Anthropology of Early Christianity

Anthropology of Early Christianity
Early Christianity (the post-Apostolic age called “Patristic”) offers no breakthroughs beyond the anthropological perspective of the Bible (please review Old Testament and New Testament Anthropologies).

Beginning with Tertulian’s (d. 222) De Anima, the early Christian writers present an element of systemization around certain fundamental principles concerning human existence—e.g., the human person as imago Dei and that the universe’s history is the history of divinization and salvation. Irenæus of Lyon (d. 202, the disciple of Polycarp, the disciple of John the Beloved) expressed these two themes resoundingly in his Adversus Hæreses (Latin for, “Against the Heresies,” the heresies being Gnosticism and related errors).

Of anthropological interest is the core of Irenæus’ theology: his theory of recapitulation. Irenæus borrows the idea of recapitulation from Paul yet expands on it greatly. By recapitulation, Irenæus means that Christ took up or summed up all that is or has been from the creation. Jesus Christ is the Second Human Being, the Second Adam, in which God gathers up everything and renews it, restores it, and reorganizes it despite it all being sidetracked in the Fall of the First Adam (which Irenæus sees more like a tantrum, a spat from the immature want to grow up ahead of time, rather than a full-blown rebellion). Salvation history is a process by which we grow and develop from immaturity to adults. Because the entire human race was lost through the First Human Being’s childish sin, in order to bring about the re-creation of humankind the Son of God had to become a mature human being (incidentally, Irenæus believed that even had the first human couple not sinned, Christ would still have been sent). Irenæus writes:

“…when He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh (or he recapitulated in himself) the long history of humanity, summing up and giving us salvation in order that we might receive again in Christ Jesus what we had lost in Adam, that is, the image and likeness of God.”
(Adversus Hæreses III, 18:1).

We must admit that as the Church spread and engaged Greek thought, classical metaphysical dualism was incorporated into theology where it has endured. This has created MAJOR pitfalls for understanding human existence. In the writings of Eastern or Greek Fathers like the brilliant Gregory of Nyssa (d. about 394) there persists a tension between spirit and matter. They see that human fulfillment is possible because of our spiritual aspect or half, one half of human nature, where we already stand on God’s side. Thus the goal lies after death in the vision of God. This vision only comes about after we are purified and restored to our original purity. Meanwhile, for Western or Latin Theology, especially that influenced by the brilliant Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), the tension lies between the merciful God and the human person as sinner. As Henry Rondet cites in The Grace of Christ (pg. 136): “Every man is Adam, every man is Christ.” What then becomes of the story of the Universe? Certainly it cannot be seen as “the free history of God in the world,” ala the theological anthropology of the Bible. No; seeing things this way the history of the world becomes rather this: “the story of how what was divided becomes reunified,” or, if you prefer, “how a screw-up gets fixed,” or even “the story of how divine liquid plumber clears the mundane pipe of human waste.” Additionally, the Neo-Platonic, dualistic, and hierarchical interpretation of Imago Dei in Augustine’s theology contributed to the legitimization of the subordinate role for women in Church and society. Dualistically, Augustine ascribed to mind-over-body and reasons-over-passions hierarchies and correlated “maleness” with mind-reason and “femaleness” with body-passions (this can be seen clearly in Confessions). Humanity (hominem), declares Augustine, is made to God’s Image and Likeness, and thus by powers of his capacity to reason is set ABOVE all nonrational animals; this higher reason rules the lower body; and just the same, even though Woman, because of her rational mind, bears equal nature to the Male, according to Augustine she is inferior in her bodily sex and therefore is subject to the male sex (Confessions 13:32:47). As far as Image of God goes, the Woman, in this dualist schema, is not equal to the male in her embodied self. Thus she is depicted as more matter than spirit, somewhat less human than the male (in fact, the word for “mother” in Greek, mater, is where we get our word matter—the changeable, inconstant stuff this mundane world is made of, “Mother Earth”). Males are the normative human beings—women are at best ‘mutilated males.’ This tendency to dichotomize continues throughout the following Medieval period.

Anthropology of Medieval Christianity
No theological, philosophical, or scientific advancements concerning understanding human existence were made during the Medieval Period (this would not happen until the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries). Medieval thought was static and incapable of doing justice to the special character of the human person. The history of salvation was given little if any attention. Human beings simply ARE—they do not grow and develop! They simply are with an unchanging essence. The human person, like all beings (or things, or entities, or creatures) was seen as a substance and as an OBJECT, a thing “in-itself.”

Here we find no real theological analysis of the fundamental experiences of joy, anguish, and death. Human behavior was not related to our actions. The universe and its history were seen as a ready-made stage for each individual human drama to unfold. Would the person save his or her own soul, or not, in the End? Nothing could be added to the Universe and its history for it was set and STATIC. And if static, then the world and history are not in process—and if that is true, then neither are us human beings.

Counterindications—evidence of some first orientation to an authentic anthropology—were present in Medieval theology, however. Certain trends of thought would eventually give rise to modern anthropologies where the human person is seen also as SUBJECT, a thing “turned-toward-others” in dynamic relationships. Despite the Medieval reflections on salvation with a nonhistorical cast, their tremendously individual focus paved the way for moderns to emphasize human persons as subjects. The Beatific Vision, i.e., the immediate, unobstructed experience of God after death by the saved INDIVIDUAL was stressed by contemporary theology. And also developed (via Augustine’s thought) were nonsacramental possibilities of salvation by that theology, the so-called votum sacramenti (or desire for the sacrament, SUBJECTIVE) where an individual’s basic good will (SUBJECTIVE and PRIVATE), under some CIRCUMSTANCES (RELATIVE), replace the need for Baptism. If this were true, there must be then something of enduring and fundamental importance about all those activities and processes of the human mind, will, and SUBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. This was assumed in the remarkably provident teaching of Thomas Aquinas concerning the inviolability of conscience, even when it is in opposition to ecclesiastical law.

It would be Scholastic philosophy, and the theology birthed from it, that would provide the true foundation for modern recognition of genuine subjectivity: it noted, to quote Karl Rahner, that “anything is or has being in proportion to the degree in which it is subjectivity in possession of itself.” Or to put it another way, and perhaps more dynamically: life moves to higher and higher levels of self-reflection; the highest forms of life not only “are aware”, we “are aware that we are aware.” We “know that we know.” And the more conscious we are of ourselves, of our knowing powers, of our powers to decide, of our thoughts’ implications, of our judgments and actions, the more we are ourselves, the more we are in possession of ourselves, the more or greater is our “genuine subjectivity.” The point: even though Medieval theology failed at being attentive to the subjective side of human existence, nonetheless crucial first-steps were made in anticipation of Modern understanding of subjectivity.

Anthropology of the Modern Period
Scientific, philosophical, and theological breakthroughs in understanding human existence begin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the discoveries of Darwin and Freud, Marx’ new social analysis, the human person as subject in the philosophy of Kant and idealism as the new focus, and with modern psychology. In a time of rapid and substantial change, the meaning of human existence assumes new and urgent force. Various attempts have been made in these modern times to answer the question, “who are we?” Here are a few of the major voices and what they offer:

1. Charles Darwin and the natural sciences say that we are creatures linked biologically with the rest of creation. Human existence is not simply given. It is something to be worked out through the process of evolution and adaptation of the environment.

2. While the natural sciences concern themselves with the interaction of human behavior and the world outside the person, one of the social sciences, psychology, has concerned itself with the interaction of human behavior and the world inside the person. This is the special contribution of Sigmund Freud. Human existence is not merely knowing what to do (intellectual) and then deciding to do it (free will). There are unconscious drives, forces, and motives that influence, probably even determine, our choices and behavior.

3. Sociologists and economists focus on the social, economic, and political context into which human persons find themselves. Karl Marx, like Freud, insists that human problems are traceable to conflicts produced by alienation. Whereas Freud would say the alienation is from one’s true self, for Marx, it is from the fruits of one’s labors and thus from the industrialized world and from other people. It is only in and through society that persons can live as human beings. The collective defines who and what we are.

4. Feminist thought presents a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary critique of the ethos and practice of sexism and gender discrimination, as expressed in patriarchal social, political, cultural, and religious structures and in andro-centric thought and language.

5. Nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophical understanding of human existence cover a wide range of approaches: the phenomenological (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), the existentialist (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Buber), the processive (Whitehead, Bergson), the pragmatic (James, Dewey), the positivistic (the early Wittgenstein, Russel, Carnap), and ordinary language philosophy (the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle). In much of these philosophies there is an emphasis on the subjective, the changeable, the particular, and the practical, over against the objective, the unchanging, the universal, and the abstract. Human existence is not a given to be examined, but a potential in process of realization.

6. Among contemporary philosophical currents there are those philosophies that go under the rubric “Continental” (the neo-Marxism of Habermas and Maarcuse; the hermeneutical approach of Gadamer; and the deconstructionism of Derrida). Most others in the English-speaking world go under the rubric “Analytic,” especially the philosophy of mind, with its biological and artificial-intelligence wings. Both are broadly naturalistic.

7. Contemporary Thomism is similarly pluralistic. There is, in addition to the historians of medieval philosophy (Gilson), the post-Kantian European Thomism of Maréchal, known as Transcendental Thomism; the Thomism of the Lubin School (which includes John Paul II); and the Thomism found in some of the analytic philosophy in England (Anscombe, Kenny).

Likewise we see Theological movements with answers to the question of human existence:

In contemporary theology one detects two apparently opposed orientations: the existentialist which focuses on the subject and the importance of achieving sufficient self understanding, and the other, the liberationist, which focuses on the subject’s responsibility to criticize and to change an unjust social order.

This is an EXTREMELY small sampling. Common to all modern thought is that human existence is personal; the human person is a subject and is seen in terms of relations and systems of relations.

Because of these and other scientific, philosophical, and theological developments we have reached a crossroads. Improvements in transportation and communications have been made possible by empiriological science (understanding how things work) and technology (application of science to practical problems). The principal products have been material growth and educational progress. Material growth liberated human existence from preoccupation with acquiring the basic necessities of life; educational progress freed us from having to accept the status quo. Both have raised the human consciousness about racial and gender equality, and also about global independence. We are a global village. And yet material and educational progress are mixed blessings. As a result we have nuclear arms, wars, pollution and various environmental disasters, health hazards in food, and crime of all kinds. Human existence, once seen at the center of the universe, now is ever more cosmically marginalized.

Here then is the Crossroads: choose to live authentically in this time as modern Christians by critically appropriating the faith in light of the ramifications of modern times and seeing what God CONTINUES to tell us about human existence, or ignore this all and indulge in inauthentic mindless piety, bizarre enthusiasm, sick superstition or blind dogmatism—of course I speak of fundamentalism.

The time has come for an anthropological recasting of all our traditional doctrines. This has not yet been completed. However we seem to be moving that way as indicated by 1) the emergence of historical theology; 2) the recognition of religious pluralism; 3) the recognition of the universality of God’s saving grace; 4) the new regard for the world as something to be transformed by the Church; 5) recent renewal and interest in spirituality for the individual in his or her personal relationship with God; 6) and the extraordinarily rapid development of the feminist consciousness.

In order to construct a formal theological anthropology, one should take from the trends just noted:

1. The insistence on conscience as the as the guide to truth and to genuine solutions to current problems
2. The fact that only in freedom can we direct ourselves toward goodness
3. Reference to our desire for higher life, a desire which “is inescapably lodged in the human heart” and which makes it possible to transcend our anxiety about death
4. Affirmation of the fundamental equality of men and women in the human community.

What is a human person, seen with all this? The human person is social, historical, of the world, with a call from God to COLLABORATE in the creation of history, in the transformation of the world, and even in the coming in the final Reign of God.

So to summarize historical thought on human existence: one, the early Christian writers make no breakthroughs in understanding human existence; two, Irenæus of Lyon and others emphasized strongly the human person as Imago Dei and human history as the history of divinization and salvation; three, Christ recapitulates in himself all that is human in the individual and in history; four, unfortunately the etendency to dichotomize between various dualities (especially matter and spirit) perdures; five, the Medieval period focuses on person as object, a creature among creatures, lower than an angel yet higher than the animal kingdom; six, unchanged by his history and environment, “man” is seen as an unchangeing essence; seven, by conceding that one could receive the grace of Baptism by desire, a turn from an objective to a subjective principle, Medieval theology unwittingly offers the basis of seeing person as subject; eight; in the so-called modern period a fundamental shift in our understanding human existence has occurred due to the impact of scientific, philosophical, and theological developments; nine, modern thought emphasizes the self-awareness of persons, our freedom and responsibility, and on the fundamental equality on men and women in the human community.

We are now ready to lay down a synthesis on the theology of the human person. I would then like to move on to the topic of nature and grace in the Bible, history, the Problem of nature and grace, and then original sin, and finally pose a theology of human existence as a synthesis. But before all that please critique this. Meanwhile, ahhhh, you know the drill—What do you think? What are the ramifications? What am I missing? How does this view on human existence affect prayer and faith? How would faith be expressed in this reality?

Till next time
July 18, 2008 11:16 PM