Our Humanity

The wonder of man is that he is little less than the angels and considerably more than all the rest of the universe: a little less than the angels because he is body as we as spirit, so much more than all the universe because he is so utterly different from the physical world in which no other spirit lives. In our blindness to the obvious, it is easy for us to draw a contrary conclusion. There seems to be so much resemblance between a sleeping man and a sleeping dog, the struggle of the two from the depths of sleep, the morning stretch and yawn. But it is not the dog who makes coffee, draws up plans for the day, and goes his entirely unpredictable way piercing the imprisoning walls of time and eliminating distance with his mind and heart even as he paces the roads with his feet.

The first awakening to the wonders of our soul carries the real danger of a kind of spiritual snobbery. It is easy to be tempted to sniff at the body as a lowly, animal sort of thing vulgarizing and profaning its beautiful spiritual consort. It is in this frame of mind that the body is seen as the prison holding the soul in temporary confinement, or as a mere tool to be tossed aside as it’s edge is blunted; the implication is that man is his soul, and the body merely a nuisance or at best a clumsy impediment to the soul’s glorious powers.

This, in fact, is a groundless illusion springing not so much from admiration of the soul as from contempt for man’s humanity. It is in obvious collision with the facts. It is man who sleeps, not a body; it is the same man who eats and who thinks, who has toothaches and ecstasies, who loves and who dies. We are not angels, and it is no compliment to our humanity to pretend that we are. It is a guarantee of despair to demand of men that they move on the level of pure spirits; they will surely fail before this impossible demand however heroic their efforts, fail so completely and so repeatedly as to kill all hope. To see the glory of the soul as obliterating the body is to be blind to the soul itself; for it is the vital principle of the body, not a disembodied spirit. Surely this is to be blind to man’s humanity. Man is not his soul; body and soul unite in one substantial unit that we call a man. When these two are separated by death, the soul is no more the man than is the corpse which lies dead before us; it is not John Jones who is then admitted to purgatory, but half of him, his soul. It is only when body and soul are reunited in the resurrection that the man lives again.

If angelism does not become a man, neither does bestiality. We are not angels, but then neither are we merely animals; yet that is what the fashionable error of our time declares when it sees man as no more than his body, when it smiles pityingly at the notion of a soul that cannot be bathed or spanked. This error like it’s twin, does not spring from an admiration of the particular bodies we pass on the street but from a contempt and a fear of the humanity of man. It too is an invitation to despair, for it asks man to live humanly while it denies him the centers of control that make responsibility possible to him. Its popularity lies in it’s apparent release from the awful burden of human responsibility; yet it punishes crime and admires virtue in the same breath in which it traces all action to subrational sources quite beyond our control. Again, the collision with the facts is obvious: there are saints and sinners, we are by turns nasty and noble, we are rightly ashamed of our pettiness and exalted by meeting love’s challenge by unselfishness. There is justice and choice and responsibility in our human world, things utterly foreign to the plant and animal world.

These then are some of the wonders of the obvious in ourselves, wonders that we so easily take for granted and to which we become blind. We are alive. We live by a life dramatically different from any other life in the physical universe. The vital principle within us, the soul, easily outraces time, eliminates distance, and pierces the wall of death. We are not angels, though spiritual; we are not animals, though physical. Of all the physical world, we are in control of our actions and our life, responsible for both; made to be masters, first of all of ourselves, then the physical world in which we live out our days.

A man must be courageous to face the truth of his humanity. God’s masterpiece of creation in the physical universe is ourselves. We, and we alone, not only see a sunset but also see and revel in it’s beauty. We do more than hear sounds; we grasp at their meaning or, injecting order into them or discovering that order, open up the whole world of music for our enjoyment. Our taste has commanded and perfected the art of cookery. The fragrance of flowers has been distilled and brought from the ends of the earth for our delicate pleasure. Our touch forever brings a message or carries one, a message of reverence or contempt, of love or hate, of appreciation or disgust. It must be so for our vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch are human things, far above the level of the animal world to which they bind us; human things, and so working humanly at human things in the human manner dictated by intelligence and will. Like the animals, we too have imagination, memory, an instinctive kind of judgment and coordination of the data of the senses; but in us, all these things are so uplifted by that refining contact with the intellect and the will as to soar far above the level of their operation in animals. The wonder of man is that in him the plant and animal world is united to the spiritual and made one, a human one, not to be confused with anything else in God’s creation.

- My Way of Life
Confraternity of the Precious Blood