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What is the Human?

What is mortal man, that You remember him,
And the son of man, that You visit him?
You have made him a little lower than angels
And have crowned him with glory and honor.
For You have caused him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet.

–Psalm 8:4-6

This ancient Hebrew psalmist, lost in wonder, asks about the “identity, calling, and nature”1 of man (gender inclusive).

Mortal, yet of interest to and cared for by God. Lower than angels, but set over all created things with glory and honor. This is the paradox of the human.2 Rolf Jacobson, who I have just cited, concludes: “The powerful message of this psalm is that God… values [humans] so much that they are given a role in God’s economy.”3 Witness Lee agrees with Jacobson: “Man is the central object of God in His creation for the accomplishment of His economy to fulfill His heart’s desire.”4

But what role is that?

Psalm 8 is itself a poetic meditation on the anthropology of Genesis 1:26: humanity created in God’s image and given dominion over God’s works.

Lee’s consistent claim, based on Genesis 1:26, is that human beings are created to express God and represent God: image and dominion, i.e., to show forth the excellence of God’s name (God’s person)5 and to stop the enemy and avenger (v. 2). These two terms have a vast application in ethics, politics, metaphysics, anthropology, and spirituality.

But, for all this, can we concisely define man?

Many have tried, but throughout intellectual history, this is a contested existential and ontological question that provokes varied answers.6 The variety stems from an insight from Karl Rahner:

Can we still make a plain and simple statement about the human being today without being constantly tormented by the awareness that we have neglected or been ignorant of a thousand things that we really should have known and taken into consideration if we wanted to make an honest and responsible attempt to make such a statement?7

While we probably can never, in this life, know all that there is to know about the human being, many characteristics thought to be unique to humans have been elevated into definitions of the human. I’ve compiled a number of definitions of “man.” Reading this list is not only insightful for how various thinkers have articulated definitions, it is also just plain fun.

Here are a number of definitions that attempt to identify what is unique or at least characteristic of the human.8

The human is:

  1. An animal with ears which it cannot move (Aristotle)9
  2. A thinking animal (Aristotle)
  3. A laughing animal (Pollux)10
  4. A tool-using animal (Thomas Carlyle)
  5. A language-using animal (Herder, Chomsky11, Charles Taylor)
  6. A storytelling animal (Rushdie)
  7. A fantasizing imaginative animal (Iris Murdoch)12
  8. An animal suspended in webs of self-spun significance (Geertz)13
  9. A bargain-making animal (Adam Smith)14
  10. A cooking animal (Boswell)15
  11. A party animal (Gazzaniga)16
  12. A praying animal (Jenson)17

Each of these definitions identifies something genuinely (or at least relatively) characteristic of human beings. But from a Christian theological perspective, I think we can say something stranger and more comprehensive.

While many of these may be true, I think the best definition is that man is the supremely deifiable animal.

I say “supremely” because, as Jordan Daniel Wood argues, Maximus the Confessor envisions the deification of all creation, each thing according to its own mode and capacity. But the human creature is “deifiable” in a distinctive sense. Our participation in God is not merely the fixed, rote, and necessary participation in God proper to creatures as creatures; it is personal, free, transformative, and ever-expansive. The human being is created not merely to receive something from God but, by grace, to participate in God’s own life.

What, then, is man?

The human is the supremely deifiable animal.

We are the creatures who hear and respond to the Word of God; whose freedom is awakened by the sovereign grace of God’s appearing; who can be joined to God in spirit and participate in God’s life; and who, through that participation, are brought into the fulfillment of our original calling—to express God in his image and represent God through his dominion.

Psalm 8 therefore answers its own question. What is man that God remembers him? Man is the creature God remembers, visits, crowns, commissions—and finally draws into participation in himself.

  1. Rolf A. Jacobson, Psalms, NICOT (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 127 ↩︎
  2. Jacobson, Psalms, 128: This psalm pinpoints “the central paradox at the heart of human identity.” ↩︎
  3. Jacobson, Psalms, 126. ↩︎
  4. Witness Lee, Life-study of Psalms, 62-3: ↩︎
  5. Lee, RcV, Matthew 28:19, note 5: “The name is the sum total of the Divine Being, equivalent to His person.” ↩︎
  6. Samuel Terrien, The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary (Wm B Eerdmans, 2003), 129: “The wondering astonishment before an apparently limitless world, as well as the existential question of the meaning of manhood, reaches such grandiose dimensions that they are linked together.” ↩︎
  7. Karl Rahner, “Intellectual Patience with Ourselves,” Theological Investigations XXIII (Crossroad, 1992), 43. ↩︎
  8. Some of these and more are cited by David Clough in, On Animals, Volume I: Systematic Theology (T&T Clark, 2012), 71-72. ↩︎
  9. Aristotle, Historia Animalium, 492 a. ↩︎
  10. Cited by Clough, On Animals, 71. See also William Hazlitt, “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” ↩︎
  11. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1968), 69. ↩︎
  12. Irish Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Chatto & Windus, 1992), 323 ↩︎
  13. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 5. ↩︎
  14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, abridged, with commentary, by Laurence Dickey (Hackett, 1993), 10-11. ↩︎
  15. James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Oxford Uni. Press, 2020), 155. ↩︎
  16. Michael S. Gazzaniga, “Humans: the party animal,” Daedalus, Vol. 138, No. 3 (Summer 2009), 21: “Take a minute the next time you go to a dinner party, barbecue, wedding reception, or baby shower—run-of-the-mill events for us Homo sapiens—to ponder the fact that such events are completely unheard of in any other species. What other animal would plan an event, provide food to unrelated others, and sit together and share it without a food fight, all while laughing about stories of the past and hopes and dreams of the future ? There is none. No matter how smart your family dog may be, he would not divvy up a prime rib roast and pass it out to the other dogs of the neighborhood with a happy little bark; neither would our closest relatives, the chimps. Humans are social beings, and although there are other animal and insect species that are social, our species takes sociability to a previously unknown level. We are party animals, and on our way to becoming such we have evolved a whole host of unique features—features so unique that we humans are playing in another ballpark. Although many may suggest that humans act “like a bunch of animals,” and the daily news intimates that we are endlessly fighting with one another, it is by cooperating with and helping unrelated others that we are unparalleled among animal species.” ↩︎
  17. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: The Works of God (Oxford University Press, 1999), 59. ↩︎

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