THE DISMANTLING OF THE HUMAN

We are now living through a historical period in which the meaning of the human is radically uncertain – as uncertain, perhaps, as it has ever been. It has perhaps never been more difficult to determine, legally or ethically or culturally, what constitutes the nature of human being, or how we might understand the limits of the human.

Of course, the category of the human has always been an unstable one, as is demonstrated by the difficulty of maintaining a distinction between the human and the non-human, or the human and the animal. Mankind is part of the animal kingdom as well as being separate from it, and this simultaneous identity and disidentity between humans and animals has always posed a problem for those who like tidy classifications. In the Christian tradition, as in many others, the category that is introduced to help distinguish the human from the animal is the divine. The human is not like the animal, because he or she is closer in nature to God – a proximity to God which manifests itself in the human as spirit, or soul. But this manoeuvre has not done much to stabilise the category of the human and has arguably simply made it more fraught. In suggesting that we are not quite or not simply animals because we are made in the image of God, we have tended to place ourselves in a peculiarly vulnerable position, between two categories, to neither of which we quite belong. As Augustine rather wonderfully puts it, ‘man is a kind of mean; but a mean between beasts and angels’. We are animal, we have something approximating an animal nature, but we are lifted out of this nature by a spirit which resides in us, which is God-like. But if we are inhabited by this spirit, if there is something of the divine within us, it seems to be the case that the divine has only a partial claim on us – that some catastrophe has befallen us to separate or remove us from that within us which is godly.