Man as boundary phenomenon: On rediscovering the image of human nature

What is man?

Carl Trueman argues that this is the most pressing question we face today. Paul Kingsnorth seems to agree; in his recently published book, Against the Machine, Kingsnorth asserts that “We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.”

Yes, somehow both. And some of us don’t like who we are because we have forgotten who we are.

Trueman contends—and rightly so—that human nature has been “dismantled, disenchanted, disembodied, and desecrated.” He suggests some potentially fruitful ways we can try to address the first three of these modern assaults on human nature, but he is too quick to minimize our ability to counter the desecration of man. His argument is as follows:

[A] lack of social consensus on the existence of God, let alone on religious dogma and practice, precludes consensus on any view of human nature grounded in the divine image. This lack of consensus is a problem, since the response to the desecration of human nature must be its consecration, and consecration must occur in a religious context. Given the secularity of our contemporary context, Christians must be modest about what we can achieve.

Admittedly, many people in today’s secular society are unwilling to consider the possible truth of one of the foundational claims of Christian (and Jewish) anthropology: that human beings are created imago Dei, in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). But there are other images of man that we could use in discussions aimed at the “new humanism” for which Trueman calls, images to which secularists might be more amenable, but which might nonetheless help to steer such discussions, albeit perhaps slowly and even imperceptibly at first, in the direction of the re-consecration of man.

One such image would be that of man as methorion or “boundary phenomenon.” Man uniquely straddles the boundary between body and mind, matter and spirit, object and subject, finite and infinite. As Hans Urs von Balthasar noted, the image of man as a boundary phenomenon has been found in some form or another, in practically all the philosophies and religions of man. In the Catholic Church’s formulation, man is the “unity of soul and body.”

The image of man as boundary phenomenon seems particularly well-suited to contemporary discussions regarding human nature. This, in part, is because that image is implicated not only in the desecration of man but also in the dismantling, disenchantment, and disembodiment of human nature as described by Truman, and thus could help address all four contemporary assaults on who we are as human beings.

The image of man as boundary phenomenon is also highly relevant to all three of the intellectual/cultural currents that have done the most damage to our contemporary understanding of human nature: materialism, expressive individualism, and transhumanism.

Materialists claim that we’re nothing but our bodies, with mind/consciousness being merely an epiphenomenon of biochemical processes.

Expressive individualists want to claim, simultaneously (and therefore incoherently), that our bodies both do and do not matter for establishing what a man is (e.g., in arguing that a person’s “gender” is whatever the person believes it to be, regardless of their body, while also arguing for the crucial importance of that person being able to alter their body via hormones, surgery, etc. in an attempt to bring their body into alignment with their internally perceived “gender”).

Transhumanists seek a way to separate us completely from the “limitations” of our bodies, possibly achieved through such techniques as the uploading of human minds to the digital cloud (which, incidentally, would still require a physical substrate as the host for those “minds”).

The image of man as a unity of matter and spirit, body and soul, is useful in countering all three of these dehumanizing schools of thought in contemporary society, as well as the general confusion about human nature that seems so prevalent today.

But how might we effectively broach such an image of human nature, keeping in mind the resistance that so many secular thinkers reflexively exhibit whenever any topic even remotely related to God, Christianity, or a transcendent realm is raised? Here are a few initial suggestions:

• Draw upon the arguments of Thomas Nagel (who is himself an atheist) that materialism fails to account for such central aspects of human life as consciousness, meaning, and value.
• Discuss how man is a finite being who is open to the infinite, as emphasized by Thomas Aquinas, among others.
• Incorporate the image of man as “microcosm” (the “embodiment of the world,” the being which “ontogenetically recapitulates in himself, crowns and transcends, all the forms of nature”), an image which is closely related to the image of man as a liminal being and which has been advocated by a variety of thinkers, including Plotinus, Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Maximus the Confessor, and Bonaventure.
• Focus on human beings’ status as both subjects and objects, as emphasized in the thought of Kant, Hegel, and, more recently, Roger Scruton. Scruton discusses how this description of human nature can open people’s eyes to what he calls our “metaphysical predicament,” a predicament to which he admits that “God is the only solution.”
• And finally, because some people aren’t attuned to what they would likely perceive to be “academic” arguments about human nature, we need to find ways to explore and reflect upon human nature as a “boundary phenomenon” in popular culture (movies, music, literature, art, etc.).

These are only some of the ways in which a rediscovery of the image of human nature as a “boundary phenomenon” could make at least some small contribution to the re-consecration of man in contemporary society.

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