Prof: Jorge Martínez Lucena

The Evolution of the Idea of Humanhood in Western Culture (I)

1. Ancient Greece and Myth

2. Ancient Greece and Philosophy

3. The Jewish People and the Divine Filiation

4. The Christian Synthesis

5. The End of the Middle Ages

6. Features of Modern Thinking

7. The Modern idea of man

Contents

“Prometheus moulded men out of water and earth and gave them also fire, which, unknown to Zeus, he had hidden in a stalk of fennel. But when Zeus learned of it, he ordered Hephaestus to nail his body to Mount Caucasus, which is a Scythian mountain. On it Prometheus was nailed and kept bound for many years. Every day an eagle swooped on him and devoured the lobes of his liver, which grew by night. That was the penalty that Prometheus paid for the theft of fire until Hercules afterwards released him, as we shall show in dealing with Hercules.” (Apollodorus, 1.7.1) (The work was traditionally ascribed to Apollodorus of Alexandria, a Greek scholar who flourished in the 2nd Century B.C., but his authorship is now dismissed. The work is generally believed to be a 2nd century A.D. compilation)

Ancient Greece and Myth

“I think, Socrates, as perhaps you do yourself, that it is either impossible or very difficult to acquire clear knowledge about these matters in this life. And yet he is a weakling who does not test in every way what is said about them and persevere until he is worn out by studying them on every side. For he must do one of two things; either he must learn or discover the truth about these matters, or if that is impossible, he must take whatever human doctrine is best and hardest to disprove and, embarking upon it as upon a raft, sail upon it through life in the midst of dangers, unless he can sail upon some stronger vessel, some divine revelation, and make his voyage more safely and securely.” (Plato, Phaedo, 85c-85d) (4th and 5th century BC)

Ancient Greece and Philosophy

“26.And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” (Genesis, 26:29) (950-500 BC)

The Jewish people and the Divine Filiation

Reading it retrospectively:

• Greek myth divine filiation (with limits) but polytheism

• Greek philosophy rational desire for understanding while waiting for a response from the divine.

• Jewish religion (Monotheism + divine filiation) but, in a sense, waiting for a bigger response

• Christianity Monotheism (God is someone) + rational desire of understanding + dignity of the person (divine filiation) + the infinite becoming an historical presence (originality)

The Christian synthesis

The Christianity doesn’t deny what Greek culture and the Jewish religion defend, but gives a plausible explanation to both of these hypotheses of meaning.

Christianity defends:

• Rationality (not as a faith against reason, but as a faith that empowers reason)

• Dignity of the person (due to human filiation)

The Christian Synthesis

Personhood (divine filiation):

“I became a hard riddle to myself, and I asked my soul why he was so downcast and why this disquieted me so sorely.” St. Augustine Confessions, IV, 4, 9 (4th century AD)

Rational but dependent (divine filiation):

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in regard to the infinite, a whole in regard to nothing, a mean between nothing and the whole; infinitely removed from understanding either extreme. The end of things and their beginnings are invincibly hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy, he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing whence he was taken, and the infinite in which he is engulfed.” Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (17th century AD)

The Christian Synthesis

The Middle Ages is the time when Christianity deploys its culture (5th – 15th century A.D.).

Some causes of the appearance of modernity:

-Richness provoked by the communal society in the Late Middle ages.

-Luther and protestantism (according to which the Catholic Church will be no longer the mediator between men and God: favours individualism and dualism)

-Invention of the press (favours protestantism and free thinking)

-Discovery of the new world and its cultures (cultural relativism)

The End of the Middle Ages

Humanism (in theRenaissance): The model of man is no longer the saint but the artist, geniuses like Da Vinci, someone who excels in certain aspects of life because of his efforts, someone who establishes his successful destiny, though he neglects other aspects of his life and of his life as a whole (dualism).

Features of Modern Thinking

Naturalism: The source of the human power is no longer God, it is Nature. Good and evil are strictly defined by natural law. Man is something good because he is natural. This is why natural action has become equivalent to good action. The more the man acts, the better will be (activism via business and science).

Features of Modern Thinking

Rationalism: Reason as the most powerful natural skill. The consistency of reality is now subjective reason. We tend to consider real what we can understand perfectly and scientifically while the mysterious part of reality tends to be considered as an unreal or inexistent thing. We tend to reduce reality to the limits of our human measure.

Features of Modern Thinking

Humanism + Naturalism + Rationalism = Man is what science defines as a man.

The Modern Idea of Man

Modernity provokes the secularization of Christianity.

Rationality is reduced to scientific reasoning.

God is not an object of the natural sciences. This is why religion is considered an irrational thing in our modernity.

How does this change transform our idea of man, taking into account that man and God are extremely related?

• The human soul is naturalized.

• Human dignity becomes the result of natural processes (related to health, development, etc.) or the outcome of human actions (social agreement, moral dignity, attachment to certain nations, parties, etc.)

The Modern Idea of Man