3 - Humanity

Summary

‘What is the human being’, the Psalmist asks God, ‘that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you attend to him’? (Ps. 8:5, LXX) How, indeed, can we define what it is to be human? Reviewing the diverse ways in which human beings have thought of themselves across the centuries, Charles Taylor concludes: ‘I suspect that no satisfactory general formula can be found to characterize the ubiquitous underlying nature of a self-interpreting animal.’¹ Given that we exist in time and, individually and collectively, grow in time, to find a universal definition would perhaps be as impossible as trying to step twice into Heraclitus’s river. And yet, that the human being is indeed something particular, worthy of God’s mindfulness and attention is presupposed by the Psalmist.