It should not be overlooked is that the idea of the 'person', so cherished in Western culture, has its root in the development of the lexical meaning of the term the Christian Scholastic theology, the prolongation in the West of the Hellenic (and primarily Platonic) philosophical tradition.
The Scholastic development was 'kick-started' by dialogue with Islamic metaphysics, the product of its own internal development of Aristotelian philosophy in light of the Qran, and most evident in the works of St Thomas Aquinas, who makes no bones about his debt to the great Moslem philosophers Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Mohammed al-Ghazali (the 'Masters' in his writings), and through them, to Aristotle ('The Philosopher').
In the Christian East, anthropology remained rooted in the Patristic Theology of the previous millennium, the Council of Chalcedon, and moved off from there in a different and more symbolic and speculative direction, under the tutelage of one of Chalcedon's primary architects, St Maximus the Confessor (who 'baptised' Platonism and gently corrected Origen), and to a lesser degree under his brother-contender against Hellenist dualism, Leontius of Byzantium.
My own theological anthropology is firmly based in the Eastern Tradition, the two mentioned being formative in my thinking on the nature of man, but the metaphysical question, of a nature as such, reaches its apogee for me, in the West, in St Thomas.
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The idea of the person, of an individual human being, existing as a God-created entity in its own right, is founded in Hebrew philosophy. According to their Scriptures, man is a created thing, a being which exists in and as a unity of body and soul, matter and spirit, but inescapably one thing, and furthermore made to exist in union with the Uncreated, its Maker.
In Christian Scripture this is inescapably affirmed, "Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Luke 12:7), and the idea of this existential unity resists sublimation in its every encounter with duality in every age.
The Enlightenment hoped to deliver the mortal blow to this idea by severing it from its ontological source, by refuting the idea of the Uncreated as known and knowable. Not only can man not know God, he cannot even know the world, nor even himself, with any certainty.
Alongside this, he determined that by the application of science, he would fashion a Garden of Eden by his own hand, to bend nature to his own will (read Francis Bacon) and create a Paradise on earth according to his own wants and desires. Right up until the close the the last millennium man still believed that science and technology would answer all his ills.
In many ways it is, but its price was the Industrial Revolution. In a trice, the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten was cut by half. Science freed man from toil in the fields, to a life of toil in the factories and mills; from plagues to industrial diseases. From a life of constant labour simply to survive, we promised ourselves that technology would set us free to enjoy the leisure of living, and here we are, slave to the device in the time-starved techno-cultures of today.
The Romance Movement of the nineteenth century was a revolt against industrialism of man, his worth as a being measured by his output in service of the economy. His place in the cosmos being shifted ever from its centre, to a point of meaninglessness, ephemeracy — and existential hopelessness — on its periphery.
Whilst (it seems to me) whilst we looked to the past in a sprit of maudlin sentimentalism — of the Gothic, of the Sublime — we put all our eggs in one basket, recoiling from the Enlightenment we rejected all that went before, and in so doing we rejected the very language by which it could be refuted from within, and instead looked East, to a hope in something entirely new, the novelty of the different, the strange, the Oriental, for a solution to our tragic situation. Is it no wonder then that Tibet, the most alien, the most unknown, the most secretive and mysterious, should suddenly became the rock of our spiritual aspirations, our new theosophies? How quick were we to declare that even Christ must have travelled there, for nowhere else on the planet could such wisdom be found!
Meanwhile, at home, the idea of the person suffers continual erosion, Every quality, every character, every facet of human nature is reduced to accidence, to contingency, to ephemeracy, there is no core of being, no center, no ontological object that experiences subjectivity. Man is just an eddy in the swirl of data, here one minute, gone the next, he derives a self-identity not from being but from process, everything, including himself, is conditional, experiential, relative, everything is beyond his control, hidden from him, caused by things he cannot discern, the world is run by conspiracy ... he is the helpless victim of circumstance, of his age and of his time.
There is no such thing as truth, all one can rely on is narrative.
But the narrative is just the account of things happening. What is the thing that they are happening to? Surely a narrative requires a narrator?
That is where the person is. That is the 'still, small voice' that we must seek, to find ourselves, the silence that is us, and us alone, and in so doing, to find the voice of the One who talks to us:
Exodus 14:13-14
"And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD ... The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace."
2 Chronicles 20:15-17
"Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude (the world); for the battle is not yours, but God's ... Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; to morrow go out against them: for the LORD will be with you."
Psalms 4:4-5
"Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.
Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD."
Psalms 46:10
"Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth."
Thomas
The Scholastic development was 'kick-started' by dialogue with Islamic metaphysics, the product of its own internal development of Aristotelian philosophy in light of the Qran, and most evident in the works of St Thomas Aquinas, who makes no bones about his debt to the great Moslem philosophers Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Mohammed al-Ghazali (the 'Masters' in his writings), and through them, to Aristotle ('The Philosopher').
In the Christian East, anthropology remained rooted in the Patristic Theology of the previous millennium, the Council of Chalcedon, and moved off from there in a different and more symbolic and speculative direction, under the tutelage of one of Chalcedon's primary architects, St Maximus the Confessor (who 'baptised' Platonism and gently corrected Origen), and to a lesser degree under his brother-contender against Hellenist dualism, Leontius of Byzantium.
My own theological anthropology is firmly based in the Eastern Tradition, the two mentioned being formative in my thinking on the nature of man, but the metaphysical question, of a nature as such, reaches its apogee for me, in the West, in St Thomas.
+++
The idea of the person, of an individual human being, existing as a God-created entity in its own right, is founded in Hebrew philosophy. According to their Scriptures, man is a created thing, a being which exists in and as a unity of body and soul, matter and spirit, but inescapably one thing, and furthermore made to exist in union with the Uncreated, its Maker.
In Christian Scripture this is inescapably affirmed, "Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Luke 12:7), and the idea of this existential unity resists sublimation in its every encounter with duality in every age.
The Enlightenment hoped to deliver the mortal blow to this idea by severing it from its ontological source, by refuting the idea of the Uncreated as known and knowable. Not only can man not know God, he cannot even know the world, nor even himself, with any certainty.
Alongside this, he determined that by the application of science, he would fashion a Garden of Eden by his own hand, to bend nature to his own will (read Francis Bacon) and create a Paradise on earth according to his own wants and desires. Right up until the close the the last millennium man still believed that science and technology would answer all his ills.
In many ways it is, but its price was the Industrial Revolution. In a trice, the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten was cut by half. Science freed man from toil in the fields, to a life of toil in the factories and mills; from plagues to industrial diseases. From a life of constant labour simply to survive, we promised ourselves that technology would set us free to enjoy the leisure of living, and here we are, slave to the device in the time-starved techno-cultures of today.
The Romance Movement of the nineteenth century was a revolt against industrialism of man, his worth as a being measured by his output in service of the economy. His place in the cosmos being shifted ever from its centre, to a point of meaninglessness, ephemeracy — and existential hopelessness — on its periphery.
Whilst (it seems to me) whilst we looked to the past in a sprit of maudlin sentimentalism — of the Gothic, of the Sublime — we put all our eggs in one basket, recoiling from the Enlightenment we rejected all that went before, and in so doing we rejected the very language by which it could be refuted from within, and instead looked East, to a hope in something entirely new, the novelty of the different, the strange, the Oriental, for a solution to our tragic situation. Is it no wonder then that Tibet, the most alien, the most unknown, the most secretive and mysterious, should suddenly became the rock of our spiritual aspirations, our new theosophies? How quick were we to declare that even Christ must have travelled there, for nowhere else on the planet could such wisdom be found!
Meanwhile, at home, the idea of the person suffers continual erosion, Every quality, every character, every facet of human nature is reduced to accidence, to contingency, to ephemeracy, there is no core of being, no center, no ontological object that experiences subjectivity. Man is just an eddy in the swirl of data, here one minute, gone the next, he derives a self-identity not from being but from process, everything, including himself, is conditional, experiential, relative, everything is beyond his control, hidden from him, caused by things he cannot discern, the world is run by conspiracy ... he is the helpless victim of circumstance, of his age and of his time.
There is no such thing as truth, all one can rely on is narrative.
But the narrative is just the account of things happening. What is the thing that they are happening to? Surely a narrative requires a narrator?
That is where the person is. That is the 'still, small voice' that we must seek, to find ourselves, the silence that is us, and us alone, and in so doing, to find the voice of the One who talks to us:
Exodus 14:13-14
"And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD ... The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace."
2 Chronicles 20:15-17
"Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude (the world); for the battle is not yours, but God's ... Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; to morrow go out against them: for the LORD will be with you."
Psalms 4:4-5
"Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.
Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD."
Psalms 46:10
"Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth."
Thomas
