WHAT IS THE MAN?

"When I consider your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?" (Psalm 8:3,4). These verses from the wisdom literature of the Hebrews show the amazement of the human being as he becomes aware of himself before the immensity of the universe. This perception leads him to discover the mystery of himself and to formulate the great question of humanity: "what is man? Throughout the centuries man has tried to answer it, but without success. Even today, man is a mystery to himself. He does not know what he is, what his origin and his destiny are, what is the reason for his existence. 

For two and a half millennia, Philosophy has studied this question. However, in the middle of the 20th century, for not reaching a conclusion, the French philosopher, an existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre said that, as far as man is concerned, "existence precedes essence" [1]. That is: the human being is "a being that exists before being defined by some concept ... man is nothing beyond what he makes of himself”. For this philosopher, the human being is a project of himself and is not born with an essence, because there is not a God to confer it. 

Sartre says that because he is a citizen of free and democratic Europe. However, a person born in a dictatorship or a closed country, who imposes a religion on his population, will hardly be a project of his own or what he would like to be. Many people, too, are already born with health problems or physical defects that prevent them from being what they would like to be. The fallen man is not free. When he is not a prisoner of life's contingencies, he is a prisoner of his passions. Soon the mystery of man remains. 

Science is another means by which man seeks to understand his being and reason for being in the world. For it the human being is nothing more than a product of the evolution of matter in time. But that is an unsatisfactory answer, since the evolutionist idea is nothing beyond a theory. There is still no evidence that life originated from inert, non-living matter, or from an initial cell resulting from spontaneous and random chemical reactions (abiogenesis). This would require a miracle as extraordinary as what the biblical text states. It is relevant to remember that science has never observed abiogenesis happening in nature, nor has it been able to create a form of life through controlled experiments. 

"The fact that living beings have morphological, biochemical and genetic similarities does not necessarily imply that they came from a common ancestor. This would involve "evolution above the species level," a purely theoretical process never directly observed. It would be something like an ape evolving into a human being. Such hypothesis is only studied through fossil analysis and research on similarities and differences in the morphology of organisms, studies that are incipient, fragile and with inaccurate conclusions" [2]. 

But when the psalmist asks the question "what is man?", he doesn't ask it out of ignorance. He knows a lot about man, his origin, his destiny and his reason for being in the world. He does it as a form of exaltation to God, who although he is the Creator of all things, cares about the human being. For the psalmist there is no doubt: man has his origin in God and was made "little less than angels", with glory and honor and dominion over all creation (Genesis 1:26; Psalm 8:5-8). 

The Apostle Paul also understands man as the psalmist. He claims that God created man to be holy and blameless in His presence "to the praise of His glory" (Ephesians 1:4,12,14). Man can only be explained in the person of God, because according to the sacred text he was created in accordance with "the image and likeness" of him (Genesis 1:26). All this questioning about "what is man?" occurs because he is separated from his Creator. He is a lost being. He does not know who he is, where he came from, where he is going, or why he is in the world. So Paul says, "once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation..." (Colossians 1:21,22). Man discovers the truth about himself when he returns to God through Christ.

Antônio Maia - M. Div.

Copyright

[1] SARTRE, Jean Paul. O Existencialismo é Um Humanismo. Petrópolis-RJ: Vozes. 2012

[2] MAIA, Antônio. O Homem Em Busca de Si – Reflexões Sobre a Condição Humana na Parábola do Filho Pródigo. amazon.com.br