What Is Man?

Christ Crowned by Eric Gill



¶ What then, about man, and what kind of being is he?

And in attempting to answer this question we shall not take into account the teachings of men of Science.

For though the word Science properly means knowledge, the scientist is not, and generally does not profess to be, a man who knows what is what.

Scientific knowledge, at the best, is, and can be, no more than the results, more or less accurately recorded, of more or less inaccurate observation.

Assuming that a foot-rule be in some sense more or less reliable as an instrument of measurement, I can tell you how many inches it is from here to there—assuming that the words “here” and “there” have some real meaning.

Assuming that the interval between one sunrise and the next has some measurable uniformity, or some measurable variability, I can tell you how many days have passed since the war began—assuming that the words “now” and “then” are intelligible.

But it is obvious, and it is admitted, that the results of such calculation have nothing to do with the meaning of anything, and that when we ask: what is man? we are not asking anything that any scientist by means of his science could tell us.

We do not want to know how tall or broad a man is, or how many years he can live under the sun. We want to know what he is, and why.

We know he is mostly made of water, but we do not know what water is, except that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen; but we do not know what they are.

And if we pull a man to pieces and discover all the chemicals and tabulate all their several chemical formulae, we know less what he is than ever.

Neither microscope nor measuring-rod, neither balances nor crucibles can tell us, or even begin to tell us, the first thing we want to know.

We know ourselves much better than men of science can. That is the starting-point. That is where we must begin.

And, starting from there, we know this:

Man is matter and spirit—both real and both good. We do not know what matter is or what spirit is—we only know that one is measurable and that the other is not—and we know that man is both measurable and immeasurable.

And we know that we know. We know ourselves—however dimly and erroneously and inadequately—and we know things that are not ourselves—again dimly, erroneously, and inadequately.

Perhaps, in our blindness, we exaggerate the separateness of ourselves and other things—perhaps in the end “me” and “not me” cease to have any meaning or significance.

Perhaps in the end we find that there is only one being, and that we live only in him and by him.

Even so, truth is that which is knowable, and we know ourselves to be beings made for truth.

¶ And the good is that which is desirable. Man is a being which desires.

In seeking to know things, we reach out to them in order to become one with them.

Prompted, provoked, moved, and stirred by desire, we reach out to things in order to possess them.

Thus we desire what we know; and only what we know can we desire.

The activity of desire we call will, and thus knowing and willing are two movements of the soul, of man himself.

And the will is free.

Knowledge is not free—we can only know what is, and there is no such thing as free thought—but willing implies choice, and in choosing we know ourselves to be free.

We know ourselves to be responsible creatures. We know ourselves to merit praise or blame.

And we know these things in the unquenchable light of nature. We have not learnt it in books or been taught it by lecturers.

On the contrary, so far as books and lecturers go, evidence for such knowledge is difficult to obtain.

In the maze of inexorable cause and effect it is wellnigh impossible to discover where and when the freedom of the will is to be found.

For though we know ourselves to be free, we also know ourselves to be bound by countless causes outside outside our cognizance, and nearly all our thoughts and actions are at least conditioned by heredity and circumstance.

In spite of this, we know ourselves responsible, how much? how little? and that that responsibility is the mark of humanity; it is that which marks us off from all other animals. Deny responsibility, and you deny man.

¶ And man is a creature who loves.

Faith is knowledge; by faith we know.

Hope and desire are fellows; we do not desire without hope or hope without desire. We do not will without hope or hope against our wills.

Faith, hope, and love—these three; but the greatest of these is love.

By knowledge we possess things;

By will we reach out to them;

By love we draw them to ourselves that we may be possessed by them.

But perhaps we must distinguish here. The natural and instinctive attraction we feel towards things, whether of sight or sound, touch or taste or smell, is good; for these things are in themselves good, and to possess them, in due order, is necessary to a normal life.

And the desire of man and woman for one another is good, and its fulfilment in union and procreation is—who does not know it?—the highest natural good (and this in no “high-brow” sense, but in all its fleshly and sensual accompaniment, its sweetness and jocundity).

Nevertheless the love we are speaking of, and which the apostle was speaking of, is not precisely that love.

This sensual love, this human love, is rather the symbol, and that other is its prototype:

By love we draw the beloved to us! This does not seem to be true when we consider human lovers and the human love of natural things.

But that is because we confuse love with lust, with desire, with appetite—even with the joyful and lawful lust and desire and appetite which we rightly have for one another, and which we rightly have for all good things.

When we think of natural human love, we think, perhaps, rather of the chase than of the surrender, and for men (who have written most about love) the error is most easy; for men do, in a manner, seem to imitate the Divine Lover.

For this reason it is said that love is greatest; for by love we surrender to God, and He gives Himself to us.

We draw the beloved to ourselves; yes, and we draw God Himself; He is, so to say, compelled to take us—because we have loved Him.

Eat, drink, and be merry, then, brothers and sisters. Be fruitful and multiply. Use your bodies and enjoy all the good things of the earth in peace—the tranquility of order. But hold fast to the truth—the truth which has made us free, the freedom with which Christ has made us free.

Such, then, is man: a creature who knows and wills and loves; a rational being, responsible for his acts—no mere receptacle of knowledge, knowing without desiring, no mere instrument only desiring to possess—but, made in the image of God (child of God and, if he will, heir also), a creature who loves.

No lower view of man will satisfy him, no other view is relevant to our theme.*

*In support, I quote the following: “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus; truth is the equating of intelligence and reality. . . . The mind is potentially all things; it becomes what it knows. Nor is this process of becoming, intellectually, something other than ourselves to be understood in anything less than its literal meaning. . . . By our mind we overpass the boundaries of selfhood and are lost in the things we contemplate. . . . In knowledge joined with love we have the only lasting riches. . . . Knowledge as distinct from learning, is concerned with things, res, and only with words in so far as the symbolize things.” (Aelred Graham, O.S.B., The Love of God, Longmans, pp. 66, 67.)

**Reprinted in Eighth Day Moot 3.1. Excerpted from Eric Gill, Christianity and the Machine Age, The Christian News-Letter Books, No. 6. (London: The Sheldon Press, 1940), pp. 20-26.