a
comprehensive reality, the whole created world comprising
geosphere as well as biosphere and noosphere. In other words, one
has to distinguish between material elements of creation in the
narrow sense of nature and the Order, which is the result of the
summing up of all created things in a Whole of the total reality,
representing the world system as Universum. Cosmos signifies the
Whole and the Totality of the Creation ( and ) (1).

Cosmology, in general, presupposes the notion of order, unity and
beauty conceived as an intelligible, beautiful and harmonious
universal all-embracing reality. The logos about the Cosmos in
cosmology is not simply the use of human reason as an instrument
for reflecting on nature and the material world. It represents more
deeply an act of thinking on the unavoidable experience of man's
inner relationship with the whole of created reality. Cosmology
denotes solidarity with the overwhelming given reality without
which human existence is unthinkable. Cosmology is the
commentary of the deep, unbroken, inseparable interdependence of
the created world and mankind within the One Universe.

Certainly, this kind of deeper and broader understanding of
cosmology is due to the comprehensive aesthetic notion of Cosmos
as jewel in ancient Greek philosophy according to which
cosmology was directly linked with theology and the act of Creation
by the Demiourgos, the wise Creator, God. That is why this kind of
cosmology betrays pantheistic trends. The act of Creation of the
Cosmos is of a transcendental nature. It is grasped, however, as
the most immanent reality expressing the wisdom of God in nature.
This is the heart of natural theology in classic philosophy, whence
natural religion, the respect and honour given to nature and rational
paganism are to be understood. An
ancient Temple and a statue of religious significance are at the
same time by their beauty and absolute harmony a grateful answer
to the beauty of Cosmos as a gift of God. It is also incarnation of
His presence in nature, achieved by human rationality and art.

The word physis (nature) in this context cannot be used as a
synonym of Cosmos in cosmology. Rightly, one has to speak of
physiology in the sense that physis denotes something created and
existing objectively and immediately grasped by senses and reason.
Further, physis - nature refers to the inner, deeper quality of things,
man and God. It is another term for denoting the unchanging ousia
as the inner ontological qualitative structure of being beyond
corruption and change. It is, therefore, both a term signifying
created reality and its constitutive qualitative principle. We use it in
both senses by speaking of as nature and as physis-nature
of God, man and things.

Nature, however, is more and more understood within the limits of
the natural, i.e. what is distinctive from accidental, technical or
artificial. It refers, mainly, to the created world without including
humanity or the works, the objects produced by human action. It is
perhaps, Christian faith which inspired in a latent and progressive
way this kind of separation between Cosmos and physis and
concreticized nature within the limits of the created material reality,
while the term continues to be used in philosophy and theology.

We can now understand why the Bible makes use of this term only
either in this latter sense (II Pet. 1,4
You might be partakers of the divine nature) or in most
of the cases in the sense of the natural being and character, by
birth something rooted within man by nature (cf. Rom. 2,14
do by
nature the things contained in the law) whence we have the idea
of natural law and natural theology. Nowhere in the New
Testament does the word nature refer to the whole of creation or
to its non-human aspect. That, it seems, is a Hellenic legacy in
western Christian thought (2).

The New Testament also does not speak of , i.e. of
creation in the sense of ancient Greek literature. Only in Hebr.
11,10 God is named (creator). The biblical text referring
to the act of creation uses more dynamic and comprehensive terms
like (I Gor. 11,9) or (Math. 19.4). or (Rom.
9,20) signifying the particular care and personal involvement of God
acting with a definite purpose in Creation. Replacing the word
nature in all of the references to Creation, the Bible prefers the
words (all things) together with the word
(creation)Eph. 3,9: . Especially, the
link between these two terms is made when the Christological
approach to creation is underlined, as we read in Colossians 1.16:
'
: all things were created by and in him and for him and by
him all things consist. Created and consist denote the
absolute totality of Creation. and unite both the
universality of the Cosmos and the act of Creation in Christ as the
highest meaningful and in the personal, trinitarian God originated
maintained and destinated Creation. Ktisis cannot be determined
either by identifying it simply with nature, or with man, or with
cosmos. It points more to the thorough, complete and all-renewing
act of God creating, preserving and recreating by and in
His incarnate Word and His Spirit. The Pauline verse II Cor. 5,17
gives us, in the most clear and condensed form, this new
understanding of cosmos and nature in relationship with man as a
holistic, total Creation in its dynamic aspect of being created and
renewed by a continuous concern of God acting in Christ and uniting
all things of Creation with man renewing him and all things
together: ,
(if any man be in Christ, a new creation;
behold all things are become new). It is a paraphrase when one
translates by is a new creature, because though more logical, this
translation risks isolating man as the only new creation (the text
does not offer this possibility directly). It also introduces a
discontinuity with the second part of the verse, which clearly refers
to the renewal of all things together with man.

The use of these particular terms, in Christ
has a paramount importance for understanding the unbroken
relationship between anthropology and cosmology on the basis of
the unbroken continuum and interdependence between man, nature
and cosmos and the dynamic historical process within the whole
creation. On this biblical basis anthropology cannot be conceived
apart and in isolation from Christology and cosmology. Creation is
linked inseparably with the mystery or renewal of all things and the
salvation of man with the whole created reality. The text of Roman
8 makes a clear reference to this interdependence. The in this
text is earnestly expecting the manifestation of the sons of God and
this ktisis also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption
into the glorious liberty of God. For we know that the whole
groaneth and travaileth in pain together (with the sons of God) until
now (Rom. 8,19-22). Here in this text we are given by St. Paul the
maximum possible expression of the relationship between Creation,
as Nature and Cosmos, with man in the mystery of salvation. The
whole Creation is symbolically described as a pregnant woman in
pain before giving birth to a new man, i.e. the highest image ever
used in expressing the inner coherence of created nature and man
taken within the one saving act of God by Christ and in His Spirit,
which makes intercessions for us with groanings, for us which have
the first fruits of the Spirit (v. 23 and v. 26).

Anthropology implies, if conceived on this basis, a Christological and
pneumatological approach to nature as Creation and
cosmos. There is no possibility of studying man apart from a
manifold creating act of God resulting in a multitude of created
realities. These realities in Christ are constituted as one total-Whole
with inner coherence and purpose, and they are subject to a
continuous becoming and renewing act operated by the Spirit. By a
Christological pneumatology of anthropology becomes
possible as the central theme of biblical systematic theology. This
kind of connection as interdependence between anthropology and
cosmology has important bearings in a more comprehensive
understanding of man, nature and history as an unbroken God-
given continuum. This is the specifically Christian element in the
image of man when confronting all kinds of possible secular images,
scientific, societal and ideological.





Notes

1. Plato in Politeia 270b.; 273e, Tim. 28c, 30b; Grat. 412d. [Kittel,
Theologisches Wrterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Band III,
Stuttgart (Kohlhammer) 1938, p. 869-879].

2. G. Paulos Gregorios, The Human Presence. An Orthodox view of
Nature, W.C.C. (Geneva) 1978, p. 21.


2. Matter Nature and Body Soul: One .

The connection between anthropology and cosmology has
immediate repercussions on our understanding of the
interrelationships and the cohesion between the fundamental
elements of Cosmos and their reciprocal role in manifesting,
maintaining and perfecting the inner unity of Creation. We should
not try to conceive man in Christian terms by an one-sided
understanding of nature and cosmos as a corrupted, fallen objective
reality of material (physical) creation. A careful study of the notion
of , as comprising both nature and saving act of God including
man and all things created in heaven and on earth, must guard us
from falling into different kinds of dualisms. It is the sinfulness of
human beings that creates this dualism, and not the nature of
nature or the secularity of cosmos. In the Bible there is no
reference to a fallen nature as ktisis, and cosmos has a dialectical
sense either as a total reality of nature-man-history for which God
has such a love that he gave His only begotten Son (John 3,16) or
as a resisting evil power against His will (John 17,14), but in no way
is this cosmos alienated from the intention and the plan of
salvation: I came not to judge the world, but to save the world
(12,47).

The Cosmos concept should not express the secular part of creation
in revolt against God as an objective reality in which man is not
participating and at which man looks as an observer from outside.
The cosmic dimension is man's insight into the wholeness of
creation. He is a part, the most significant, in God's creation, but
never above or separated from it on account of his superiority. In
this sense, he is micro-cosmic because he reveals the macrocosmos
of the total purpose of Creation but always together with matter,
nature and cosmos and thanks to this relationship. Man is the link,
the mediator between natural and cosmic, matter and spirit, and we
can add, facing possible scientific images, between static and
dynamic, given and becoming, necessity and possibility, obligation
and freedom (1).

All dualistic concepts of man are overcome by this fundamental
thesis. There is no split or opposition between matter and spirit,
body and soul. The oneness in Creation as ktisis represents the
ongoing process of final unification of all apparently opposed
elements of Creation. Man is continually becoming the recapitulation
of material, animal, spiritual, created and further creative elements
of the one ktisis in himself. Man, as microcosmic, signifies not that
human beings are beyond matter as pure spirits or reasonable
beings, but as E. L. Mascall points out, for we live in the
borderland where matter is raised to the level of spirit and spirit
immerses itself in matter (2). In the so-called spiritual man we
appreciate the conditio sine qua non which is matter in the form of
the body. There is a spiritual body and a bodily spiritual existence.
Without this reciprocity man is not the creature of God, according to
a consistent Christian anthropology.

Against all kinds of dualistic idealisms or monistic materialisms the
Christian image of man will defend the absolute interdependence of
matter and spirit in the one human existence as microcosmic of the
question of qualitative priority between the two, for they are
entirely and equally reciprocal in one and the same organism
reflecting thus the origins, the foundation and the function of the
whole cosmos. From one point of view matter appears to be the
matrix of life, either as it is indicated by the words of Genesis 1,20
(life coming out of the waters) or in the story of the creation of
man, Genesis 2,7 (God starting His creation by taking earth into his
hands).

The microcosmic nature of man is mainly focused on his bodily
existence. Only Christian faith has accepted and consistently
proclaimed body and soul as an inseparable unit with tremendous
implications for appreciating matter in general as the fundamental
element and bearer of life. In this created world nothing can exist
without its basic material foundation. Matter is the matrix of animal
life and the body is its highest expression as God's direct creation.
That is why the body in spite of all kinds of abuses (spiritualistic-
ascetic or hedonistic) is the temple of the Holy Spirit, which is in
you, which you have from God (I Cor. 6,19). Against all idealistic
beliefs of the immortality of the soul alone, we are reminded by the
authentic biblical tradition that our resurrection is a bodily one. That
is why, in biblical terms one does not speak of flesh as the inferior
part of the human existence. After the incarnation the term flesh
denotes the central event of faith, because the Word was made
flesh (John 1,14). Flesh is the state of the carnally minded
(Rom. 8,6) while this inferior part of man is denoted by the
paradoxical expression (I Cor. 2,14), the
psychic man, i.e. the bearer of the simple natural quality of soul is
not spiritual element, namely it is not yet renewed by the Holy
Spirit.

In Christian faith and praxis material creation is elevated as part of
the one creation of God at the same level of appreciation and
qualification with man and his bodily existence. Man as a Body is
fundamentally a Christian basis of anthropology resulting from its
inseparable link with cosmology. The body can never become a
separated object if it is understood in its identity with the spiritual
foundation of man. I am a body, does not signify only an identity
with my body either; but the phrase points out to the solidarity of
man with nature as part of the whole created cosmos, comprising
man, nature, matter and history.





Notes

1. Maximus the Confessor: Man is introduced as the last one into
the Creation as a natural () link of the whole reality through
his mediation of the extreme beings in himself, leading all greatly
differentiated things into the oneness (M.P.G. 91, 1305 B).

2. E. L. Mascall, The Importance of Being Human, London (Oxford
University Press) 1959, p. 34.


3. The Uniqueness of Man in Cosmos and in solidarity with
Nature

Christian faith, therefore, cannot accept a concept or image of man
which on the one hand does not recognize his uniqueness in
Creation and on the other does not profess his solidarity with the
created world, Nature, as well as with historical reality. This is not
due to man's superiority, because he possesses reason or
conceptual thought, or because he is the highest amongst the
species of an evolutionary process, but because of the fundamental
Christological approach to the mystery of Creation, Christ being the
recapitulation of all created things and at the same time the Savior
in a cosmic dimension. It is only on this basis that we can discuss
today anthropology and reexamine its attitude to the uniqueness of
man in Creation.

The careful examination of this issue is necessary before we
establish a point of contact with any kind of secular images of man.
It is also very important because of the ongoing debate amongst
Christian theologians and process philosophers on this issue,
because it looks as if the uniqueness of man professed in traditional
theological terms creates an uneasiness amongst secular
anthropologists and Christian process philosophers because it risks
separating man from his natural environment. This traditional
approach becomes in their eyes responsible for serious deviations in
Christianity due to its anthropological transcendentalism creating a
gap between man and nature, and depriving man of a full
appreciation of the ecological problem (1).

This applies especially to process philosophers within Christian
tradition who has the intention of acting as correctives against an
excessive and unjustifiable anthropocentricism in Christian theology
and praxis. For them, Christianity has to recover its full appreciation
of matter, vegetable and animal life in Nature, by eliminating all
unnecessary and defective transcendental concepts of God and man
originating from idealistic philosophy which introduce a dualistic
anthropology, resulting in a false understanding of the absolute
superiority of man over Nature. In Christianity, for them, nature, as
the physical world, is historicized, it is included when we say God
acts in history, and therefore natural processes are part of
history (2). Like, man, all creatures in Nature have their freedom
of choice and God cannot predetermine how they would develop in
their evolutionary process, conforming in this way their thought to
the indeterminism of modern science and modern concepts of
biological growth of organisms. Things and animals have some
being and value in themselves, and therefore man is riot only the
creature who can interpret existence. He is the one who exemplifies
the nature of reality and far from being the exception in creation he
is t lie flower of a plant that is one with nature(3).

The important issue in this attitude of process philosophy is whether
there is intrinsic value beyond man, and if so how to prevent
Christianity from falling into the unjustified position that all
subhuman beings and material objects are there only for serving
man, because of his wrongly understood unique and central position
in nature. In this view, feeling is the base of the subjective side of
all things. All entities from electron to man embody feelings and
therefore are of value and share in the freedom of development of
the whole creation. This attitude represents an antithesis to
materialism and mechanism and it defends the position that the
universe and its parts are more like a life of an organism than a
contrivance or a blunt insensitive material to be used and exploited
by man. Certainly, the life of man is a better model of existence
than the physicist's construct of the atom, but this appropriate
acknowledgment of man's important position does not mean that he
is the only creature which has intrinsic value; and that he can live in
his superiority and uniqueness without taking any account of their
abuse or of non-human nature (4).

The consequence of this attitude is that non-human nature has a
value and can overcome western dualistic rationalistic thought after
Descartes and become more conformed to the Old Testament
tradition of the value of the natural world and the New Testament
pattern of relationship between God, man, and nature which
excludes all kinds of devaluation of nature by reason of the
anthropocentricity of the Bible. We badly need, following this
attitude of process philosophers, an ethic of nature, which will be
the result of our attitude to nature's worth.

It is evident what is the very positive contribution of such an
attitude to the relationship between anthropology and cosmology.
Man cannot be conceived apart from Nature. What is more
important and interesting, however, is the place of theology in the
context of this philosophy of nature, because, God should be also
and consistently conceived in a far more dynamic relationship with
material and animal creation than traditional Christian theology has
professed under the influence of theistic rationalistic philosophies.

God, as the maker of heaven and earth is not acting like a man
manufacturing our object, with which he has no relationship
whatsoever after he has sold it (a carpenter and his table). Created
matter plants and animals cannot exist without God's continuous
sustaining activity; the one God extends to man's cells and
molecules and not only to his spiritual being. If God as Creator
remains apart continually in the process of sustaining all that exists,
through what A. N. Whitehead has called God's primordial nature.
This is how creative activity is experienced by the entities of
existence. God is not the passive offstage observer but the
experiencer of all created value. Not a sparrow falls to the ground
without His knowing... This is what A. N. White-head calls the
consequent nature of God. It is the way God grows as the universe
evolves, because His experience expands with his participation in all
creation. The values that are realized in experience are saved in
God's experience (5).

This dynamic, almost pantheistic, approach to theology, this
growing and becoming of God along with his creation, is necessary
if we want to increase our respect of nature or attribute any value
to any part of the creation, because we have to do it not for the
sake of created animals and things but as a due thanksgiving and
offering to God, who is not only a God who creates and gives but
also who receives. Love implies this exchange of gifts and there is
no love which either only gives or only receives. A defective
Christian faith is also the one which is unable to inspire deep
respect and high appreciation of nature as existing in God and of
God as evolving in it as a process of creative act identical with His
being. It is the most dangerous isolation of man if he in the basis of
his superiority over nature in the name of God avoids or neglects
conceiving himself in a continuum of created reality not radically
separated from it. According always to process philosophy what
seems to us the cruelties of nature the savagery, the mindless
destruction of storm and volcano, the diseases are the accidents
on a trial-and-error process, accidents which in the long course of
time God moves to correct by exerting His less than compelling
influence.

Of course, by this attitude the intrinsic value of nature is
emphasized, the obligation of man to respect natural reality is
defended, the absolute uniqueness of man on the basis of God's
creation is relativized and finally natural evil is explained
dialectically with God sharing in it (6). But Christian theologians
might express their doubts about the theological premises or
better conclusions of such a philosophy of nature. Thomas Derr,
for instance, remarks on this precise point: the problem of evil is
solved, then, but at the cost, of course, of God's capacity to
overcome it at the cost of the divine omnipotence (7). He thinks
that the principal difference between process thought and
Christianity is the former's concept of a limited God, one who is not
any more omnipotent. It solves easily the problem of natural evil,
by limiting God's capacity to act, ignoring at the same time the
sinful nature of man and the need of salvation. We have to do here
with a weakened God who is unable to inspire submission of man to
His will. He is not a God to worship either. He is a God of becoming
with and for the sake of the world (8). It becomes also doubtful for
T. Derr whether such theological premises for evaluating nature
allow any real involvement of man in combating social evil
responsibly in the face of a living personal God.

This debate reveals some important issues regarding our main
theme.

a. We have to admit that traditional Christian anthropology has
overdone the uniqueness of man and caused a gap between human
and a kind of subhuman creation.

b. It is to a certain extent possible that this attitude has devaluated
nature and led to its unwise exploitation. It is true that
anthropocentricity existed in ancient oriental wisdom, in classical
Greek philosophy, in Judaism, but their attitude had not the same
impact in separating man from nature.

c. The question is whether man and subhuman creatures have to
have almost equal rights in order to have equal values (intrinsic),
without insisting on keeping different degrees between them,
whether dualism between man and nature can do justice to the
creation of God as a whole and finally and most important, whether
God should be directly involved in the process of nature's
development and growth by losing His transcendence vis--vis His
creation for the sake of preserving the unbroken continuum of God,
man and nature and overcoming a wrong Christian concept and
praxis about the uniqueness of man.

It seems to me that this debate is an indication that Christian
anthropology bears a certain responsibility because it has developed
an one sided, anthropomonistic system of thought, disregarding
vital elements of biblical tradition concerning the inseparable link
between man and nature, and the place of man as mediator
between God and nature. It is also true that theistic tendencies in
theology introduced, with the support of rationalistic Cartesian
principles and the mechanistic concept of a self-governed universe,
an unbridgeable gap between God and his Creation and left nature
in the hands of man as material for achieving his welfare, prosperity
and technical progress, devaluating thus animal and vegetable life
as well as matter, which is for Christians part of God's creation
revealing His continuous concern for it without discrimination.

It is true that in the patristic writings, this anthropomonistic concept
of man is entirely absent. Both in the West and the East, patristic
thought converges in the Christological foundation of the unity of
creation. Metropolitan Paulos Gregorios Verghese reminds us of this
basic patristic cosmology in view of the debate with process
philosophers. Creation betrays an inner coherence, interdependence
and complementarity. Harmony, sympnoia (breathing
together) sympatheia (suffering or struggling together in love
and complementarity) are terms pointing to the inevitable link
between God, man and nature as the one single and common
Creation. The ascending path of evolution in Creation with man
created by a special creative intervention binds all things together
with man. Gregory of Nyssa believes in human interdependence
with nature and he thinks it important to see humanity in an
integral relationship to the universe of things, plants and animals...
while man does not derive the whole of his nature from the
universe (9).

If man is a mediator between God and Creation and in this sense
also a microcosm of the relation between spirit and all material
things as soul and body, then also matter, i.e. the rocks, the sea,
the mud, the inferior materials and not only the beautiful flowers
and the stars praised by a humanistic romanticism, have an intrinsic
value. This value is not due to the fact that it is used by man, or
that man is related to it. Matter is what it is because it is the
fundamental element for life maintaining the coherence between
Creator, man and Creation. It is this coherence that validates man
and matter equally within the One Creation. The specific and most
important event in man's creation, conceived through the
incarnation, is that the Spirit penetrates matter and matter
becomes what it has been from the foundation of the world, the
unique matrix of life. The uniqueness of man as the image of God
cannot be conceived without his material being. The physiological
aspect of man's being and existence forbids us to speak of spirit
and soul without the presupposition and basis of matter (10).

In the Eastern theological tradition matter occupies this central
place in creation on the basis of the Logos theology. Certainly, this
concept of matter presupposes also the regenerating energy of the
Spirit of God. Matter has a value only because it is penetrated by
the Sprit in a personal way reminding us of the origin of the
creation of the whole cosmos. Soul and body, spirit and matter are
therefore equally subjects of transformation. Their value can only
be jointly defended as one and whole organism of life always on the
way to their recreation and transfiguration. It is this reality of the
relation of Spirit and matter which makes Eastern Orthodoxy
conceives of the cosmos together with man's transfiguration in
Christ by the operation of the Spirit. In the Orthodox liturgical
worship and its symbolic representation of the elevated cosmos in
Christ one can detect this cosmic dimension clearly. Alongside and
together with the memorial of Christ's incarnation, cross and
resurrection, as one and inseparable event, the worshipping Church
gathered in the power of the Pentecostal event is celebrating
around the Eucharist and through the material gifts of bread and
wine the elevation of the whole cosmos together with man; and this
makes salvation and transfiguration possible. Rightly, one can
speak not of church worship, but of cosmic liturgy referring to the
Eastern understanding of worship and of man as microcosmic (11).
After the use of water for Baptism, the hymnology of the Epiphany
liturgy, for instance, in the Eastern tradition is a hymn and praise of
the elevated matter of creation as a whole. The river Jordan is the
matrix of salvation and iconography represents it as filling the
whole canopy of the created cosmos, Christ being implanted into its
water like a pillar as the pivot of the whole creation. Baptism and
Eucharist are the sacraments of salvation but also the signs and
antitype-symbols of the union between man, nature and history as
Cosmos. More precisely, using the words of Paul Evdokimov: The
word by which the eucharist was instituted, 'this is my body'
designates the living body, the whole Christ conferring on every
communicant a quickening consanguinity and corporality. In the
same way, 'the word was made flesh' means that God assumed
human nature in its entirety and in it, the whole cosmos. And the
'resurrection of the flesh' in the Creed confesses the reconstitution
of the whole man, soul and body, and thus all flesh shall see the
salvation of God 'all flesh' meaning the pleroma of nature (12).

This liturgical elevation of the cosmos signifies that all of our
enterprises with the created things of nature is a sharing in this
ongoing recreation and transformation of cosmos. Science is
performing a God-given function. In the eyes of a Christian a
scientist is consciously, if he is a believer, and unconsciously, if not,
offering a para-eucharistic act by his work in the service of
humanity; the God-given material is given back to Him fulfilling its
purpose as part of the created cosmos in process of transfiguration.
A scientist represents a secular priestly function and offers a
continuous reasonable sacrifice and praise to the Creator of the
cosmos and on behalf of man as microcosmic mediator between
Him and all created subhuman beings and things. It is on this basis
that anthropology is inseparably linked with cosmology. It is in this
way that a Christian can appreciate appropriately matter and nature
with their very important implications for our dialogue between
Christian and scientific images of man.

Unfortunately, this right approach to the value of nature and matter
remained a liturgical symbolism and vision. Both in the West and in
the East there was no immediate effect on the understanding in this
positive way of subhuman material creation. Though the
explanation of the precise reasons which have caused the
inefficiency of this authentic biblical-Christological approach to
nature is not entirely possible, we can attempt to investigate some
of the probable causes (13).

First, the blunt materialism connected with atheism might be
regarded as the origin of the Christian's hesitation to evaluate
matter. The automatic genesis of life, the exploitation of the
evolutionary theories of species, the wrong conclusions of the
incorruptibility of matter have led theology to defend the spiritual
foundations of creation in an exaggerated way at the expense of its
material nature. Together with this attitude one should investigate
the role played by rationalistic philosophy and by one-sided, partial
interpretation of Plato and Aristotle as dualistic philosophers.

Second, an overemphasis on the value of the monastic ideal,
contemplative life and meditation have dominated Christians
expecting the second coming of Christ. A false eschatology has
greatly affected the facticity and historicity of faith and accentuated
the liturgical vision of the end of time in full glory against the
material nature of the cosmos in corruption and sin. The monks
rightly point to this final end of history and validate the manifold
ascesis, which in the East especially has been wrongly connected
with an unjustified position of the pneumatic-spiritual against the
material nature of the cosmos.

Third, a kind of anti-fleshly mind, connected with the ascesis as the
central moral principle of Christian life, nourished by the fear of
falling into mortal sexual sins has greatly contributed to devaluating
matter as connected with the inferior if not sinful part of creation.
The threat of pansexualism in modern times has further
strengthened this position and inspired a spiritualistic ethics as a
noble struggle against the low, dirty and animal trends which
violently assault the human body and require satisfaction.

Perhaps, along these lines one can look for some of the causes of
the failure to draw the implications of the Christological
interpretation of nature regarding the value of matter. Anyway, we
have to admit that there cannot be a dialogue with secular images
of man if this separation of anthropology and cosmology in Christian
theology is not repudiated. Christian faith has all the
presuppositions to enable it to remain a dynamic factor of progress
as well as a realistic partner of dialogue within a secularized world,
because of its Christological cosmology. It is not an abstract and
rationalistic natural theology which inspires the intrinsic value of
created subhuman beings and matter, but the faith that all things
are created and recapitulated in Christ. And this makes all the
difference with all other possible theories about nature and matter
of a traditional natural theology.

This Christological approach to nature does not allow any kind of
false interpretation of man's God-given right to the domination of
nature. It is not a right of stewardship that man is given either. Man
cannot be named simply steward of nature in order to avoid the
idea of domination. Steward is also too ambiguous and
presumptuous. Nor is it sufficient to say that man is a guest in
nature so that he will not behave as an owner or master of it. None
of these expressions, which up to a certain extent try to place man
in a new responsible way at the center of creation setting limitations
of his power, are the appropriate terms to be used in this
connection, because, though they try to save man from his
excessive egocentricity over against nature, these terms might
introduce another type of distance and another kind of self-
alienation from nature and in cosmos. Steward and guest can
become indications of another kind of emancipation of man within
the cosmos reserving for him the right to manipulate or to exploit
nature. In this sense there is no hope of appreciating man's full and
responsible involvement and of taking appropriate action against
ecological threat.

What is necessary to be proclaimed on the basis of a consistent
Christology of nature is the co-naturality of man, his inner, deep
and inevitable co-existence, or better, I dare to say, identity with
matter. It is only in this way that we have to overcome in theology
all kinds of dualistic trends introducing an inappropriate separation
and superiority of man over nature under the pretext of man's
uniqueness in creation based on a partial biblical notion of
anthropocentricity. The process philosophers and theologians can
help us to focus this centrality of man according to a Christian
theology of nature against anthropomonistic trends, reminding
Christian anthropology of its inevitable and imperative association
with a consistent biblical Christology of nature.

It becomes more and more evident, today, that every unreflected
act of man in using and abusing nature becomes a latent motif of
slow but sure suicide of human life on this earth. Pollution of nature
or unlimited absorption of energy predicts with accuracy man's
disappearance from this earth. The environmental problem and the
energy condition prescribe the frame for human survival in the near
future (14). Human egoistic superiority over nature equals human
self annihilation. Between aesthetic humanistic romanticism and
materialistic utilitarianism a new Christian consciousness of identity
of man with nature in the one Creation of God in Christ must
develop. This can be done only if anthropology is inseparably
conceived along with cosmology.

It is only in this way that an authentic Christian image of man can
enter into dialogue with secular anthropologies to support them in
their effort to reflect on the quality of life and the value of the
human person in an age of technology and false, one-sided
economic growth. It is only in this way that the Christian visions
about man and nature in a Christological sense can become
dynamic factors in the historical process and not remain simple
symbolic references or mystical liturgical experience. Above all and
finally it is only in this way that Christian anthropology can
appreciate nature historicized, i.e. as Cosmos bearing the marks of
world history, in which man is not the sole Creator but also and
principally one of the dynamic agents and participants in Creation,
as Cosmos and nature have also a history of their own apart from
human presence, not only before the creation of man in the remote
future. But they have now with man a history parallel to human
history, which has an intrinsic value in itself.

It is this kind of cosmic historicity of subhumans and material
nature which is decisive in conceiving human personality in
relationship to the facticity of historical process as a whole. Only in
this case one can appreciate and evaluate science and technology
and their effects in the formation of human personality. Especially,
it is only out of this world's historicity that a Christian image of man
should be carefully constructed, correcting traditional one-sided
principles of Christian anthropology isolated from the actual
historical process and expressed in esoteric language.

Science, psychology and social and political struggle for a worldwide
human community of freedom and justice are indispensable parts of
a consistent Christian anthropology which takes seriously into
consideration the history of nature represented and studied by
scientific research and its historical predicament as it is grasped in
the struggle for liberation and transformation of the structures of
injustice on a worldwide scale. Anthropology and Cosmology in
complementary and reciprocal relationship of interdependence
signify that a Christian image of the human person cannot be
conceived out of a neutral self-sufficient transcendental position. On
the other side all ideological concepts of humanity derived from
science, psychology, society or politics should raise unavoidably the
ontological question of human being and of the quality of human
life, in an age of crisis caused by a false autonomy either of
Christian anthropology or scientific cosmology.





Notes

1. On this issue: Anticipation, WCC., Geneva, March 1974.

2. Ibid. p. 21.

3. Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, ibid. p. 33.

4. Ibid. p. 33.

5. Ibid. p. 34.

6. A. N. Whitehead is the principal teacher of this kind of theology,
submitted to his dynamic concept of creation as a continuous
recreating-itself process. He continually reverses the order between
heaven and earth, giving priority to nature's ongoing inner
movement of development. He writes amongst other things in this
context: What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in
heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By
reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into
the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. God is, in
this sense, the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who
understands. (Process and Reality, New York (Macmillan) 1929 p.
532).

7. Anticipation, ibid. p. 22.

8. The critique of T. Derron process theology is expanded in his
book: Ecology and Human Liberation, Geneva (WCC) 1973.

9. Paulos Gregorios, The Human Presence. An Orthodox View of
Nature, W.G.C. (Geneva) 1978, p. 64.

10. Gregory Palamas writes: Based on the biblical physiology I
should not speak of soul alone or of body alone, but of both
together, what is meant by the phrase 'according to the image of
God' (P.G. 1361C).

11. As Hans-Urs von Balthasaris doing in his book: Liturgie
Cosmique. Paris (Aubier-Montaigne) 1947 and Lars Thurnberg:
Microcosm and Mediator. The Theological Anthropology of Maximus
the Confessor. Lund (Gleerup) 1965.

12. P. Evdokimov: Nature, in: Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol.
18. No. 1 (March 1965), p. 9 (quoted by Paulos Gregorios, op. cit.,
p. 88).

13. Similar positive theological attitudes to nature and creation are
to be found in the West, expressed in less symbolic-liturgical
language than in the East but converging in the same basic
appreciation of matter and nature. For instance M. O. Chenu in his
book Nature, Man and Society writes: The discovery of nature: we
are not now concerned merely with the feeling for nature which
poets of the time evinced here and there in fashionable allegorical
constructions... Rather our concern is with the realization which laid
upon these men of the twelfth century...(when): they reflected that
they were themselves caught up within the framework of nature,
were themselves also bits of this cosmos they were ready to
master (Nature, Man and Society in the Twelth Century. Selected,
edited and translated by J. Taylor and L. Little, Chicago and London
(Chicago Univ. Press) 1957, p. 4-5).

14. See on this issue: Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy, a new World View.
New York (The Viking Press) 1980.


II. Scientific approaches to the Human Person and their
Challenge to Christian Anthropological Visions

The interpenetration of anthropology and cosmology on the basis of
a genuine Christology of nature has a direct positive bearing on the
dialogue between secular understanding and Christian images of the
human person. Certainly, science, psychology and political ideology
rightly want to possess the whole of nature, of man, and society as
their own field of research and action. But the main issue is this
wholeness, i.e. how one understands and serves it best. It is the
right of science to investigate all things thoroughly towards
achieving the fuller knowledge possible, while the interpntration
of anthropology and cosmology proves this legitimate effort to be
ultimately inaccessible. It is not the notion of mystery, very popular
in theological circles, especially in the East, which makes this
enterprise futile. It is not the dimension of the sacred in cosmos and
man either which proves science to be limited only to one part of
the cosmic reality. It is more the nature of created things and the
historical predicament in the cosmos, which makes scientific
research and concepts of man relative in connection with a possible
holistic knowledge of them. The further authentic science develops,
the more this missing dimension of holism referring to man's image
becomes evident, especially when anthropology and cosmology are
interpenetrated fields of scientific research. If Christian
anthropology has to be corrected and saved from its
anthropomonism, because of the notion of the absolute uniqueness
of man in creation, similarly scientific cosmology has to be
complemented by anthropology in order to enlarge its research field
and ultimate reference.

In reality, science has not and cannot have anthropology in the
sense of ethology, philosophy and theology. Perhaps, introspective
psychology is closer to anthropological issues than other applied
system of knowledge. It is true, indeed, that scientific researches
are, in principle, by their methodology, deprived of their probable
extension to anthropology. This is understandable and to a certain
extent welcome on the part of anthropological sciences. But at the
same time, one has to recognize that scientific research by its
conclusions can exercise a direct influence on the anthropological
sciences. Especially, at times of advanced secularization its
repercussions are immediate in conceiving the human person, its
origin, essence and destination. In some cases, the impact on
anthropology is decisive when there is no systematic reference to it
on the part of science, psychology and political ideology. Their
concern for human applied knowledge, composition of matter,
function of physical laws, the molecular constitution of the human
body and its effects on psychic functions, the study of conscious and
subconscious life and finally the relationship between economy,
society and man as well as the reasons given for the struggle for a
just and sustainable world community become basic introductory
principles towards an unsystematically written anthropology. It has
convincing power and direct bearing for conceiving an unwritten
popular image of the human person with an immediate practical,
ethical application.

The encounter between scientific-secular and Christian images of
man should take this difference seriously into consideration. The
wish from the Christian point of view, however, should be always
expressed that sciences, in view of this encounter, might think also
anthropologically, by trying to reflect on their missing dimension of
anthropology when they interpret nature. Because, most of the
misunderstanding and one-sidedness, or polemic attitude against
traditional Christian expression of man's nature have been caused
by a popularized vulgarization of great scientific theories, like the
evolution of species. The practical application of easily generalized
scientific conclusions against traditional images of man in many
cases are due to the absence of concern for real anthropology in a
deeper and holistic dimension on the part of the initiators of
scientific theories.

It must, therefore, be clarified that a genuine encounter between
secular and Christian images of man can be affected only if these
limitations are acknowledged on both sides and Christian
anthropologists are ready to take into their interests cosmology and
scientists converge also towards anthropology. Unless this
reciprocal movement is there, the debate will be without point of
contact and will remain two parallel monologues. We have to be
conscious, however, that at this moment we have still very few
examples of such converging attitudes and we are not yet, among
the great majority on both sides, fully aware of our lack of holistic
trends in anthropology. Theology is unable to construct a genuine
cosmology, and science is reluctant to develop a consistent
application of scientific research in holistic anthropology. Perhaps,
here in this issue we touch one of the most delicate issues in
anthropology. Upon this issue the debate about the quality of
human life depends especially in so-called Christian world, which
bears a major responsibility for the progressive separation of man
from nature. This separation is against the authentic interpretation
of man from nature. This separation is against the authentic
interpretation of the biblical message regarding the wholeness of
Creation as cosmos and ktisis. It is this attitude, to a certain extent,
which made science operate in an autonomous field of knowledge
and action, based on human aspirations for domination over nature
and for serving human welfare and progress.


II. Scientific approaches to the Human Person and their
Challenge to Christian Anthropological Visions

1. Determinism-mechanism in Science and Evolutionary
Humanism.

The first problem one has to face following the assertion of the
relationships between anthropology and cosmology, in other words,
the concept of man within the cosmos, is the relationship between
scientific humanism and a humane science. For many scientists
it is today less urgent that the humanities should become imbued
with the values of science than that science should become alert to
the values of humanity (1). After a period of a partial investigation
of man, due to the exact, rationalistic method of scientific
objectivity, modern science has moved to a more integral vision of
the human person, due to this liberation from a deterministic and
mechanical conception of reality.

Certainly, science in its new contemporary trends also remains
faithful to its fundamental principles of research: immanence,
proposition and proof enjoying universal acceptance on the basis of
logic and experience. Science looks for interpreting new laws
derived from its observation of nature in its immediate grasp. It
reflects on the common experience in such a way that it displays
recognizable patterns. A simple, first contact with objective reality
causes a confusion which might become an order after a scientific
system of explanation is proposed. For science, knowledge derives
always from definite experience of reality. Alongside scientific
precise definitions science produces a series of models of nature,
which act out only the consequences of the limited and partial
mechanisms which we have put into them... This is the inductive
method, by which we first look for laws and then judge them to be
confirmed if their consequences go on fitting the observed facts
(2).

These principles and definitions make out of scientific approach a
self-determined field of knowledge and action without necessary
reference to debates about essence, substance, feeling, and human
aspirations. One can or should be a scientist only by limiting oneself
within the boundaries of rationality, facticity and observation of
things. It is out of these principles that the mechanistic
interpretation of nature is introduced with the corresponding image
of the universe as a huge machine. The giant machine was not
only causal and determinate; it was objective in the sense that no
human act or intervention qualified its behavior (3).

The subjective rationalistic operation and the objective mechanistic
concept of nature have easily resulted in the mechanization of the
whole of life and man. With the presupposition of the Cartesian
certainty of human reason against doubt and the proof of rationality
as condition for understanding human existence, science, by its
consistent objectivity related to this well-structured mental
operation in connection with reality, extended its conclusion beyond
its limits in the areas of theology and anthropology. Descartes and
Newton joined in reverence in front of a Deus ex Machina and of
man operating mechanically. Causality and determinism in nature
had a reductionism effect in other areas beyond strictly scientific
sets of limits which are clearly defined by the strict application of
scientific methodology. Perhaps, science itself is not directly
responsible because this extension becomes unavoidable as a
psychological reaction in the face of persuasive scientific conclusions
of reality.

If science operates with such accuracy and by convincing logical and
mathematical proofs illustrated by applications in daily life in
continuous technical progress, its principles become parts of human
consciousness and beliefs, and affect all realms of intellectual and
spiritual life. Man and his ontological affirmation is the most evident
and immediate area falling under the influence of such scientific
approaches. The abstract notion of humanity, though it is no object
of scientific research, can also become the object of scientific
determinism; if it is true that all that matters is matter and that
the function of matter can be explained by the law of causality and
gravity, this means imposing a mathematical finality on history
and biology and geology and mining and spinning (4).

The so-called scientific revolution of the 18th century meant that
from the principles of the secular sciences to the foundations of
religious revelation, from metaphysics to matters of taste... from
the scholastic disputes of theologians to matters of commerce, from
natural law to the arbitrary laws of the nations... everything has
been discussed, analyzed or at least mentioned(5). All the notions
of reality, including man as part of it are reduced to a well
structured motion of particles or molecules and all kinds of
emotions and psychical reactions of man are interpreted by
quantitative size and the relationship of mechanical laws
determined by speed. Arithmetic dominating not only physics, but
also psychic reactions, will prove applied psychology to operate like
anatomy and physiology in the human body as a complex molecular
organism, which explains cognitive, volitional and sentimental
operation of consciousness. Floyd Matson appropriately makes the
remark: man had disappeared from the world as subject in order
to reappear as object. Mind itself was dissolved into particles in
motion by the neutralizing solvent of the new physics (6) and
reminds us of the assertion of La Mettrie: that man is a machine
and that there is only one substance, differently modified, in the
whole world. What will all the weak reeds of divinity, metaphysics
and nonsense of the schools avail against this firm and solid oak?
(7).

The radically mechanized metaphysics in the philosophy of extreme
Cartesian tendencies, married with the descriptive and analytic but
absolutely consistent positivist thought in physics have been
strangely combined with the Darwinian evolutionary theory in their
massive attack against all kinds of substance research in man.
Without any appropriate reasonable motif, a generalized anti-
humane system of values has been developed perhaps under the
psychologically imposed necessity to negate transcendence,
metaphysics and any survival of faith in a special intervention of a
creating power from outside. When we study this curious alliance
and some hasty enthusiastic pronouncements on the entire
sufficiency of explanations in physics and biology by some of the
adherents of this mechanistic outlook of man and nature, we
experience a strange dissatisfaction, especially because we are
given such a crippled, one-sided and partial image of creation and
man. In the same way as traditional transcendental theistic
philosophical anthropology and theology had neglected the natural
and material reality of the cosmos in dealing with humanity and
spoke of man from an ivory tower, so from another angle science
refused to allow space to man to move as a distinctive creature and
spoke of him as a particle of a machine and as an organism of
developing animal life. The great achievements of science in its first
bold steps have betrayed a certain kind of non-scientific inflexibility
and a deep intellectual weakness.

The right evolutionary theory mixed up with mechanistic philosophy
and physics missed the total vision of humanum and reduced
human being to a process from mammalian to psychological
organization prescribed strictly by natural physical laws of selection
and biological transformation. Man is not only made of the same
matter and operated by the same energy as all the rest of the
cosmos, but, for all his distinctiveness, he is linked by generic
continuity with all the other living inhabitants of his planet. Man is
an animal thinking mechanically, with an acquired bigger brain-
stuff, automatically reacting to his natural environment and creating
fantasies beyond it about himself, his origins, his destiny.
Evolutionary scientists still in the 20th century do not hesitate to
negate all kinds of transcendence for the sake of this mechanistic
explanation. Julian Huxley writes that evolutionary man can no
longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into
the arms of a divinized father a figure whom he has himself
created nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by
sheltering under the umbrella of Divine Authority, nor absolve
himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and
planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient but
unfortunately inscrutable Providence (8).

No one has the right or can dispute a purely scientific biological
theory with sufficient proofs, if they exist. But what is questionable
is the advance to a totalitarian conclusion that the only field still
remaining outside the range of scientific system is that of the so-
called paranormal phenomena like telepathy thus facilitating the
creation of a sole authentic scientific religion based on this
mechanistic evolutionary vision of man without reference to any
kind of salvation or higher destiny or a Creator. All these constitute
a regrettable dogmatism (9), which with the belief in an
omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God leads to a frustrating
dilemma at the very heart of our approach to reality and introduces
an inseparable split into the universe, and prevents us from
grasping its real unity. All religious or even questions about the
ontological being of man, his destiny, his deeper emotional trends
beyond natural and mechanical existence are psychosocial organs of
evolving man. There is but a simple revolutionary and evolutionary
humanism against all traditional images of man. This humanism is
rooted in absolute faith in the self-guided selection towards
perfection in nature, by man and for man alone. This evolutionary
progress is nourished by the fact that by scientific knowledge, many
phenomena which once appeared wholly mysterious can now be
described or explained in rationally intelligible or naturalistic terms.

Certainly, even the most radical mechanistic evolutionist is ready to
assert that science cannot abolish the mystery of existence in
general. Having removed the obscuring veil of mystery, science will
persist in questioning and wondering: what is life, what is mind and
its relationship with all kinds of images it creates out of the
observation of nature? But this self-humbling attitude does not
affect the progressive investigation of reality by means of pure
observation and research. The hope is that applied scientific
knowledge is on the way to achieve more and more clarity.
Santayana has come close to the central idea of evolutionary
humanism: there is only one world, the natural world, and only
one truth about it; but this world has a spiritual life in it, which
looks not to another world but to the beauty and perfection that this
world suggests, approaches and misses (10). From this position a
realistic hopeful vision of the future is created. Man is not regarded
in his static being, which has been designed once for all by God. He
is fully in transformation forward, inspiring confidence in the future.
For evolutionary humanists of all kinds here at this point lies the
most striking difference with Christian anthropologists. For J.
Bronowski this humanism implies that there would one day be
different an even better human beings than ourselves (11).





Notes

1. Floyd W. Mats on. The Broken Image. Man, Science and Society,
New York (Anchor Books - G. Braziller) 1964, p. V.

2. J. Bronowski, Science is human. In The Humanist Frame ed.
by J. Huxley, London (G. Allen and Unwin Ltd.) 1961, p. 89.

3. S.Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding,
New York (Simon and Schuster) 1954, p. 13-14 (quoted by F.
Maison, ibid, p. 3).

4. J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, Cambridge
(Harvard Univ. Press) 1955, p. 46.

5. D' Allembert, Elements de Philosophie, quoted in Cassirer,
Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 46-47, quoted by F. Matson,
ibid., p. 12.

6. Floyd Matson, ibid., p. 13.

7. La Mettrie, L' Homme Machine, quoted in Joseph Needham, in:
Science, Religion and Reality, New York (Araziller) 1955, p. 236.

8. Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame, London (George Allen) 1961
p. 19.

9. Ibid., p. 38-39.

10. Quoted by Julian Huxley, ibid., p. 48.

11. J. Bronowski, Science is human, ibid., p. 93.


II. Scientific approaches to the Human Person and their
Challenge to Christian Anthropological Visions

2. Psychosocial models as images of man.

It is remarkable how one of the most anthropological sciences,
psychology, has been permeated by this mechanistic outlook in
science during a later period of modern history, especially when
determinism and causality are shaken by new scientific researches.
It is astonishing how in our days a counter-revolution in psychology
has joined mechanical patterns of scientific investigation of the 18th
century. In this sense, it joins also contemporary global affirmation
of the pure objectivity of society enjoying full qualitative priority
over the particular human subject and its freedom.

It looks as if psychology and sociology realized later than the
natural science their independence from philosophy. In order to
justify and accentuate this emancipation they entirely refused all
kinds of conceptual theoretical systems of thought regarding man
and adopted the purely objectivisation of his psychic operations.
This psychology refused all introspective investigation because of its
lack in objectivity without which an applied scientific knowledge
cannot exist. Psychology in contrast to concern with consciousness
and introspection, or with experiment and observation of psychic
reactions in the three fields of the soul cognitive, volitional and
emotional now follows the data given objectively by the behavior
of the individual. Disregarding hereditary psychic facts, it occupies
itself with the example of the exclusive mechanistic method of
science and the data collected by observation of the behavior of
each subject. This attitude is accompanied by the same optimistic
view of evolutionary humanism as in the past. John B. Watson
expresses it clearly on the part of behaviorists of all times: Give
me the baby and my world to bring it up in and I'll make it crawl
and walk. I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing
buildings of stone or wood; I'll make it a thief, a gunman... The
possibility of shaping in any direction is almost endless... (1).

Certainly, this is another image of human person manipulated by
scientific objectivity. The human person risks becoming empty of
deeper, inner qualities, because only external, objectifiable data can
afford a sure ground of scientific investigation. Man has, in reality,
his authentic model and the means to conform to it outside his
psychic and conscious structure. Introspective examination proves
to be a vanity and an illusory operation. Psychology through this
radical behaviorism, refusing the dimension of depth for the sake of
pure objectivity in the service of scientific methodology, offers
another image of man depending upon processes outside his
conscious self-determination and existential condition and decision.
Objective can easily mean and become here functional and
mechanistic. It is a self-alienating process in which the image is
supplied by objective models suggested or imposed on him from
outside, as convincing, realistic, psychically healthy images to be
massively realized on the model of industrial mechanical production.
Introspection, self-examination and concentration, meditation and
recollection are regarded as means irrelevant to psychological
scientific appreciation of man's inner life. The value of the human
person consists in repeating the objective model by consciously
behaving according to it.

Together with this kind of objectivisation in psychology through
behaviorism, sociology also as a new science and for the sake of
achieving precise scientific knowledge enjoying objectivity has
emphasized in an almost radical way the pure objectivity of the
social phenomenon. From the early times of sociology, by Auguste
Comte and Herbert Spencer the evolution of society has been
proclaimed as moving from the religious and mythical through the
rational and metaphysical to the positive and industrial stage or
from a primitive mono-molecular to a modern poly-molecular
status. Studying society, as the new, rising event in the modern
scientific world, one has to apply pure scientific methods. Therefore,
the social phenomenon has to be accepted by the sociologist as
objectively as the natural phenomenon is by the scientist in natural
sciences. No wonder that progressively, due also to the creation of
big urban und industrial centers, this objectivity has been adopted
as the criterion of defining man as simply part of an objective
societal whole, governed by its own rules and norms. Against any
religious, philosophic and humanistic anthropocentricity a new
collective, mechanical, self-evident and autonomous concentration
upon society has been introduced into all spheres of science,
anthropology, economy and political ideology.

Again, man, as a distinctive human person with his existential
choices, struggling to assert his freedom as one of the highest
qualities of his being, has withdrawn to a secondary, inferior
position of simple participation in this global, anonymous and
massive new reality of society. Inside this collective, machine-like
objective reality, truths and values are created and spread out in a
convincing obligatory way.

Society possesses a qualitatively different nature of knowledge,
morals and normative principles of life. It enjoys full priority and
autonomy over the subjective human individual person, whose
qualification depends now upon his ability to share, to contribute
and to follow what is happening sociologically and objectively.
Technical rationalization, methodical planning, evolutionary
biological and intellectual progress, as well as pure objectivity
grasped by scientific observation have replaced, little by little,
ontological affirmation of human being. Freedom became a
readiness of the human person to submit to external, anonymous,
social principles and events.

As in behaviorist, psychology, sociology now will proclaim the
conformity and adaptation of the individual as a human person and
existence to group models, standards and norms. The objectively
and collectively valid principles, the generally accepted fashion and
mode will gain priority over the existential, the ontological, the
subjective and exceptional characteristics of the deeper essence of
man as a person. Functional rationality, behaviorism, objectivity as
a unique rule of scientific investigation of reality, engineering and
management for the sake of maximum possible production have
succeeded on the basis of reason in offending the freedom of
human being. The individual has been degraded to the role of a
particle of a gigantic personal organism with an inner mechanical
order in the form of modern industrial society. This is the sole
ground, source and generator of progress, a demythologising reality
and a fountain of all goods securing prosperity and healthy state of
mind against all kinds of fantasies and illusions of
transcendence and metaphysical beliefs.

This scientific trend towards concentration on society modified the
focus of the center of values from its anthropocentricity to an
anonymous collective external center of power. Man
unconsciously becomes neutral towards values and weak in his free
choices. Everything happens by necessity and chance. The concern
for order and discipline for the sake of the common good and the
bureaucratic administration will gradually replace free ethical
decision, experience of inner personal struggle for the sake of
meditation, reflection and spirituality. Man has happily abandoned
himself to the secure forces of protection and order from outside his
troubled inner self. Many problems will be thus resolved, many
deficiencies of economic and social structures will be corrected, an
improvement of public health will be secured, easier
communications on a world scale will be developed, but at the same
time, parallel to this progress, a progressive emptiness of self from
deeper cultural, aesthetic and ethical values will gradually occur.
The proprietor of values is now the anonymous society and its
dominating function (2).

In the same direction of development the final step towards pure
objectivity has been realized in social and economic systems in
sociology professing the value of collective interests over subjective
aspirations towards free choice for the sake of strict social order
and justice. Political ideologies will determine the value of the
human person simply and uniquely by man's sharing in the common
effort to increase the general welfare in economic life. This radical
application of objectivity in sociology will interpret the history of
culture, traditional ethics and religion as an illusory life-product of
economic relationships or as their superstructure. The personality of
man is calculated and qualified only by his work as a basic factor of
economic growth and by his contribution, in this way, to the welfare
of the whole society.

On the other hand, also, in the non-ideologically socialized
countries, professing and supporting individual human rights,
declaring that science can be rightly developed only within a
democratic state, it is the freedom of science, it is the illogical
production of all kinds of goods, it is the greedy consumption, it is
the unlimited economic growth which define the human person.
Progress has become synonymous with the welfare state and
cultural values have been subordinated to the manifold application
of technology for the sake of economic expansion and security.
Technocracy dominates in planning social life and computerized
systems efficiently relate conflicts of interest between groups. The
human person is losing his identity and consciousness as a qualified
being with a distinctive origin and a higher destination. Technology
makes man lose his immediate contact with surrounding nature,
because it helps him to dominate it and utilize it from a distance
through a .highly devised system of applied knowledge. Technology
makes man look at himself in a different way, at a distance from his
existential problem. Mastering nature in this way, he risks becoming
too weak to master himself. Losing his inwardness and spontaneity,
he is to achieve individual satisfaction by an extroverted movement.
Human intelligence must serve a pre-determined accurate system,
comprising the best of man's scientific achievement with the highest
range of efficiency as its proof.

It is well known that for this reason all kinds of scientists and
philosophers following thinkers like Sren Kierkegaard, have in the
past criticized scientism, systematization, radical rationality and
superficial optimistic forecasts of the future and more do so at the
present moment. This attack comes from all parts of
anthropological sciences as well as from all kinds of political
ideologies and represents a general dissatisfaction especially
regarding the image of the human person as being threatened in its
own basic constitution (3). We have to confess that there is a kind
of fatalism in this criticism in the face of an irreversible process of
depersonalization and irresistible mechanisation of life.

It seems to me, however, that the problem is too complicated to be
faced only by this radical criticism. The threats against the
individuality and the inherent worth of man are definitely there. But
we have to admit that science in our technological age cannot be
massively negated as depersonalizing. It is true that technology can
cause all these negative effects on human personality, but it is also
true that technology is a way of humanizing the world of matter in
time and space (4), and reshapes the terrific potentialities of
humanity. Certainly, it can manipulate human beings, but it can
also, always in the service of humanity, reshape human life and
social structures and favor positive developments in all areas of
application of knowledge in all realms of science, in genetics, in
medicine as well as in agriculture, and in food-production.

Finally, the most interesting thing is that technologically applied
science penetrates all realms of life changing social conditions and
creating new life styles for the individual. And this is a direct
challenge to all kinds of anthropologies, which are not willing simply
to join the ongoing criticism, but which are ready to accept this
challenge and rethink their concept of the human person today. It is
necessary, though, to understand fully this kind of challenge at this
moment by trying to follow the new trends in the self-appreciation
of scientific research and work. The science of today abandons more
and more the deterministic and mechanistic framework of the past
described above. This change creates a new possibility of dialogue
with Christian anthropology about the quality of the human person.





Notes

1. Quoted by Floyd Matson, ibid., p. 30.

2. Margaret A. Boden: Examples of schizophrenia, as well as the
bewildering variety of psychological malfunctions associated with
amnesia or with damage to the speech-era of the brain, thus
indicate the subtle complexities of the computational basis of
normal free behavior. (Human Values in a Mechanistic Universe.
In Human Values. Edited by G. Vesey, The Harvester Press,
Sussex 1978, p. 153).

3. Against the domination of man by society as an impersonal
machine people from all different systems of thought, ideologies,
philosophies and anthropologies have raised their criticism. The
most representative in this context is definitely Herbert Marcuse
with his book: The One Dimensional Man.

4. Paulos Gregorios, The Human Presence, p. 89.


II. Scientific approaches to the Human Person and their
Challenge to Christian Anthropological Visions

3. The Overcoming of Mechanistic Determinism in Science
and the new challenge in Christian anthropology

Though it is not yet fully appreciated and appropriately applied in
the realm of philosophy of nature and history, science has definitely
abandoned the mechanistic understanding of natural phenomena
and their interrelationships. A. Einstein has written that the great
change was brought about by Faraday, Maxwell and Herz as a
matter of fact half unconsciously and against their will (1). Maxwell
introduced the electromagnetic theory and put in question the
whole Newtonian mechanistic system. Further, thermodynamics
with its reliance upon probability refuted any idea of determinacy
and certainty. Matter has been replaced by fields of force for
interpreting electricity and by the study of the inner workings of
nature passed from the engineer scientist to the mathematician in
the theory of relativity (2), and these absolutes of space and time
have been deprived of their independence and form a four-
dimensional continuum of space-time. Instead of matter we must
speak of energy as the basic foundation of science. The stable
foundations of physics have broken up... The old foundations of
scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter,
material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration,
structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the
sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not
know what you mean by mechanics? (3). Energy, it is supposed
but in discontinuous packets or quanta; this quanta theory has
affected an entire outlook on the physical world and has shaken the
foundations of the classical mechanistic physics. All the laws of
nature that are usually classed as fundamental can be foreseen
wholly from epistemological considerations. They correspond to a
priori knowledge, and are therefore wholly subjective (4). James
Jeans does not hesitate to make the remark: Today there is a wide
measure of agreement which on the physical side of science
approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is
heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to
look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no
longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter,
we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the
creator and governor of the realm of matter (5). Determinism has
given up in face of the laws of chance and Heisenberg's principle of
uncertainty and complementarity opposing causality and sure
predictability in classical physics.
This counter-revolution in modern physics bridged the gap between
nature as a gigantic prefabricated machine and man as a calculating
spectator from a distance. The act of pure objective observation,
presented as exact objectivity in scientific mechanistic vision and
method, includes unavoidably the act of participation. Floyd Matson
writes: Man and preeminently scientific manwas only a
mechanically-minded spectator at the grand performance of
nature... The principal lesson derived by quantum physicists from
the discoveries of the past half-century is one which is addressed
directly to this venerable ideal. In the famous figure of Bohr, it is
simply that man is at once an actor and a spectator in the drama of
existence (6). Scientific observation means observation,
interaction, participation, mutual contribution on both sides.
Objectivity now means complementarity, man as observer
sharing in the observed object of nature composing a coherent
whole with it (7). Instead of the mechanistic exclusiveness of
classical physics we are invited now to admit the strange
development of inclusiveness of the scientific mind and the world of
objects under observation.

This reciprocity in scientific enterprise has tremendous
repercussions on science and humanity. The mechanistic view in
science is not only anti-nature but also anti-human, because it
fails to capture what matters most about the human in its
mechanical images. Charles Birch further remarks on this point: a
universe that produces humans cannot be known apart from this
fact. It is a humiverse. We only begin to know what is by what it
becomes. We do hot start with electrons and atoms and build a
universe. We start with humanity and interpret the rest in terms of
this starting point... to bring the human into the picture is to bring
in mind and consciousness and purpose, sensations of red and blue,
bitter and sweet, suffering and joy (8).

Against mechanism science accepts now participation and
complementarity between human thinking and objective nature.
The result is twofold: first, new categories like insight, intuition,
sensitivity, consciousness are included in the epistemological
presuppositions of scientific research with the intention of including
the whole of man as cognitive, volitional and emotional, while
nature is more and more regarded as an organism (and not as the
great machine) with exceptional reactions, unforeseen
developments and rationally unpredictable changes; and
secondhand most important, that the category of mystery
belongs to the fundamental principles of scientific work, because
scientific knowledge is based on abstractions which we choose to
make from a more complex, essentially mysterious reality, though it
is true that science does remove minor mysteries, such as the
mechanism of heredity, but in doing so it shows us where the
mysteries really are (9). Certainly science deals with the mystery
in a specific way, through reason which excludes emotional,
mystical, and psychological reaction which one finds directly
expressed in religious knowledge or in artistic contemplation and
creation through aesthetic values. But together with the notion of
complementarity and participation the category of mystery endows
modern science not only with more flexibility in dealing with the
objective world but, principally, it gives a total vision of reality and
an inclusive rational operation with tremendous significance for
creating a more comprehensive image of the human person.

Especially, the notion of mystery in this new scientific context
means that reality, in the end, remains rationally unknown. In other
words, it is beyond the control of man's power. The more human
knowledge penetrates reality, the more its mysterious basic
structures become evident and persuasive. Harold K. Schilling
emphasizes this paramount basic truth in today's science which
evokes endless wonder and awe. It should not be understood as
an emotional reaction but <(the evidence for this lies in the depths
of the interior of matter and energy and in the character of life,
mind and spirit; in the quality and extent of nature's systematic
interrelationships and interdependencies; in its lawfulness and
randomness; its dynamism and evolutionary holistic creativity; its
transmutability, and remediality; its limitlessness and openness to
the future, in the structure and depths of space-time; in the infinite
variety of its qualities, in its drives toward the social wholes we call
communities and in still other fundamental features (10).

This paragraph describes perfectly the interpenetration of the two
formerly distant fields (reason and reality) in the deterministic and
mechanistic science of classical physics. Now there is but one whole
reality in full interaction on the basis of the category of mystery,
which is equally animating both, reason and reality. The perpetual
experience of this fundamental truth in a post-scientific era which
we are slowly but surely entering makes scientists share in
existential categories which are parallel categories of knowledge
towards a holistic science. Nature and reason are not simply object
or subjective qualities causing to the subject aesthetic admiration,
or romantic feelings but anxious perplexity and profound concern
or even traumatic anguish (11).

Science in this new context becomes a humane and passionate
operation and scientific knowledge, an existential and experiential
process. The knowing subject becomes alternatively the known
object. Objective knowledge includes with reason the areas of will
and sentiment. Epistemology has to deal with the nature of
knowledge as relationship. Its function depends on an exchange of
logical with experiential, psychic and sensual categories. After the
period of the isolation of reason as the unique and supreme element
of knowing in classical physics which was perhaps necessary in
the first steps of physical sciences, psychology and sociology we
now return to appreciate the all inclusive nature of knowledge
accepting the interaction between pure cognitive with existential
categories. It is evident that the scientist is unconsciously involved
in humane problems and creates a new sensitivity and a new
consciousness vis-a-vis nature and himself. The question
about the image of the human person is raised as a para-scientific
concern of primary importance in a new way, allowing a more
comprehensive vision of human nature and its origin and purpose
as a more open question. Anyway, scientific knowledge becomes
more and more conscious that it cannot manipulate nature without
paying the price of loss of human dignity. Human existence also
should not be manipulated by any objective system of thought,
structures of society or totalitarian ideologies.

This counter-revolution in science against deterministic mechanism,
rationalism and pure objectivity has occurred with more disturbing
effects in the realm of psychology. If uncertainty, mystery, the
inaccessible, perplexity has to accompany a fully scientific work and
raise the question of knowledge in a new humane dimension, then it
is psychology diametrically opposed to behaviorism and objective
observation which has to be recognized as the most important area
of scientific revolution for the sake of the human person. Against
the threats of mechanism and empiricism Depth Psychology focused
its research deep into the subject. Against conceptual psychology it
turns back to the self-analysis of man's deepest unconscious violent
forces, not only to behavior but first to the Behaver.

Definitely, S. Freud began his work as a typical adherent to classical
scientism. He applied determinist methods in explaining the
Subconscious or Unconscious. The interpretation of the function of
libido is almost mechanistic. Repression, transformation,
sublimation create the determined pattern of the unavoidable
function of libido and the interpretations of dreams follows this
scheme faithfully. But, in reality, Freud's invention of the Sub-
conscious signifies the end of scientism and objectivism. Now,
everything has to be studied through the self and subjective, inner
unconscious psychic events. Introspective psychology will defeat the
easy Gestalt-psychology of empiricism and behavior. Human
existence is bi-polar in its constitution and function: a violent
struggle between the life-bearing eros for creativity and the self-
annihilating pathos of death. Man is an incurably guilty person
linked, with all preceding generations by the assassination of the
Ur-Vater. All social relationships can become a source of
neurosis, because of the sick devotion (Widmung) which makes
the ego centrifugal seeking for a sick identity with the masses or
with another person. No action of the human person represents
what it really is. Man is participating in a continuous carnival in
order to avoid his individual neurosis.
Though deterministic, the Unconscious seems to be a level of
activity which is complementary and compensatory to our ordinary
conscious life (12). By this affirmation the deterministic and
mechanistic method defeats mechanism. Man appears in his
authentic continuous struggle with and against himself, full of
anxiety and uncertainty. Introspection as self-examination will
reveal the chaotic, dark basis of human existence killing all kinds of
self-sufficiency, autonomy and superficial optimism regarding an
anthropocentric future. All scientific evolutionary humanisms
become fantasies of neurotic nature, false consolations, amongst
others, for a momentary escape from our tragic psychic situation.

That is why this first psychoanalytical radicalism will be followed
and complemented by a more comprehensive scientific approach.
The analytical psychology of C.G. Jung on the same basis will
introduce the bi-polarity of the collective-subjective subconscious
and will accept the struggle as a continuous effort of the subject to
find the equilibrium between the two in a continuous tension. Man is
never alone and never one-dimensional, but animus and anima,
extroverted and introverted, between good and evil, archetypal and
experiential, instinctive and reflective, energetic and passive.
Psychic health depends on the balance between opposing but
complementary un-conscious and conscious trends around the
axonic system, where the pivot-axis is the archetype of God. The
purpose of life is the self-identity with this archetype: God
becoming man. The Self (Selbst) is the final purpose of life as it
is grasped through the analytic psychological introspective method.
Starting from these presuppositions, Jung does not hesitate to
describe conscience, this unifying functional center of ego into
which all impressions of the subject are referred for receiving their
logical affirmation and evaluation, as a complicated and
undetermined, undefinable process composed of two levels
(Stockwerken). The one, as the basic, includes a certain psychic
event, the other represents a kind of superstructure. The
psychological interpretation of conscience must be accepted as a
permanent coalition-clash (Kollision) (13). The famous self-
consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) becomes here the most
uncertain process of basic complementarity in psychic life. Jung
professes a radical bi-polarity within the most crucial operation of a
human being. Conscience has a static, permanent subtratum (what
we usually call vox Dei) and a flexible, unstable, uncertain element
which causes a perpetual change, uneasiness and insecurity in all of
our so-called conscious decisions. Conscience is, in the end, a
continuous self-questioning between two antithetical forces that the
subject tries to balance and to reconcile. The Self is in itself a
relationship, a communal event. Its wholeness is the purpose of
self-consciousness. One can say that introspection in this way,
though a strictly individual act, is, in reality a communal experience.
On the same basis, the so-called individual psychology of A. Adler
will teach that only the relationship with the Thou of the other
person saves us from the neurosis of the inferiority complex. The
Self is created in connection with a partner and the ego in the
realization of its relationship with the environment and the
important participants in this environment (14).

This bi-polarity and reciprocal complementarity is also confirmed by
contemporary biology's abandonment of its mechanistic and
deterministic past. As in individual and analytic psychology,
hereditary givenness will be matched by the activity of planning for
the .future and the continuous effort of the Self to overcome it and
become a process of recreation without being able to arrive at a
final stage of self-sufficiency. The biologist Jakob Johan von Uexkll
has found that, basically, a human being has molecules of
receptive and effective nature, which organize all energies of
life as a polarized movement biologically and psychologically. Every
unconscious biological movement is a movement of relationship.
In this way the essence of life is no reflex-machine. It possesses
from the beginning in its essential structure the movement towards
inside and outside as an inseparable fundamental element of its
Being (15).

This survey of changes in the contemporary sciences, it is clear, has
a particular bearing on the debate about the nature of the human
person. Because, science, though it remains rational and objective
and impersonal, based on observation and exprimentais no longer
tempted by optimistic self-sufficiency and assurance about its
possibility to understand fully both matter and spirit. There is a
tendency towards self-criticism and humbleness amongst the best
scientists today. R. K. Merton qualifies scientists as a community
governed by four imperatives universalism, communalism,
disinterestedness and organized scepticism (16), expressing the
new scientific consciousness at this moment. Certainly, not all
scientists feel this way. Science, relativising its absoluteness and
exclusiveness, will continue to work the same security. Its
credibility is not at stake and it is neither our wish nor our
expectation to call them in question.

The interesting point for our particular theme is that science in
change raises the problem of encounter with change as a norm of
reality. Alvin Toffler makes the appropriate remark speaking about
change and the future. This, in itself, places a new demand on the
nervous system. The people of the past adapting to comparatively
stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own
inner conceptions of the-way-things-are... New discoveries, new
technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt
into our lives in the increased turnover ratesshorter and shorter
relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life.
They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for
that potentiality devastating social illness-future shock (17).

The positive element of this new self-affirmation of science, in its
ambiguity, uncertainty and pessimism, accentuated by the
ecological problem, and the ethical responsibility of the scientist in
being obliged to serve all kinds of unjust societies and war
preparations, is the fact that makes scientific man become more
and more conscious that there is a need for a self-identity of the
human person. Science has caused a new sensitivity of man in face
of the need to confront the issue of his responsibility frankly and
honestly. The epic of modern science is a story at once of
tremendous achievement, loneliness and terror (18). Human
persons caught up in this new scientific era of ours have to reflect
more seriously about themselves and reconsider their deeper
identity threatened by forces of alienation as never before. Science
is humanizing in this sense, i.e. by creating the sense of
uncertainty, confusion and pessimism it forces man into a position
of self-criticism, self-questioning.

Science, of course, in itself is something good and most necessary
for humankind. There is no doubt about it. However, the more
scientific humanism develops, the more a new self-identity is
required beyond science. Scientific humanism can never overcome
its limitation (rationalistic and technical) and its ethical ambiguity.
Man is tempted to relax in its scientific functionalism. Here lies the
great challenge of science in today's world: the radicalization of the
problem and the necessity for modern man to find his own identity
beyond science.

The defeat of determinism and mechanism and the double sense of
mystery as wonder and awe imply an urgent need for deeper
humanisation in order that scientific man may overcome pessimism
and loneliness. Enrico Gantore rightly describes the challenge of
science in anthropology when he writes: for, truly if man living in
the scientific age does not determinately strive after self-
humanization, he is bound to effectively dehumanize himself (19).

This self-humanization is the new self-consciousness of human
person seeking anew the quality of life. The current model of man
challenged by contemporary science is the realization that he is a
broken self in a broken world, full of uncertainty, injustice and
necessity. Quality of life means both a truer measure of
development and liberation, and the total repudiation of technology
serving repression and economic self-interests. Quality of life means
a whole man in the whole world in inseparable responsible unity
through man's concern for inner coherence of mind and energy and
the historical predicament.

Of course self-humanization requires a process of reference and a
model to be referred to. The challenge of science imposes an
introspective reflection towards recovering a distinctive selfhood.
Science itself cannot create such a model and cannot even afford
the point of reference. It seems to me that the question of the
quality of life in the process of self-humanization, as a response to
the challenge of science in the realm of contemporary anthropology,
is the question about the real being of the human person. The
challenge of science cannot be faced without ontology, certainly
through the inductive and contextual, and not through the
deductive and abstract method. But without this final reference of
Being there is no possibility of dealing with the scientific challenge,
though science will always remain neutral in face of the necessity of
raising this question. It is absolutely necessary, for this reason, to
conceive the ontological question about man's nature through
existential categories and living realities encountered in experience.
An existential ontology is not only possible but imperative in the
realm of anthropology since science unified knowledge, mystery,
mind and energy with anxious perplexity and traumatic anguish.

Finally, the challenge of science in anthropology is more directly
addressed to Christian theologians. The pessimistic and tragic
questioning of man's existence requires a Christian response.
Theology is not ready to accept this challenge. Our traditional
anthropology risks appearing as outdated on the whole. Our models
are static and our ontological affirmations too theoretical to meet
the challenge. Christian theology is always tested in dealing with
man outside Christian faith, while this should be regarded as one of
the most important and necessary chapters of Christian faith, action
and knowledge. Our concepts of the Imago Dei are once more
challenged by a science which reopens the discussion by its
openness to the categories of mystery and tragic in the scientific
enterprise of our days.





Notes

1. Albert Einstein, Out of my Later Years, New York (Philosophical
Library) 1950, p. 101 (quoted by F. Matson, ibid., p. 287).

2. J. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 119 (quoted by F. Matson,
"ibid., p. 290).

3. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 17-18
(quoted by F. Matson, ibid., p. 290).

4. A. Einstein, The Philosophy of Physical Science, p. 57 (quoted by
F. Matson, ibid., p. 121).

5. J. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, p. 181.

6. F. Matson, ibid., p. 127.

7. Robert H. Brown writes: Modern physics has demonstrated for
all to see the importance of complementarity in human
understanding (In: Faith and Science in an Unjust World, Vol. 1.
Geneva (W.C.C.) 1980, p. 40).

8. Charles Birch, Nature, Humanity and God in Ecological
Perspective. In Faith and Science in an Unjust World. Vol. 1.
Geneva (W.C.C.) 1980 p. 65 and 69.

9. Robert H. Brown, ibid., p. 39-40.

10. Harold K. Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and
Religion, London (SCM Press) 1973, p. 30-31.

11. Ibid., p. 32.

12. G. Stephens Spinks, Psychology and Religion, London
(Methuen) 1963, p. 52.

13. Carl Gustave Jung, Das Gewissen in psychologischer Sicht. In:
Das Gewissen, Zrich (Rascher Verlag) 1958, p. 185.

14. Gaetano Benedetti, Introspektion, Subjektivitt und Freiheit in
der Sicht der Naturwissenschaft. In Sich selbst erkennen,
(Hrsgg.) T.Wagner-Simon, G. Benedetti, Gttingen (Vandenhoeck u.
Ruprecht) 1982, p. 236-238.

15. Hans Mislin, Jakob Johann von Uexkll (1864-1944). In
.Psychologie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Band VI, Zrich (Kindler)
1978, p. 46.

16. R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science, Chicago (Univ. Press)
1973. Quoted in: Faith and Science in an Unjust World, Geneva
(W.C.C.) 1980, p. 31.

17. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, London (Pan Books) 1971, 169-170.

18. Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe, New York (Harcourt)
1969. p. 4 (quoted by Enrico Cantore, Scientific Man, New York
(ISH Publications) 1977, p. 411).

19. Enrico Cantore, ibid, p. 413.


III. The Image of God: Christian Anthropology in Dialogue
with Secular Images of Man

The scientific and secular understandings of man do not constitute
clear concepts. There is no scientific exact theory on what man
really is. It is only by reference to some conclusions of scientific
research that one can guess their impact on the possible
understanding of the human person when one raises this question
with scientists. Certainly, anthropological sciences, like psychology,
and especially that which deals with the origin and function of the
sub-conscious in order to pre-mote introspective methods in their
methodology, are closer to a probable construction of an image of
the Self. But this image is still an analytical and descriptive
diagnosis of the function of psychic life and not a systematic
synthesis of a concept about the human person. Psychoanalysis
does not suffice to produce an adequate basis for systematic
anthropology. Only a psychosynthesis could approach the
possibility of the construction of a consistent theory about human
person, operating on the main issues and conclusions of a scientific
anthropology, i.e. the origin, function and growth of
consciousness in man. And yet, whatever synthesis exists in
this connection is not what a systematic theologian dealing with the
human person understands and tries to conceptualize.

Science in this case also will apply the method of gathering data
derived from the analysis of psychic phenomena, experiences and
evidence. In the realm of introspective psychologies these data shall
be simply used towards the construction of a more comprehensive
image of the psychic function in order to gain more efficient
therapeutic techniques integrating into a new system of application
scattered data derived from diagnoses. This is an extremely
complicated process which does not enable scientists to arrive at a
notion of man as a whole. The passage from the sub-conscious
through conscience to consciousness in operating this synthetic
process is possible but never total and adequate. Because, at the
final stage, consciousness can be everything relating to hereditary
givenness: conscious growth together with esoteric traditions,
physiological particularities of an individual, special environmental
influences and particular undetectable reactions. The determination
of the selfhood of man in science is the most uncertain goal of
investigation on the basis of consciousness which can be
everything from biological and physiological to the most conscious
actions including also the paranormal faculties of human being.
Awareness of the Self and experience of identity of the I
transcend human knowledge as another genos in cognitive
operation. Conscious will and desire also cause this awareness of
Self to change its center of reference by unforeseen measures and
unpredictable developments.

The scientific approach to man by a psychosynthesis would be a
riddle for science itself. This attitude however does not imply
anthropological agnosticism. In the contrary this humble position
includes the category of mystery, which is becoming more evident,
when scientific way attempts a synthetic knowledge out of the
analytical data. In this direction biology will specifically define the
characteristics of the biological organism and out of the scattered
results of observation shall reach more synthetic global visions
which accept the human being as an organism in universalistic
holistic dimension, rendering thus the definition of man as a
biological organism more complex and beyond precise
conceptualization. In this sense it will be proved that (a) the
organism is a complex of elements in mutual interaction (b) the
behavior of an individual element is influenced by the state of the
whole organism (c) the Whole exhibits properties absent from its
isolated parts and (d) a biological organism is a basically active
system. It has an autonomous activity, and is not basically reflexive
or basically receptive (1). For psychology this broader vision of
man in biology would signify the inclusiveness of all acquired
observations of behavior and unconscious trends into a whole
synthesis of psychical and mutual interaction with the
environmental influences and autonomous, inner psychical
movements proper to every individual but at the same time
communicable on a universal scale. As in physics, the term
complementarity is used to account for the fact that two
different conditions of observation yielded conclusion that were
conceptually incompatible, i.e. light behaved like a particle on one
occasion and like a wave on another (2). Similarly in the whole
process of self-consciousness and identity, psycho synthesis has the
impossible task of uniting elements of psychic behavior which prove
not to be intrinsically incompatible but which are incompatible in
scientific observation.

On this basis, science operates in a pre-anthropological area and
prepares the anthropologist to admit the difficulty of
conceptualization of the human person for the sake of a more
comprehensive investigation of human life. In this sense one does
not simply speak of Man, that unknown being but of an
extended concept of man (3), which has tremendous implications
for scientific epistemology in human sciences and opens the way for
the beyond ness and transcendence of man within his immanence,
as a biological, mental and psychological organism. Post-scientific
epistemology introduces the categories of universalism,
complementarity-communalism and organized scepticism and
affords human sciences the possibility of new points of contact
the most difficult thing in all dialogues especially in anthropology
with psychological, philosophical but especially theological
approaches to the understanding of the human person.

Christian anthropology, dealing with this new type of epistemology,
would have committed a great error if it had conceived an image of
man by an exact theory with rational self-sufficiency. Facing
probable contemporary secular images of the human person,
Christian anthropology, especially today, has to confess its
incapacity to respond fully to their challenge, realizing that it is
beyond its power to produce a rational, systematic interpretation of
its own image of man. Its first duty would be to proclaim honestly
its limitations in face of the extended concept of the human
person. The first point of contact with scientific models of man has
to be established on this new category both of theology and of
contemporary epistemology.





Notes

1. Arthur J. Deikman quoted I. Bertalanfy in The Nature of Human
Consciousness, edited by Robert, E. Ornstein, New York (The
Viking Press, p. 320.

2. Ibid., p. 319.

3. Robert B. Ornstein, ibid., p. 313 ff.


III. The Image of God: Christian Anthropology in Dialogue
with Secular Images of Man

1. The Imago Dei: Love, communion and humbleness.

Following these remarks we have to be careful not to fall into any
kind of tritimphalistic speculation describing man as the Image
of God, because this anthropological affirmation of Christian faith is
the highest and the boldest statement ever made in anthropology.
Christians risk falling into all kinds of hidden isotheia, theories of
equality with God which is precisely what Christian theology should
avoid doing by all means.

It is fundamental and imperative to focus our approach to the
Christian notion of man in God, because of the affirmation that his
image is of God. In this connection God is the Creator of man.
There is an infinite difference between creating and being
created. The Church Fathers will insist on this notion by the term
diastema signifying distancing, as we find it expressed in
Gregory of Nyssa.

Further, following the biblical text we are not allowed to speak
directly of man as the Image of God, as we usually do. The biblical
expression relates to the act of God as Creator. Man is created
after or better according to the image of God. It is the act of
Creation qualifying man as image of God and not man in himself
directly. The image denotes the relationship of dependence of the
created man on the creating God.

It is not, therefore, man as such, who is the Image of God, but it is
the act of God placing him in the inseparable God-man relationship,
offering him the freedom to grow and become after His Likeness.
The act of Creation is as we already said to be understood only
christologically; In and by him all things were created (Col.
1,16). That is why the only one, the unique one called directly the
image of God is Christ (II Cor. 4,4), who contrary to all possible
triumphalistic temptations, as the unique Image of God, thought it
is not a thing to be grasped to be equal with God, but made himself
of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant (Phil.
2,7). His glory, as the Image of God, is shown in his self-humiliation
as a human person.
The Christian image of man is definitely theocentric (God-centered).
We cannot escape including this reference to God in the dialogue
with the secular images of man. We cannot, however, ignore the
fact that we have to deal with an ontological affirmation of His
Being and qualify His creative action as transcendent. But all of
these references in the realm of anthropology have to be made in
Christ, in the person of the historical Jesus in this world, in this
history. The difficulty in dialogue is that Christians propose him as
the realized relationship of communion with God, the Creator, and
therefore, the One and Unique Image of man. But, again, this is not
an abstract ontological
affirmation of the absoluteness of God but of the uniqueness of the
Person of Christ. Unique signifies universal while absolute refers to
the transcendence of Being. Christ, because he is unique, can have
a universal presence. The nature of uniqueness is relationship on a
universal scale.

Eikon, image, denotes the presence of a prototype or archetype. It
is a representation, faithful to its original without absolute identity
with the prototype. It is a likeness, a resemblance which
establishes a relationship with the prototype and its characteristic
traits. Eikon indicates that an object is related with what precedes
it, revealing the relationship between created and non-created. It is
in this sense that Christ as the image of God has said to his
disciples: he that has seen me has seen the Father (John 14,9).
But it is evident that here the resemblance does not refer to the
external traits of the prototype, but to essential elements of identity
between Father and Son, and the accomplishment of the will of the
Father by the Son in this world, in this history.

The verb (to see) in the Bible has a deeper dimension in many
cases. To see, on the part of man, signifies to know, to
participate, to communicate, to coexist in agreement and to follow
the will of God. St. Matthew makes use of this verse in one of these
senses in one of the beatitudes: Blessed are the pure in heart-for
they shall see God (5,8). To see God does not mean visionary
contemplation of his glory only, but principally and primarily the
desire of man to participate in his grace dynamically and
existentially. In other words, mystical contemplation and union with
God has to be interpreted by the existential decision of man to think
and act according to the Image of God, i.e. in Christ and his
involvement in history in the form of a servant and on the Cross.
This is the Image of God in its uniqueness and universality in Christ,
This implies for all human persons the need to relate with him,
sharing through him in the holiness of God and acting accordingly in
history.

It is, perhaps, through this approach to the notion of man as the
Image of God, in Christ acting in history and its tragedy that we can
suggest a dialogical image to the scientific and secular world.
Certainly on the Christian part faith in the incarnation of the Logos
of God is required. Without this presupposition agreement is not
possible with the non-Christian images of man. But, if agreement is
not possible the dialogue with them is fully possible and can
become fruitful for both sides faithfully serving humanity together
and the whole creation in its movement towards continuous
recreation. This Christological and historical interpretation of the
Image lays emphasis on historicity and facticity, leading to a
dynamic involvement of man in Christ in the ongoing operation of
the Spirit of God towards the new man in a new Creation.

There is no strict ontological and philosophical abstract notion of the
Imago here, something which could equally divide and frustrate
positivist scientists or activistic secularists and adherents of political
theology and contextualists. Of course, there is the unavoidable
reference to the act of the Creator which is transcendent and
presupposes also an ontological reference to the nature of God
acting as love in Christ and in the Spirit. But this ontology is
grasped and experienced by faith, i.e. through a personal existential
decision comprising the whole of the human condition in history. It
is this kind of existential ontology and ontological existentialism
which though a paradox in the eyes of a philosopher is however the
authentic cognitive approach to the image of man of Christian
anthropology establishing a point of contact with the secular images
of the human person.

This realistic and dynamic approach to the Imago Dei underlines the
means employed by the creating act of God: Love which is his
essence, and therefore communion on a universal scale (which is
the result of his essence) with the whole creation and all men; and
finally humbleness and selfhumiliation which is the application of
both in a concrete way in history for the sake of the transformation
of the old man to a new creation.

Epistemologically also, this approach to the understanding of the
Imago Dei can afford us the possibility of engaging in dialogue with
the modern scientific image of the human person. Instead of
philosophical, ontological abstract categories of thought, the Imago
Dei notion expounded in this existential way can meet the
epistemological and existential notions of the new scientific outlook
comprising universal-ism, communalism, disinterested and
organized scepticism respecting at the same time the mystery
as the final option of cognitive operation in the realm of
anthropology. For a better dialogical exchange on these notions,
especially regarding the scientific disinterested and organized
pessimism the tragic traumatism and the existential anxiety
of scientists, as well as the Christian notion of humbleness and
the need to grasp the human person in Christ which is always in
need of a continuous transformation from the old to the new man,
we have to interpret the Imago Dei in connection with the fall and
tho sinful-ness of man.


III. The Image of God: Christian Anthropology in Dialogue
with Secular Images of Man

2. Imago Dei: a hopeful and repenting sinner.

The complementarity between the ontological and existential
approaches to the interpretation of the Image of God is given in the
biblical narration of the creation of the human person. There is no
possibility of interpreting the image without the likeness of God.
That we are the image of God means that we are created after his
likeness also. There is a givenness, a constitutive element of man in
God, which however depends on whether we are ready to put it into
action by our free choice and will. Imago Dei means reciprocity
between the gift of God and our conformity to it through our free
decision. The essence of God and the vehicle of his creative act is
love, which includes both the constitutive element of the Image and
the freedom of the bearer of this Image to live in accordance with
it, after his likeness.

This dialectical situation of the Image explains to us why it is never
lost, because it is the creative constitutive element of the human
being. But it can be seriously shaken, darkened, perverted. The
Image of God is a gift of grace of God without which man cannot be
constituted as a person. It is not a supernatural additional grace.
The Image itself is both the basic constitutive substance of man and
a gift of grace, because creation by love of God places man in a
state of grace. One cannot lose entirely the Image as something
superadditum or as justitia originalis, something created by a
second special act, which one can lose and still exist as a natural
man. The grace of the Image constitutes the Image itself, identical
with the being of man. He cannot lose it and still exist. But the
existential side of the Image is expressed by the after our
likeness. This becomes almost a condition for the real presence
and function of the Image. The likeness stands for the dynamic
interpretation by life and existence of the Image, which cannot be
lost as the constitutive basis of man but can be corrupted. To
the constitution of man belongs the static being but its full
realization and activation depends upon the existence in freedom of
man and his choice.

The main property of man's nature is that he can live towards his
likeness to God, which includes the possibility of his dissociation
from God for recovering a fascinating independence which is
given as possibility in his constitutive basis: the Image of God. A
human being
is truly human only when he realizes his communion with God which
is already given as his basic being, but even when he fails to keep
himself fully in this communion he does not cease to be human.
From a state of grace man is reduced to a state of expectation of a
new manifestation of the grace of God who shall restore his Image
by reestablishing his broken communion with man in Christ.

In the Greek patristic tradition we are given this dialectic between
the ontological and the existential interpretation of the Image. On
the one side one has the impression that sinful man has entirely
corrupted and destroyed the Image of God in himself. But the same
Fathers, on the other hand, defend the thesis that sin is not an
ontological reality because God has not created it. It is the sin
which made man lose almost everything that he was given with his
creation (immortality... the conaturality with the divine life, the
divine virtues, the fruits of the Spirit etc) (1) and still he remains
within the framework of the grace of God which cannot be entirely
negated by man. At the basis of this paradoxical dialectics there is
an existential approach to the Imago Dei through the likeness,
and the Christological and pneumato-logical understanding of the
Image (2).

The fallen man can be defined in the following three stages:
a. He is the Image of God but has deviated from his main purpose.
He is the living manifestation of the love of God, his Creator, but he
is deprived of full communion with him.
b. The sinful man reveals the power and the transcendent nature of
his self-determination. Freedom as of the essence of the Image of
God qualifies the creating act of God operated by his love.
c. The fallen man makes manifest a perverted will, which changes
his freedom as gift or grace to a false autonomy, resulting in
alienation from God, egocentricity, false self-sufficiency, carnal
spirit, the judgment of the law awakening the feeling of his guilt.
Sin is broken relationship with God and with the other men, and the
Creation. It is the absence of the grace of God which operates only
through communion with man.

The state of sin is neither a total negation of man's nature nor a
definite fall. The existential side, i.e. the likeness of the Image,
at the same qualitative level with the ontological, defines the fallen
man, following the manifestation of the Image in Christ, as a human
being who by his appropriate use of freedom is on the way to repair
this state of sin. To the decision of the first man to guarantee his
autonomy by using the existential possibility of independence given
to him by the Image corresponds now in Christ the new decision
accorded again by the Image and the likeness of God arising from a
completely different attitude, a change of heart and mind, the
metanoia, as a new beginning towards recovering the broken
Image. Repentance is also not a status originalis but a new direction
within the state of fallen man, who is now defined by what he can
become through a progressive change towards his full restoration.
This is possible only in the reestablished full communion with God
by sharing in Christ's body.

Within this same attitude of Christians towards recovering the full
Image of God through repentance as the initial state towards the
end, there are different emphases by different theologies and forms
of praxis, which have a particular importance when we encounter
Christian and secular images of man. Generalizing easily for a
moment, I would risk making the remark that, while in the East we
insist on the recovery of the Image through repentance in the
communion of God (that is why Church, liturgy, Eucharist, and
resurrection are at the center of the Eastern spirituality), in the
West the emphasis is more on the redemption and justification of
the fallen man (that is why prophetism, judgment and the Cross are
at the center of Western Christian spirituality). Both theologies, the
one of the Logos and the redemptive, are equally legitimate, but
they are complementary and equally constitutive of an authentic
approach to the interpretation of the Imago Dei today.

These two different emphases, dissociated from each other, risk
inspiring two different types of spirituality of hidden, unconscious
and latent triumphalism with many variations for each one of
them which can, if professed in a radical one-sided way, isolate
Christian images of human persons from possible secular ones. The
Logos theology though everything in it is entirely dependent upon
the will and the energy of the Trinitarian God and the broken heart
of the self-humiliated sinful man is always tempted to disregard the
historicity and facticity of the Imago Dei. There is a tendency to
spiritualization, to sanctification of all things without reference to a
consistent involvement, oriented towards the world, in the struggle
with and for the secular. The Logos theology as more reflecting
upon the mystery, mystically experiencing and liturgically
celebrating Christ's victory, is bound to inspire a more transcendent
spirituality with a cosmic vision resulting in a contemplation of
eschatological fullness, which is already symbolically hero in the
liturgy. The Imago Dei in this case can become a detached reality
from the world. It can be expressed by esoteric language and
celebrated liturgically rather than worked out ethically by intense
activity in the realm of secular powers. The activists in the realm of
social revolutions as well as the scientists in their organized
pessimism and their traumatic anxiety cannot find here an easy
partner for action and discussion in anthropology.

Redemptive theology, on the other hand, can inspire an
exaggerated expectation of salvation, which might concentrate our
interest on receiving grace for justification while man still remains
an unchanged sinner. To escape from the Eastern deification of
man it falls back into a justified humanism, which might
camouflage another type of self-sufficiency, superiority and
individual enjoyment of salvation. While the East sees in the Imago
Dei a supernaturally natural reality, the West by professing as
the supernatural element the created justitia originalis introduces
a juridical term into anthropology and builds a theology of
justification. Certainly, this approach makes the Image of God more
world oriented and realistically linked with the human condition. But
the ((Justus idea dominates the peccator in a juridical scheme
and the idea of salvation becomes too individually centered. The
danger here is that a justified sinner is inclined to create in himself,
though everything in this theology depends on the grace of God, too
great a confidence in his self-justification.

The well-known psychoanalyst Alfred Adler criticizes this tendency
as a probable danger of a superiority complex which is the
permanent result of the reaction of the individual against his own
feelings of inferiority" (3). He suggests an alternative term, which
better corresponds to the whole of the Christian heritage, i.e.
repentant sinner, because he is the type of man, in whom not
only our times, but also the times of the greatest development of all
religions have recognized the greatest value, as his position is far
higher than that of thousands of justified people (4). Alfred Adler,
in the end, does not spare his criticism of an easy and superficial
teaching about the biblical term Imago Dei given to young pupils
attending catechetical classes, because of the possibility that young
people easily unconsciously can create a false tendency to
regard themselves as equal imaginary to God and fall into the
complex of an imaginary superiority (5). It is only the permanent
state of repentance as a sinner that can help man to understand the
Imago Dei concept in the appropriate way.


On the other hand, Christian anthropology dealing with the image of
the human person should not insist on the sinfulness of man in a
unilateral, onesided direction. In many cases, theology has confined
itself to the problem of interpreting the how all men have sinned
and are guilty because of the act of disobedience of the first man,
Adam, according to the biblical verse Romans 5,12: for that all
have sinned. Christian anthropology has not equally emphasized
that much more the grace of God in Jesus Christ has abounded
into many (5,15). Repentance, therefore, has meaning only in the
perspective of the hopeful expectation of man to be delivered from
the bondage of sin. There is not only a solidarity or identity of all
men as sinful but also a solidarity in hope. Perhaps the Christian
message has to insist more on this dimension of the recovery of the
benefits of the image of God, restored in Christ, than on the
destructive effects of the fall. Otherwise theology risks offering an
image of the human person threatened by all kinds of neurosis.
Christian anthropology should not forget that Sigmund Freud has
focussed his theory about the origin and function of religion on the
universal unavoidable consciousness of guilt, which is the result of
the assassination of the first father by his four sons. This myth
explains the solidarity of guilt of all human beings and it is for him
at the root of all religions, which can be interpreted as a
transformation of man's guilt complex and the sublimation of the
libido. Religion in this sense should be characterized, according to
Freud, as a universal necessarily imposed neurosis by which man
escapes from his individual neurotic status (6). This approach to the
guilty conscience betrays a certain kind of influence from an
onesided Judo-Christian anthropology centered exclusively around
the fall and the sin of man and the identity in sin of the whole
human race. It is possible that a traditional Christian anthropology,
which has not equally emphasized the dynamic aspect of
repentance and the hope of man for sharing in the restored image
of God in Christ, can offer a desperate deterministic image of man
(fall sin redemptionjustification) which provides the reasons
for such a psychoanalytical, deterministic and mechanistic
interpretation of the origin and function of religion and can create
various complex situations in some believers. Together with the
generalized sinfulness of the whole human race, which is right and
fundamental according to the biblical message Christian
anthropology, avoiding all kinds of absolutization of sin, has to focus
its image of man also and equally or perhaps more in the positive
side of salvation in Christ which is the hopeful continuous process of
fulfilment of man's aspirations and expectations of realizing a more
human life in this history.

The Christian image of man, on the basis of the Imago Dei
doctrine, has to be professed against both of the possible deviations
which have tempted theology in the past, against the idealistic,
heavenly oriented doctrine divorcing it from its historicity and
facticity, and against the pessimistic doctrine of the image oriented
only towards the world and destroyed by sin, divorcing it from its
higher original purpose and fulfillment. So to be faithful to its
biblical basis, the Christian image of the human person, interpreting
the Imago Dei concept of man, has to be focused at the same
time on the solidarity in sin but also on the solidarity of salvation as
fulfillment in hope of the human expectation of overcoming in Christ
his sinful state, and thereby feating all kinds of guilty conscience.

Especially today, the reinterpretation of the imago Dei through an
existentialist approach and at the same time through the ontological
affirmation of its essence as communion with God, as it has been
revealed in history in the Person of Christ, the image of the human
person that Christians suggest points both to the tragic aspect of
human existence as well as to its God-given origin and its higher
purpose. The misery of sin has to be grasped in the glory of God's
realized communion in history. Repentance is a continuous change
of heart and mind operated within the sure hope of the final
fulfillment in realizing authentic humanity as the image of Christ,
who is the unique Imago Dei. Now, we can say of man in
existentialist terms that he is what he has to become. Definition of
the human person is impossible, because it can be understood only
as a continuous process of change through repentance and self-
humiliation in the light of Christ's exaltation and glory. Neither
sinfulness nor glorification are the permanent status of the human
person. If there is something permanent in man, that is his
continuous struggle to overcome the status of misery in order to
share gradually and progressively in the new reality of the new man
in Christ.

Solidarity in sin and contemplation and sharing in the revealed glory
of the unique imago Dei in history should make us in East and
West understand and profess the repentant sinner as an alternative
to the man of pessimism and anxiety. It must be understood as a
hopeful and repentant sinner. The Christian image of man, without
being superficially optimistic, has to be a model of sober joy and
dynamic hope, which is the motive of faith. Hope is the other name
of faith exercised in love. Hope is the power moving man towards
the future with vision, perseverance and joy. Without hope there is
no faith, and love remains a sentimental, emotional reaction. The
hope of the Christian model of man is a link with the hopes of the
world, but it is also their critical justification and restoration.

The Christian image cannot exist without repentance. It is
necessary that secular images of man should be challenged on this
difficult point of contact. Metanoia, as a continuous change of heart
and mind after a serious self-criticism, is always relevant for the
secular models, especially today. Modern secular images of man are
the fruits of pragmatism and immanentism in science and
philosophy and of the submission of all ideologies to society acting
as a detached machine in which politics dominate by seeking to
secure a welfare state without cultural and moral dimension. Leslie
Paul, commenting on atheistic existentialism and popular
pragmatism, makes the remark that the positivist or empiricist's
hypothesis would necessarily be that one arrives at the concept
man as one arrives at the concept house by the accumulation of a
series of atomic sensations about them which upon reflection are
united into a single concept, as with Locke's theory of how we arrive
at the notion of substancean idea, which is a kind of mental
shorthand to save one from repeating additive processes (7).

This concept of man indirectly refuses normal communication with
other human persons in love and mutual self-limitation and
forgiveness. It is an horizontal view which makes all transcending
values disappear in face of a confident pragmatist development. No
wonder that the new pro-communal trends in science and society
are in danger of being deprived of mutual deep appreciation of the
other persons. Utilitarianism applied to persons and to society has
replaced the value of the distinctive person, deriving from an
ontological and existential principle. These new humanistic
pragmatist images of man based on simple egalitarian principles of
biological, social and behaviourist similarities disregard the
dialectics of freedom and unify human persons in one simple
organic and mechanical function in the name of justice and
progress. Freedom as a one-dimensional quality for achieving
independence in this context is becoming a negation of personal
values. It lacks the deeper dimension of responsibility vis--vis the
other distinct persons, since there is no reference to the
transcending person qualifying freedom's essence as communion.

It becomes evident, however, that these inherited models of
pseudo-social man begin to crack and shatter in the consciousness
of modern man, especially amongst the young generation. The
liberal, bourgeois, democratic welfare society, as well as the
directed, collectively egalitarian society, have proved to be
problematic equally for today's model of a free human person in a
free society, conceived by a simple functional humanism. In the
anthropology of today there is too much uncertainty, confusion and
disappointment undermining by frustration the remains of an
optimistic humanism. The question is how the Image of God, i.e.
the Christian Image of the human person, can contribute to
clarifying some basic issues and remind the present generation of a
missing basic dimension in contemporary secular anthropology in
the understanding of man as a hopeful repentant sinner.





Notes

1. St. Gregory of Nyssa, P.G. 44,800 c.

2. S.Paul Evdokimov writes: It is the source which is poisoned,
because the ontological norm has been transgressed by the evil
spirit... but as St. Gregory of Nazianzen writes (P.G. 37,2) by Christ
the integrity of our nature is restored, because he represents in
fugure (archetype) that which we are (P. Evdokimov, Orthodoxie,
Paris 1959, p. 92).

3. Adler ., Menschenkenntnis, Frankfurt (FischerTaschenbuch
Verlag) 1980, p. 189.

4. Adler ., ibid., p. 27 der reuige Snder is the expression and
the quoted phrase. We have to remind ourselves, however, that
Martin Luther has not only spoken of simul justus et peccator but
in one case he adds appropriately ((et penitens.

5. Adler ., ibid., p. 190.

6. Freud: Moses und Taboo: assassination of Urvater: Totem und
Tambu, IX, S. 175, 19613-Religion as universal Zwangrhandlungen
und Religiousbungen; Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt (Fischer)
1966, S. 139,

7. Lesslie Paul, Alternatives to Christian Belief, London (Hodder and
Stoughton) 1967, p. 109.

III. The Image of God: Christian Anthropology in Dialogue
with Secular Images of Man

3. Imago Dei: a Challenge to Immanentist Human Identities

The scientific image of man comprising existential categories of
universalism, communalism, organized pessimism and traumatic
anguish, together with the psychosocial model, present a challenge
to any unilaterally conceived transcendental concept of the Imago
Dei. This recent development is causing a new attention to be paid
to the historical facticity and the humane aspect of the Christian
Image which is usually neglected in our theologies.

It is a paramount duty, now, that the reverse challenge of the
Imago should become a factor in a broader concept of man in the
secular realm. Though we again risk to easy generalization in our
conclusions about the characteristics of some of the secular models
of man in today's confused anthropology given above, we can
remark finally that man in this new situation of disillusionment
remains a man of courage and of adventure, enjoying his autonomy
and his well-being, living in the affluent, abundant society of north-
western hemisphere of our globe. Satisfaction and pleasure as well
confidence in progress continue in spite of all kinds of deceptions,
frustrations and suffering, and in face of the rise of uncertainty in
public security, terrorism of all kinds and abuse of drugs. The
archetypes of Prometheus and of Dionysos are still valid behind
most of the models of secular anthropology in today's crisis. Secular
anthropocentricity can survive even in the most tragic revelation of
human limitation, solipsism and despair. Man can be paradoxically
happy and self-sufficient in his own appreciation of happiness and
momentary satisfactions within the most contradictory human
situations. The immediacy of the experience of life of the
autonomous human enterprise has kept its priority over any
concept of a theoritical, philosophical and religious nature. The need
of changing in the sense of biblical metanoia can appear as
absurd today as during the prevalence of optimistic models of man
which is definitely over. We have to be conscious of this fact and
not produce any kind of easy apologetics based on the manifold
frustrations of modern disillusioned man.

There is, however, an evident reaction against this
anthropomonistic satisfaction in today's human secular models from
within this contradictory anthropology. Dramatists, writers, radical
politicians and sociologists as well as the new revolutionaries in
political theology are becoming more and more aware of the human
person without escape, caught up within his solipsism. To this
contradictory experience corresponds a radical opposition which
cannot be expressed otherwise than as a scheme opposing
frustrating disillusioned human reality inherited from the past with
an utopian extended concept of man which is extended to the
future. Utopianism is a substitute for the new natural theology of
our days in the area of secular anthropology, social radicalism and
revolutionary, political theology. Utopia is for man the necessary
breathing-hole for seeking a false transcendence as he deceives
himself suffocated by the totalitarianism of technocracy and
material welfare within impersonal modern society.

The Imago Dei approach can only demythologize this new extension
into horizontal Utopian humanism by debating the question of
identity as it is expressed in the secular models of man. Personhood
and selfhood can be the missing fundamental elements in the
secular image, while the image of God is precisely a model of
reference and relationship which seeks human identity in man as a
being-in-personal-and communal-relationship. If there is a single
determinism in anthropology it is that man as individual has to pass
from individuality to personhood in order to find his identity in
himself as a free, responsible, communal being. Wayne Oates
defines self-hood as the habitual center of focus of man's identity
(1). We can say this center is always a center of interpersonal
relationship. It is an encounter with another person who determines
my free choice of freedom not seeking independence but always
returning back to the original nature of freedom as communion
having its origin in God as a plurality of persons in identity of
essence which is love. The Imago Dei approach in anthropology is
also anthropocentric, because of human freedom, but only when it
reveals to man its theocentric origin and purpose. It is the outcome
of encounter with the historical Jesus as the Image of God, i.e. as
the incarnate Word of God.

The dialogue with utopianism of today centers in this sense on the
issue of identity. If personhood is an ethical concept (2) then it is
inevitable that to seek identity means to create models of life and
action beyond subjective limitations. Ralph Ruddock remarks man
develops as a person in so far as personhood is imputed to him by
others and by himself, and he continues that this person is socially
conditioned, so that the term person has two distinguishable
meanings. One is the complex of rights and duties imputed to the
human individual, embodied in ethical prescriptions and cultural
value systems. The meaning is in principle universal. The other is
the freely acting participant in a social system, whose capacity for
such action has developed on the same basis of some attribution of
personhood (3).

This is the meaning of selfhood in a pure consistent immanentistic
line. There is nothing against it. But there is a question about the
universal principle of cultural value systems and ethical
prescriptions. The Imago Dei would never admit a pure
anthropocentric autonomy as a unique source of such universal
concepts. Especially when selfhood relates to the anxious seeking
by man of his identity, universal validity in the area of culture
and ethics cannot be referred to or conceived without the
uniqueness of a principle of transcendental order or, better, a
person who by his uniqueness has universal value. It is true,
precisely, as Ralph Ruddock, in the end, admits, that religious
writing informs us that 'identity-in-the-world" is itself transient and
contingent, and requires the individual to live in the awareness
proper to his 'real self within a cosmic frame of reference (4). It is
not simply a matter of writing in cosmic reference, but of a
Person realizing communion between God since he speaks of
religion and the whole Creation. The Imago Dei is called upon to
play precisely this role in the search for identity of modern man by
recapturing his selfhood in relationship with the historical event of
the personal relationship realised between God and man as the
pivot event in history.

It is in this sense that contemporary Christian theologies are trying
to expound new identities with the Image of God within the limits of
historical facticity. We can detect a twofold identity in these
theologies, first, the one that God himself in Christ established by
the humanity of Jesus and his appearance in the form of a servant;
and second, the identity of man with this Image as he has to
conform himself to this form and act accordingly. Christ as the
Image of God in Jesus realizes God's identity with these who are in
the state of a servant, in the sense of self-humiliation but also in
the act of service to the one and paramount duty, that man by his
effort has to realize this identity of servant hood in order to become
more human and also to serve the process of humanization of other
men who are also created at the Image of a servant and suffering
God.

This double realistic identity is implied by the emphasis on the
historicity and facticity of the Image of God as it can be conceived
by stressing the human nature of Christ and by the christological
affirmation of the inner inseparable unity between anthropology and
cosmology, man and creation in a renewed ktisis. The radical
appreciation of the historicity and humanity, following also the
critical attitude towards metaphysics and transcendental notions in
anthropology, have resulted in an anthropocentric and activistic
attitude of Christians and the affirmation of the identity of the
Image of God in this immediate and realistic manner. In the
liberation theologies God's Image is to be found as identical with
the suffering man, the disadvantaged black person and man
exploited by the forces of injustice and repression15. God acting in
Christ as Saviour can be grasped in the person of the oppressed as
God of the oppressed (6) and his Image in the same way can be
grasped in the person of poor people (7).

This implies a consistent action of man sharing in the salvation
given by God in Christ by an ethical conformity to his image in the
historical person of Jesus who liberates from the manifold slavery,
or heals of sick, helps the poor, the prisoners and the afflicted
following the biblical appeal addressed to all men as the main sign
of the messianic role of Jesus (Luc. 4, 18-19). The humanity of
Christ is the main feature of the Image in this world, identical with
those who suffer and also with those who share in this suffering in
the name of Jesus for man's liberation from all kinds of bondage in
the unjust world-wide community. The humanity of Christ is
professed here as not only the point of contact with the human
condition in general but concretely with man in the state of
bondage. The Imago Dei is reflected in this condition and in the
struggle against it (8). History renewed as part of the new Creation
of the cosmos has its own main purpose in the liberation of the
oppressed people as the Image of God and his children. The
fundamental traits and constitutive element of the Image of God is
love and freedom and therefore the Christian image of man cannot
be conceived without his identity with the oppressed and those who
are denouncing it by consistent action. The love and freedom of the
Christian Image of man has to become liberation of the human
person. The Imago Dei must be interpreted as continuous liberating
action by human persons who are professing and preaching it as it
has been revealed in the historical Jesus.

This understanding for a Christian Image of the human person
today must be accepted as a consequence of the inseparable link
between cosmos, history and man. It arises from a Christology of
nature as a new ktisis and as a corrective against the traditional
unilateral, sometimes promonophysite way of thinking in Christian
anthropology which emphasized the divine nature of the Image of
God only. Certainly, the contextual theologies of liberation are
betraying also an one-sidedness, perhaps because of their effort to
call upon a more practical and active approach to Christian faith. It
is necessary, therefore, now to try to construct the Christian Image
of man by referring also to the missing transcendent and existential
element of the Image of God, focusing it more in an inductive
method on the humanity of Jesus and its implication as the
necessary final reference for Christian anthropology, as seen
especially from the tradition of Eastern Christianity.






Notes

1. Wayne Oates, Christ and Selfhood, New York (Associated Press)
1961, p. 21.

2. As Ninian Smart maintains in The Six Approaches to the
Person Edited by Ralph Ruddock, London (Routledge and Kegan
Paul) 1972, p. 13 ff.

3. Ralph Ruddock, ibid., p. 203.

4. Ibid. 205.

5. For this notion of identity see the book of James Cone: Black
Theology and Black Power, New York (Seabury Press) 1969.

6. The book of James H. Cone: God of the Oppressed, New York
(Seabury Press) 1975.

7. The book of Julio de Santa Ana: Towards a Church of the Poor,
Geneva (W.C.C) 1979, especially chapter IX: Theology from the
Perspective of the Underdogs of History, p.p. 114-139.

8. The book of Gust a v o Gutierrez: A Theology of Liberation, Mary-
Knoll (Obis Books) 1973.


IV. Becoming Human - Becoming Divine

Deification: a process towards achieving authentic Humanum
in Christ

The secular images of the human person, though deprived of an
immediate and direct reference to a transcendent model of
humanity are however persuasive in that they envisage man in his
development towards becoming more authentic in his nature as a
distinctive human being. Science, technology or social and political
ideologies project an image of the maximum possible perfection
within this world. Man has to develop his natural capacities and to
improve human conditions. It it is true that general anthropology
contributes towards broadening and deepening our understanding
of man, and explores the range of man's capacity to build cultural
systems (1).

The secular humanists betray a desire to serve the dignity of man.
Regardless of special presuppositions in each field of knowledge and
action they all converge in a desire to serve a process of
humanization. We can detect common characteristics, therefore,
which sum up all particular insights, visions and efforts towards the
same end: a better humanity achieved by scientific knowledge and
stewardship of nature, by facing diseases and hereditary
deficiencies, by elevating cultural standards through art and
creative imagination, by professing ethical norms for action and by
attacking destructive and evil forces in unjust structures of society.

Humanization, in this sense, is a continuous process of improving
the quality of life imposed on all men at all times and in all places
on account of their humanity, which implies development, progress,
growth, improvement of human conditions. There are not definite
criteria of this almost natural effort, which constitutes the backbone
of human history, but we can assert that no human being escapes
this effort.

A human being has its definition as a person taken into a process of
humanization and as sharing actively in this process by a personal
contribution. No glorious theory about man nor any negative
position regarding his nature because of his failures, moral
deficiencies and his existence threatened by death can affect and
hinder this humanization process as the main purpose of human
life.

Certainly, this humanization process is a risky affair. It includes
inevitably also dehumanizing acts. It causes confusion, since its
criteria are, in most cases, not entirely clear. It can cause divisions
amongst man because of the competitive nature of all human
enterprises. There is the danger of self-denial and offence against
the dignity of the person and humanity as a whole and at the same
time of a catastrophe, due to excessive technical progress that man
cannot master. But in all of these negative instances humanization
remains the first and dominating feature of human history.

The debate is, therefore, not whether secular images of man have a
value but what that value is. The image itself of man as a model
humanization, an object of debate and possibly of negation, but in
what way this image does not allow probable negative powers to
operate against human dignity and offence humanity. The secular
images of man in the understanding of a Christian are not false
alternatives of the Imago Dei, but they can become ambiguous both
in their impact on humanity and by the application in some of their
models.

The missing element of a transcendent of theological nature in the
secular Images of the human person does not disqualify the Image
as such a priori. The mystery of the Creation of man implies that all
human beings work unconsciously as collaborators with their
Creator for promoting and fulfilling this Creation. Creativity is the
common characteristic of all models of secular images. It is the
deepest qualification of the nature of man which can be regarded as
an indirect manifestation or as of the ontological depth and
transcendence of human being. Further the fact that one reflects on
the human existence reveals that man has as his purpose in life the
achievement of the fullest possible self-consciousness and the
fulfillment his inner impulse to recreate his deepest Self and his
concrete identity as a distinctive person. In all kinds of scientific
research or social and political activities, regardless of their
individual or collective nature, the quest of, search for and
experience of this personal distinctiveness is inherent in man's
being and his value, and in almost all possible secular images of
man constitutes the basic element of his intrinsic value and worth.
Creativity and self-consciousness and therefore the sense of ethical
consistent judgment and action comprise the unavoidable basic
elements of the secular images of man.





Notes

1. Margaret Mead: The Quest for the truly human. In
StudyEncounter, Vol. II, No. 1, Geneva (W.G.C.) 1966, p. 2.


IV. Becoming Human - Becoming Divine

Deification: a process towards achieving authentic Humanum
in Christ

1. Humanization as a God-given Process in the Service of
Humanum

The understanding and appreciation of secular images of the human
person depends on the value we ascribe on the part of Christian
faith to these human efforts to make man more human. It seems to
me that the impact of Christology on nature and the relation
between anthropology and cosmology should lead us to
acknowledge that humanization is one of the main purposes of
Creation. This world and human history as a whole are means of
man's struggle towards perfection and salvation. It is man's being
and life work which is at the center of the historical process towards
humanization. It is in this process that man proves himself to be a
responsible creature in the midst of history bearing the marks of an
intelligent and meaningful Creation.

There is, indeed, an evident obligation of man as an intelligent
being to act for his further development as man in this history
without external intervention. The structure of man's consciousness
of being and possession of a deeper Self with a prescribed plan of
his continuous transformation is the first thing that he experiences
in all phases of his involvement in history. Without concerning
himself with great philosophies about the intrinsic value of nature
and the historical process, a human person, as by his nature, tries
to respond to plans of life, value systems and a deeper meaning of
what he has decided to do at every moment in his daily life, which
are all already prescribed for him.

Involvement in history signifies sharing meaning and serving
purpose in history as it moves towards its fulfillment. Nothing is
meaningless and vain in nature and cosmos. It is this truth that
compels us to define man as a creature-in-hope looking always
forward to his development and nature manhood. Without any
immediate sense of God's calling to act according to a given plan of
humanization in Creation, man inevitably becomes an actor of this
plan by a simple conformity to an existing order and purpose that
he finds subjectively structured in himself and objectively present in
history. Not only as religious but as a secular man, even in his
radical agnostic position, a human person is defined as a self-
predetermined being in process of becoming more human, i.e. more
conformed to his nature and purpose as a thinking creature in an
intelligent Creation. Everything in the world demands that man shall
work for promoting human development and his fulfillment by
consistent action, and everything in human effort is subject to
evaluation according to the corresponding attitude he has taken in
answering this demand from the world and from his consciousness
that he is a human person. Without referring to a transcendent
Being, a human person transcends himself everyday by his
unavoidable actions as one involved in the process of his
humanization and fulfillment.

It is inadmissible on the basis of a consistent Christology of nature
to maintain that history is meaningless or entirely corrupted
because of man's fall and sin. This approach represents the most
Promethean attitude in this Creation, if one at the same time
accepts that human efforts are decisive in giving meaning and
purpose to life. The fact that we cannot define what is humanum
as the purpose of the process of humanization does not mean that
history has no meaning. It means that humanum cannot become
one ideology amongst many and that there is no repressive
obligation for a man to become what he should become, negating
thus his freedom, the main element of the humanum.

Certainly, one can attempt a description of the distinctive
characteristics of a human person within Creation, making him able
to speak and act in the service of humanum. David Jenkins makes
the comment: Humanum should not be considered as if were a
collective adjective treated as a man designed to point towards
what is distinctively necessary for our existence to be a human
existence (1). This is due to the fact that one cannot make an
exhaustive and adequate analysis of these particularities which
construct the essence of humanum. If there is something resisting
logical and systematic analysis it is precisely the qualitative essence
of humanum as it is clearly grasped, and especially as it is
experienced, as a process in which we are involved. Together with
apophatic theology there is apophatic anthropology, which does not
really mean ignorance, agnosticism or abstraction. On the contrary
it means personal involvement and relationship with an indefinable
object.
By the humanum as the final stage of the process of
humanization in this sense, as an unavoidable involvement of man
in history, we are obliged as Christians to recognize man as created
according to the Image of God permeating the natural order of
man's Creation. By the study of the humanum as the particular, the
indefinable characteristic of the secular image of man and as a
result of the incarnation of the Logos in this history and world
reality, anthropology is a theology of the process of humanization.
To consider the humanum in the secular realm means to do a
theology of man involved by God in the world struggle in order to
fulfill his God-given purpose as a human person.

If there is a glory in man's enterprise this is the glory of the deeper
purpose of Creation reflected in the human process of making man
more human, i. e. after the image and likeness of God. All human
beings are to be seen within this struggle to become human, as
they reveal God's glory in becoming human in this history.
Therefore all events in history manifesting man's effort to become
more human are elements of doing the appropriate theology of the
human person. The context of theology of man is the process of
humanization because man can only in this context realize his
calling to become more human as a God-given reality in Christ.

A human person in the process of humanization becomes
meaningful in so far as he is creative. Creativity is a sharing in
God's image as Creator. Humanum is precisely a sharing in God's
deepest essence and grace. Creativity does not only unite all men
as one of the common characteristics of humanum. It is more
important that it makes becoming humanum a sharing in divine
nature. Man's process of humanization is in itself a process of being
on the way to the maximum possible end, purpose, and fulfillment
of man's nature and life, which is God's communion and love. We
should not minimize this God-given dynamic sharing in the Image
of God because of the sinfulness of man and especially the tragic
element represented by the existence of death in history.
Humanization is a process of making the glory of God, as Creator
and regenerator of human history, manifest in this world. But of
course, it is a glory of the Cross in the light of resurrection. It is the
drama resolved by the victory of God in this world. Death is not
simply an annihilating element but also and principally in the light of
the resurrection a positive one of human existence.

The process of humanization reveals in human life and world history
that God's image in man is the reality of God's being acting in
history and Creation through an inner personal and unbroken
relationship with the human person. Man's sin cannot break this
link. It can damage it but never destroy it without losing entirely
man's humanness. Within this process of humanization a Christian
approach to the secular models of man recognizes God's being in
solidarity with the human process towards the achievement of full
manhood as it has been revealed in Christ. His Being becomes in
this way communicable as new life. Any static concept of God as
Being-in-itself, absolute and unapproachable in his essence is
defeated by his self-communication in the God-created humanum,
his sharing in it finally in Christ.

Therefore, humanization is also and finally a sharing in the divine
life. Becoming human is equal to sharing in the divine nature.





Notes

1. David Jenkins, Towards a Purposeful Study of Man. In Study
Encounter, Vol. V, No. 4. W.C.C. (Geneva) 1969, p. 154.


IV. Becoming Human - Becoming Divine

Deification: a process towards achieving authentic Humanum
in Christ

2. Deification: a sharing in God for achieving authentic
humanization

It is in this direction that we can approach and try to understand
the central meaning of the Image of man in God according to the
Eastern Orthodox Tradition, i.e. the theosis of the human person.
It is too easy to make an interpretation of this notion as signifying a
cryptic, ecstatic, mystical and visionary attitude of Orthodoxy in
connection with the reality of human person. Theosis is not entirely
what I understand that the term divinization might signify as
pointing to the change of human nature and assumption of another
being. Theosis is not theopoiesis in the sense of being made
divine, though St. Athanasius use the verb also (1). Deification is
closer to the Greek term as pointing to a deified nature, which does
not lose its identity though it has passed through a transformation
of the existential qualities of a being.

This inner change is the stumbling block for human reason because
it cannot admit a change within a substance which cannot be
objectively detected and analyzed. The appropriate appreciation of
this anthropological Eastern doctrine has been made more difficult
by the radicalization of sin in the West resulting in the idea of the
immense and unbridgeable gap between God and man. But it is well
known that many Church Fathers in the West have defended
deification as the culminating point of Christian anthropology. E. L.
Mascall reminds us of the phrase of St. Augustine: God wishes to
make you a god, not by nature, but by adoption. Thus the whole
man is deified (2) and sees the difficulty as lying in the Western
teaching that man has a created natural order and another
supernatural order by additional grace without communication
between them (3).

The Eastern Orthodox Tradition does not hesitate on the basis of
the incarnation to operate a Christological anthropology of
deification. The permanent guide in Christian theology is the
hypo-static union between the two natures, divine and human, in
Christ without change or confusion. There is a kind of mixis,
mixture, between the two operated by the Spirit which cannot be
similar to any other mixtures we know in the natural order or in
philosophy. It is not a totally new being resulting out of this mixture
but there are not too separate things remaining after it either. As in
the hypostatic qualities amongst the three persons in the Holy
Trinity, so it is with the two natures in Christ and so it will be with
the possibility for man of union by the same Spirit with God in
Christ without losing his identity as man. There is a reciprocal
communication of essential qualities without personal identity and
nature being changed or affected on each side (4).

Behind this notion of mixture there is the reciprocal movement
between the Persons of the Trinity and the communication with man
on the basis of distinction between essence and energy in the triune
divine Being. This is not a speculative doctrine but a reflection on
the nature of the dynamic movement in God as it is given in the
Bible because of the incarnation. We shall never understand
deification in the appropriate God-initiated movement unless we
focus it in the Trinity and in the communion of God and man
realized in Christ.

God is love. That means that God in his ineffable and
incomprehensible nature is reciprocal personal movement because
love as identity in essence signifies and creates a movement
towards other persons of the same essential identity. God as
identical with his essence as love is One but he is never alone. He
creates persons identical with himself and therefore in communion
with himself. The One-ness of God in the identity of love excludes
the loneliness of God.

God therefore incomprehensible in his essence becomes more
immediately accessible as communicable, because his essence as
love becomes a dynamic movement out of which Creation is
possible, bearing the same sign in its substance: communication.
There is, apart from objective knowledge acquired by observation
and analysis, a knowledge caused by the reciprocal movement of
persons. This knowledge is the one that God has first of us (Gal.
4,9) so that we can know in Christ communicating by his grace with
his nature. It is this knowledge as movement person-to-person
(prosopon-pros-prosopon) (I Cor. 13,12) which is the outcome of
the essence of God, as love, in communion with man, effected by
the Spirit.

It is this kind of movement in God manifested in Christ and
actualized by the Spirit, that the Bible speaks about, as the
presupposition of being able as human beings, created according
to their Image and after their likeness (the plural is very
significant in this case), to become partakers of the divine nature
(II Pet. 1,4), because of Jesus who has given to us all things
through the knowledge of him that has called us to glory and
virtue (II Pet. 1,3). Divine essence as love, movement as energy
implying personal communion and knowledge resulting from this
communion: these are the categories prescribing the nature and
function of theosis as the supreme telos of the Christian Image of
man manifesting the fact of man's Creation after his Image and
after his likeness. Theology and anthropology are interpenetrated
and interdependent areas of knowledge and there is no demarcation
line between divinum and humanum.

This esoteric, mystical language should not create, therefore, the
impression that we are detaching ourselves from the human reality
and condition. Deification is the strange term for the most
immediate reality (consistent with Christology) and experience of
life in Christ and in the world, because theosis is never meant in
the above given interpretation to indicate a hidden transcendental
reality. If it is regarded as a mystical trend then mysticism must be
understood as the most natural experience of reciprocity and
relationship, i.e. knowledge through intrinsic communion with
another person. Deification is, in the Orthodox Theology, the
initiative of God communicating with man out of his sovereign will
and outcome of his love and concern for man. It is not another
super-nature of man added by a special transcendent act. Certainly,
because the movement originates in God, it is revealed in Christ
and realized by the Spirit, it can be characterized as supernatural in
a special sense. But it is connected with man's nature as it is in the
process of transformation without losing his identity as a human
being. His change is within human nature because of the human
deified nature of Christ, in which he is called to share by faith and in
a concrete way by sacrament and word. The deification of man is
ontologically the sharing in Christ's human nature but a nature
which is deified. Therefore, deification is an operation in natural
man, here and now in history. The nature is conceived as a
movement towards a super-naturally natural being in continuous,
inner transformation from his manhood to his real and authentic
humanity restored in Christ.

Deification is finally in this sense a process of reaching out to
authentic humanization. It is the implication that Christ does not
reveal only the Verus Deus but he is also the Verus homo. He does
not only reveal by his incarnation the movement of God towards
man but also that of man towards God. He does not make God
known by reason, but he initiates personal communication between
God and man, elevating man as participant of divine nature.
Becoming really man means becoming divine within a process of
deification that remains within the limits of human nature and
condition. Human life is permeated by the deified humanity of
Christ. As really human, man has his definition in the possibility of
becoming partaker of the divine nature.

The process of the humanization towards the humanum is the same
process for recovering it in the divinum; by deification, therefore, is
a process towards authentic humanization. This exchange of
qualities between divine and human does not alter essentially
human nature but it restores it to its appropriate order after the
image of Christ, who is the Image of God. appearing in the form of
a man.

E. L. Mascall can express with the Western precision and clarity
what happens in deification in this context. First, he writes the
super-naturalization which grace produces operates in the very
substance of human nature far beneath the level of observable
behaviour... second, while it works by transforming man's natural
being, grace is directly concerned with his supernatural end and
makes his natural end ancillary and contributary to it and, third,
intimate as it is, the activity of God at the ontological root of our
being by which he keeps us in existence and energizes our nature
far more intimate is his activity in us in the supernatural order (5).





Notes

1. St. Athanasius sums up the whole purpose of the incarnation in
the act of man's deification. He (Christ) assumed human nature,
so that we might be divinized (
), P.G. 25, 192.

2. Serm. 166, 4. E. L. Mascall, The Importance of Being Human,
London (Oxford Univ. Press) 1959, p. 65-66.

3. Ibid. p. 57-58.

4. Gregory of Nazianzus: P. G. 36,140, 93, 165,168. On this subject
about mixis see Harry A. Wolfson: The Philosophy of the Church
Fathers, Cambridge 1964, p. 372-386.

5. B. L. Mascall, ibid., p. 65.

IV. Becoming Human - Becoming Divine

Deification: a process towards achieving authentic Humanum
in Christ

3. Authentic Humanness in Humanizing Divinity

This interpretation of deification as the purpose both of the process
of humanization and of the Incarnation of the Logos has a particular
bearing on the interrelationship between secular and Christian
images of the human person conceived on the ground of
interdependence of secular cosmology and Christian anthropology.
Certainly, within the church life and Orthodox spirituality deification
has definite and clear implications first in the area of personal
ethics, initiating total conformity to evangelical virtues and the
imitation of Christ in the mystery of transfiguration from glory to
glory; second, in the liturgical life as the climactic manifestation in
worship of the deified nature of man and his elevation in his
supreme order of collaboration with God in his creation; third, in the
broadening of salvation to cosmic dimension including nature and
all things in the process of theosis; and, fourth, and most evident
and important, in opening the vision towards the glorious final end
and fulfillment in history by anticipation as a realized eschatology.
This definite deification, clearly bound up with inner church life,
should not be regarded as a transcendental vision detached from
the world situation, which unfortunately is the case very often. In
reality, this should be a reminder of the centrality of deification for
historical facticity, for man's immanent relationships as they are
now re-evaluated by Christ's incarnation and the right
understanding of the Image of God implied by the manhood of
Christ.

Secular and Christian are related as the areas of humanization
and deification mutually exchangeable, complementary and
interdependent. You cannot speak of the one without the other.
Humanization and deification become the two perspectives of the
one movement of immanence within transcendence and vice-versa.
Humanness is possible only by its reference to its divine origin and
purpose and deification is the paramount reality of humanness. Man
as the Imago Dei is the link between the two and therefore he has
his proper definition as a man in the process of change from being
human to being really humanized through his deification. Everything
now becomes a flow of inner, deeper, invisible transformation within
humanity which is transformed into the receptacle of divine grace
for its own fulfillment, through the infinite movement towards
achieving God's likeness.

In this context transcendence in anthropology is the ontological
reality of the deepest humanum in God, as he is acting in Christ by
the Spirit. Transcendence according to this concept of the Christian
Image as the outcome of the Imago Dei and the likeness is the
process of man's transfiguration from natural humanity to the
movement of deification. Transformation in man's nature is a far
more vital, difficult act and notion than what is meant by the term
transcendence in the realm of reason and philosophy. It is more
difficult to change human nature from sin to sanctity, from
meaningless creativity to responsible synergia with God than to
create something ex nihilo. That is why it is only God with the
consent of human freedom, who can work this kind of
transformation. Deification has always its origin in God like the
Incarnation. There is always a priority for God's humanizing process
over the human act of accepting and operating it out of man's free
will.

This type of transcendence permeates all human enterprises. More
and more science realizes that knowledge in its manifold application
bears an ontological, essential, deeper movement of personal
relationship. Every new discovery in the realm of science is a new
discovery of the inner interdependence of things with man's mind
accompanied by a profound involvement of change of one's own
person-in-communion with a transcending power of transformation.
Research is revealing the three-fold reality behind things and
human reason: personal interprenetration as a real intercourse of
male and female, mutual exchange of roles between nature and
human mind, and finally reference to a supra-individual focus,
which are all inherent within these relationships. For Michael
Polanyi: a discovery is always creative. As man discovers, his
personality changes. If man refuses to grow and evades change, his
thinking becomes schematized. Unwillingness to change leads man
to do violence to facts,... he quenches the spirit of inquiry which
issues from the depths of existence (1).

Though science requires individual concentration and operation and
the objective field of research is clearly objective, the essence and
the character both of knowledge and objects are more deeply
connected in existential terms, representing an interpenetration of
transcendence and immanence. John Macmurray accepts that an
impersonal science is an impossible notion and writes in this
connection that the terms transcendent and immanent refer to the
persons as agents and they are strictly correlative. Pure immanence
like pure transcendence is meaningless. Whatever is transcendent is
necessary immanent, and immanence in turn implies
transcendence. God therefore, as the infinite gent is immanent in
the world which is his act, but transcendent of it (2).

In all realms of intellectual or cognitive, volitional and emotional life
all kinds of dualisms should be defeated if one thinks of man as
created after the Image of God uniting dynamically humanization
and deification. Man is coming slowly into an age of maturity by
conceiving reality and himself as a bi-polar unity. All kinds of splits
in all areas of reason, will and feeling are slowly being understood
as necessary challenges for communal thinking and action. Life
takes its deeper sense as divine humanness and humanness in
process of deification in man's effort to realize unity and equality
between spirit and matter, individual and personal, subject and
object, body and soul, divine and human.

The greatest challenge, perhaps, in this respect is man himself as a
total human person at risk and under trial in his bi-sexual being as
male and female. This is indeed, from the natural point of view, the
most fundamental split and striking division in himself as the Image
of God. It is the encounter in transcendental dimensions, indeed,
because man-woman does not constitute a simple relationship but a
full interdependence. The more any kind of undue imbalance and
inequality is overcome the more a human being is in the process of
his deification. Humanness entirely depends on the continuous
reconstruction of the Image of God as an interchange on an equal
footing of full complementarity and communal interpenetration of
man and woman as the one whole human being in the making
within the Trinitarian God. Male and female are rooted inside the
Trinitarian communion of personal relationships based on the
identity of essence which is love. The perversion of this relationship
is a pure and direct negation of the Christian triune God as fullness
of communion.

It is not the fundamental role of maternity which is decisive for
creativity as external par rapport to the Trinity which makes the
psychiatrist C. Jung professes the necessity of Quarternity
instead of the Trinity. But the maternity as it appears in the Person
of Mary, not as Christotokos but as Theotokos, is inherent to the
Fatherhood, the Son-ship and the Procession inside the Trinity. The
maternity archetype is the manifested outcome of the essence of
God as love and is implied in the Fatherhood. Christ, therefore, as
the Word incarnate represents as male historical person both
aspects of creativity of the new man as deified in full identity and
complementarity of male and female. Discrimination against cither
sex is not a simple negation of ethical order but a refusal of the
humanization process and humanizing act of God, in other words it
is inherent in the full acceptance of authentic deification as the
basis of realizing full manhood. The Image of man according to the
Imago Dei is recognized only in the full identity and reciprocity of
communal being reflecting the divine essence. The question of
equality and reciprocity here is the basic anthropological issue for a
Christian model of man in dialogue with secular images.

The Eastern Orthodox approach to the human person as created in
the Image of God Jays, in other words, its emphasis in the effort of
man to realize the Image by actualizing the similitude (after
God's likeness). It is the sense of existential ontology which has
priority over rational transcendentalism. With this presupposition
Christian and secular images of the human person might enter into
fruitful encounter without discriminating between secular and
sacred. Becoming human is possible through becoming divine by
participation and deification. This is to be attempted only within the
process of humanization, which is also a God-given order and
possibility.

Certainly, this concept of the human person presupposes faith in
the event of the incarnation and the Christology of nature. Without
it there is no possible exchange of views for the sake of a fuller
understanding of humanity. But, there is from the Christian point of
view an open possibility of apprecing the secular movement of
humanization as sharing in ongoing fulfillment of the purpose of the
whole creation: to create a new man together with the world.
Eastern Orthodoxy has on this point its main and crucial standpoint
facing the secular images of human person as valid partners of
dialogue and action within the one Creation.

Perhaps, this presentation of the Christian Image of the human
person has to a certain extend failed to appreciate the reality of
fallen man as sinful, in the eyes of a Western Christian. It is
possible. It seems to me, however, that Orthodoxy faces this aspect
of humanity in its full negative ontological content and significance
by the image of the hopeful repentant sinner. The human person
created after the Image of God and after his likeness should be
grasped principally in his movement towards his prototype and not
through its negation. Sin should not remain the abstract
substratum of guilt, preventing all efforts of transfiguration,
discouraging all dynamic attempts of a person as member of the
Ecclesia to fulfill his calling. The calling of God for Orthodoxy will be
always understood as an imitation of acquiring the things which are
given from above and a movement forward to the future in
eschatological anticipation. Sin as a permanent guilt-conscience
can hinder this perspective. Christology of the Image of God in the
human person signifies a total affirmation of authentic humanity as
rooted and determined in the divinity. It is the way of the
resurrection. Without the latter the Gross is deprived of its
entelechia for the human person, and history becomes a
meaningless circle under the domination of death. The Christian
image of man on the contrary has to be understood as an appeal to
all men to share in the glory of God and his victory in history, here
and now.





Notes

1. Aarne Siirala comments in this way on M. Polanyi's philosophy in
his work; Divine Humanness, Philadelphia (Fortress Press) 1970, p.
137.

2. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, London (Faber) 1961, p.
223.