Abstract
Modern social conditions and the leading ideas of our era have together contracted our sense of what it is to be human. We easily see ourselves nowadays in terms of the many systems upon which modern life depends. We are consumers in economic systems, we are patients in medical systems, we are users in technological systems, and so on. Sometimes, it feels like life is one big, printed circuit board and we are the nodes or switches where transactions happen within these systems. It is not uncommon to show up for a doctor’s appointment only to find the receptionist makes no eye contact with you at all and looks solely at a networked computer, “processing” your arrival within its information system. It is hard not to feel that you have been somehow diminished in this transaction. There are many similar modern conditions, written in letters almost too large to read, that shape our sense of what it is to be human today.
Intellectually too, the leading ideas about human nature in the modern period do not give us a deep sense of anthropology. We are described chiefly in terms of our biology and our psychology. Outwardly, we appear as highly evolved organisms within an environment; inwardly, we have the therapeutic self-consciousness of “psychological man.” 1 I look out through my eyes, but the self that is doing this is looking is highly constrained compared to the ancients’ view of ourselves. I am a bundle of perceptions, emotions, and thoughts contained within my skin like a zip-lock bag. Notwithstanding our many achievements, the modern self is a small remnant of a much larger Christian soul.
There is much in the modern period, as it bears on anthropology, that tends in this direction of diminished self-perception when compared with premodern, Christian anthropology. I would like to focus in the first half of this essay specifically on the way that human self-understanding has contracted in the modern age as we have come to view human beings more and more through the lens of quantitative measurement. For, increasingly, we find we are data points on a statistical curve. Alongside the modern conditions and categories for human nature, there has been this steady preoccupation with making modern calculations concerning human nature.
So, as we consider that question of whether we can or ought to measure spirituality in some way, I would like to register a caution, like sending up a warning flare: we must be careful to avoid reducing human nature to fit the tools of our analysis. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a certain kind of social scientist, human beings are precisely those subjects whose behavior is capable of operationalization, survey, quantitative emplotment and tabular display. Human qualities may be converted to quantities and counted, with calculation allowing a further level of powerful abstract analysis. In such a frame, human beings are interchangeable subjects capable of numerical generalization.
This way of thinking is suddenly very topical. Since March 2020, we have all become arm-chair epidemiologists. Perhaps this can make us more aware of the importance in modernity of the conversion of quality to quantity. An alien researcher from a distant galaxy, observing us since 2020, would surely notice all the data collection, the statistical analysis of risk, the medical testing at scale, and the modeling and projecting and steady reporting of case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths. I am not here wanting to engage in debate about the usefulness of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, the accuracy of modeling, or the efficacy of public health measures, but I want instead just to observe that something that happens when we develop a habit of abstracting human beings as interchangeable data points on a statistical array.
Modernity has in many ways granted human beings an unprecedented sense of control over nature, and the spread of a novel coronavirus was a shock to all the modern systems that deliver this control. Especially at first, we wondered, would the financial system collapse? Would fiscal and monetary interventions stabilize markets, stave off hyper-inflation, avoid deflation, and prevent a great depression? Would supply chains collapse and render daily life precarious? (Who can forget the hoarding of toilet paper?) Would the medical system be overwhelmed? Would our educational systems survive? Would the welfare system be robust enough to cope with mass unemployment? A microscopic pathogen suddenly exposed the taken-for-granted quality of modern life as much more fragile than we had ever imagined. In our time of crisis, modern human beings did not turn so much to art, culture, and religion or to local observation and inference and anecdote, as to massive data collection and analysis at scale. This is how we hoped to reassert control and prevent system failure.
I suspect, however, that something happens to us when we begin really to indwell in the sort of epidemiological modeling that we have been subjected to daily for the past year and more. I cease to live the life present to me immediately, here in my own body, in this moment, in this place, with my own unique history. The philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich spoke prophetically therefore in the 1990s when he said, “In the most intense way…disembodiment happens through what we call risk awareness. If anybody should ask me,” he said, “what is the most important religiously celebrated ideology today, I would say the ideology of risk awareness.” He explained what he meant: “Why is risk so disembodying? Because it is a strictly mathematical concept. It is a placing of myself, each time I think of risk, into a base population for which certain events, future events, can be calculated. It’s an invitation to intensive self-algorithmization, not only disembodying, but reducing myself entirely to misplaced concreteness by projecting myself on a curve.” 2 His compound word “self-algorithmization” perfectly describes the pandemic discourse since the spring of 2020, as we have located ourselves repeatedly in the daily reporting of “cases” or in the percentage of the population vaccinated.
In contrast to this level of abstraction, there is the uniquely irreducible experience of persons-in-relation. During the year 2020, my father’s health declined to the place where he entered hospice care. His body was shattered. He had advanced cancer and Parkinson’s, and for 7 months, my mother, sister, and I visited him as we were permitted, and it was a holy privilege to be present to him and to share in his unique experience of suffering and consolation in expectation of his coming death and entry into life eternal in the presence of Christ. We were with him to the end, and the last words he heard were me saying, “I love you, Dad.” To us, he was never, of course, merely a bundle of risk factors or the sum of quantitative medical tests or a component in a medical system. The last days of his life were certainly not experienced as measurable QALYs. These are units in actuarial calculations used in public health and insurance, the so-called “quality adjusted life years,” where the year of death counts as zero, since the quality of life is pretty bad that year, and perfect health for a year counts as one. QALYs let you make calculations and treat human beings as interchangeable and replaceable for the assessment of health policy and budgets. So, no, our experience of my father in hospice had nothing to do with such calculations. My father’s life was irreplaceable, non-interchangeable, uniquely complex, and utterly beyond the sort of knowing that involves p values, confidence intervals, and odds ratios.
I am not saying that quantitative analysis has no place, but it must be chastened and circumscribed by a deeper anthropology. After tracing the conversion of quality to quantity in history, especially noting where this has concerned the spiritual life, I would like to recover theological resources from an earlier age that might help us to enlarge our sense of human nature and challenge the reductionism inherent in calculation. We will observe first the deflation of human nature that happens in quantitative measurement, like letting air out of an inner tube, and then we will turn to reinflate human nature with help from the ancients.
Where then did this quantitative approach to human life come from? What are the precedents for the sorts of modeling we see routinely now in epidemiology and economics? The effort “to calculate of an uncertain future” goes back to the mathematicians Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665) in the 17th century. 3 They exchanged letters working out how to calculate the odds of rolling double sixes with dice, given several chances. They also worked on the “problem of the points” (also called the “division problem”), which involved calculating how to divide a pot of money where a wager has been placed but you stop part way through the game. You must be able to calculate precise odds for how the game could finish. Indeed, the first practical application of probability risk calculation was to gambling by figures such as the Scottish entrepreneur and adventurer John Law (1671–1729), who made vast sums of money in cards before becoming a successful banker (for a period) and establishing the first central bank in France. 4 Soon these calculations were applied to the probability of death to quantify risk for government-issued annuities—where the government was effectively placing a bet on how long the annuitant would live. In January 1693, the mathematician and astronomer Edmond Halley tackled the problem in “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives.” 5 The City of Breslau had collected detailed data on mortality, including, crucially, data of age at death. Halley recognized that he could use these data to model probabilities of death at any interval of years. Moreover, he said that to contemplate death in this manner had “Physical and Political Uses.” Sure enough, soon others in Scotland were calculating more exact odds for life insurance. This was the birth of the revolutionary idea that we can predict the future and make decisions accordingly. From the beginning, it was in the areas of gambling, finance, and public health where these probability calculations had their first application.
Even Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God was framed in these terms as a risk-benefit analysis, involving at least three probability arguments. 6 It was an aleatory calculation, where an uncertain event has implications in terms of profit and loss. (“Aleatory” derives from the Latin noun ālea that referred to a kind of dice game. This was, truly, early game theory or decision theory.) Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “Let us then examine this point, and say, ‘God is, or He is not.’ But which way shall we lean? Reason can settle nothing here; there is an infinite gulf between us. A game is on, at the other end of this infinite distance, and heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?” 7 He ran this as a probability calculation and concluded that a rational person should live as though God exists, for if God does not actually exist, one will have only a finite loss (some pleasures given up), whereas if God does exist, one stands to receive infinite reward and avoid infinite losses.
Voltaire, the outspoken critic of Christianity, sensed that something was wrong with Pascal’s “wager.” He described it as “a little indecent and puerile: the idea of a game, and of loss and gain, does not befit the gravity of the subject.” 8 We might note that it was also inherently reductionistic by distilling the idea of God and salvation (or damnation) to fit the terms of a probability equation. It was not wrong, but it was diminished theologically. Pascal’s utilitarian wager raises the question of whether there was, in other ways, a temptation for Christians to adapt the new interest in quantitative methods to advancing the cause of Christ. Could spiritual life be accelerated by the use of data and calculation? This is, of course, a contemporary question where institutional life today seems everywhere to be governed by metrics and critical success factors that can be scored and counted. Institutions want to make evidence-based decisions and so we gather data as never before. Every church website has its analytics. We’ve googlified ourselves. This has no doubt been accelerated by the move online during the Covid-19 crisis.
The history of calculation also intertwines with the history of spirituality. There is a long history of interaction between financial record-keeping and spiritual account-keeping. This requires turning the clock back further, but it is useful to see something of how measurement began, here and there, to figure significantly in the spiritual life itself. In the early medieval period, the rise of tariffed penance in Irish, Gallic, and Carolingian piety added an element of precision and calculation to the prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Specific sins were given quantifiable, measurable penances. 9 In the 13th century, this was extended with the co-ordinate rise of double-entry bookkeeping in Italy and the intensification of sacramental confession and moral fastidiousness. 10 Indeed, this was the era where quantification really took off with the first mechanical clock, marine charts for navigation, perspective painting, and the new accounting techniques. 11 The Gregorian reforms in the church, and Italian book-keeping, progressed together.
Two centuries later Ignatius Loyola wrote his Spiritual Exercises and included a “particular examen” of conscience for the first week of the retreat that invited the exercitant to identify a specific besetting sin and then to look back at midday, and again at the end of the day, making tick marks on a register to indicate precisely how many times this sin happened. 12 Over the course of a week, the hope was that one could see a diminishment in the number of tick marks. Although Ignatius was very aware of the danger of scruples, this was well and truly data being collected and analyzed for spiritual improvement, and it bore remarkable similarity to medieval tally sticks for financial record keeping. Jesuit spirituality developed a reputation in its later history for a certain casuistical character, and only relatively recently, in the 1970s, did Jesuits decisively transform the particular and general examen of conscience into an examen of consciousness that was more focused on discernment than moral book-keeping. 13 This was in the spirit of Ignatius who was so concerned to see God in all things.
My own research has focused largely on the early evangelical movement and its concern for “true religion.” Did its leaders collect and analyze data for spiritual improvement? Should we?
At the very beginning, there is evidence that those who would lead the movement were preoccupied, sometimes obsessively, with measurement. Some of this may have come to them indirectly from Jesuit sources such as Lorenzo Scupoli. For a while, it seemed as though they would pull the plant out of the ground every few minutes to see if it was growing. John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield and more than a dozen young men at Oxford in the 1730s kept detailed track of their spiritual condition every hour of every day in a tabular format that included a column to record one’s “temper of devotion” on a scale of one to nine. 14 In similar spirit, the young Jonathan Edwards made a list of 70 detailed resolutions in the 1720s and he would examine himself minutely each week by these, keeping a diary to record his effort to keep them. 15 This pattern of precise self-assessment was also promoted in popular devotional manuals at the time, such as Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul.
Such detailed self-assessment shared in the wider culture of early modern self-management. One of the spiritual handbooks known to several of the early evangelicals counseled keeping a “Book of Spiritual Accounts.” 16 The choice of metaphor here is telling, since it was again accounting that popularized more exact record-keeping. The consumer revolution, commodity money, and the expansion of credit hastened these practices of the conversion of “quality to quantity” right around this time. 17 Some 80 bookkeeping texts were published in the 1730s and 40s as the evangelical movement was beginning. Many of these were written for ordinary folk. As one of these handbooks remarked, “Tradesman’s Books, like a Christian Conscience, should always be kept clean and neat; and he that is not careful of both, will give but a sad Account of himself either to God or Man.” 18 Accounting worked both ways. By such means there was an intensification in the 18th century of what contemporaries called “l’esprit géometrique” or “the quantifying spirit,” including a new obsession with tabular display. 19 There is a direct line from here to the methods of the social sciences today.
However, the use of numerical measurement in self-examination was for the most part (John Wesley excepted) a short-lived experiment at Oxford, and the early evangelical leaders never did much analysis of the data they collected, as far as I can tell. In fact, the moral fastidiousness of these young men was the very thing that drove them to self-despair and an entire trust in Christ’s free, atoning grace. Through evangelical conversion, each of the key leaders came to see the importance of what Thomas Chalmers would later call “the expulsive power of a new affection.” 20 The felt presence of the Holy Spirit was the fire that melted away scruples and moral fastidiousness. Although they trialed the practice of turning spirituality into measurable quanta, they came finally to realize this was a dead end. They turned instead to more qualitative measures of spiritual maturity and growth in grace.
Even in this short-lived experiment with spiritual data, they only ever really focused on individual self-improvement. At the level of populations (the congregation, parish, denomination, etc.), evangelical leaders did not collect data or employ any sort of statistical or quantitative methods, though this was beginning to happen in various areas of political economy, as we have seen with Edmond Halley and his use of mortality tables.
Practices of qualitative self-examination remained important, however. The characteristic approach was to evaluate the character of an individual or a community according to certain “marks” of maturity. The writer who contributed most significantly to an evangelical literature of discernment was Jonathan Edwards. Beginning with his Faithful Narrative (1737), and then continuing in a series of further works, he contrasted inadequate criteria for assessment with true and proper criteria. The context was the heightened atmosphere of revival, but his response was deeply considered. We may take as a specimen his Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741). For Edwards, signs such as intense bodily effects or a deeply impressed imagination were at best uncertain signs of the work of God’s Spirit. What counted as reliable marks of the presence of the Spirit were a heightened esteem for Christ as Saviour and Lord, a quickened conscience, an intensified love for Scripture, a deeper orthodoxy, and an increased love for God and neighbour. He was also willing to apply these principles empirically to what was going on in New England in 1741 and make a prudential judgement that, all things considered, there was something genuine going on. 21 He made a moral judgment but there was no appeal to data—no surveys, and no randomized sampling of control and test groups.
Generally, this is the way evangelicals made their assessment of spiritual maturity. It was by acts of pastoral discernment according to qualitative biblical marks of genuine spirituality. They used numbers for attendance, membership, and money, but they abandoned statistics for spiritual assessment.
For the scientifically inclined, it may seem that everything nonquantifiable is just so much connoisseurship. I think the leaders of the early evangelical movement acted in ways intermediate between these two poles (between data-driven science and mere connoisseurship). Discernment involved criteria and there was a definite shape to the Christian life, but judgment of cases required experience, wisdom, and prudence. When the clergyman John Newton tried to describe the general pattern of growth in grace, he paused several times to acknowledge that one could never arrive at pure generalization without distorting the particulars of human experience. “The Lord the Spirit is sovereign and free in his operations,” he declared. And though the Spirit gives to all the same view of sin, themselves, and the Saviour, yet “with respect to the circumstantials of his work, there is, as in the features of our faces, such an amazing variety, that perhaps no two persons can be found whose experiences have been exactly alike.” 22 Newton exercised judgment, but he resisted the “quantifying spirit” that would make the unique experience of individuals somehow universal and interchangeable. He was a wise old man.
I like the fact that Newton compared the uniqueness of each person’s spiritual experience to the uniqueness of each human face. For the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this is indeed where ethics begins. Prior even to any moral reasoning, I am confronted by the face of the other, and this commands my reverence. 23 The encounter with the irreplaceable face of another human being is utterly unique and ineffable. In philosophical language, ontology precedes ethics. Jonathan Edwards thought so too: he described the foundation of ethics, rather abstractly, as “the consent of being to being.” 24
Here is where we may turn afresh to ancient theological resources to aid us in responding to the reductions evident in modern anthropology. We have noted that there are modern conditions and ideas, and a l’esprit géometrique or calculating spirit, that have had the effect of diminishing human nature. If we turn to premodern Christian resources, we find a different way of understanding our humanity. Comparatively, earlier believers had a heightened sense of contingency, a larger consciousness of our capacity for transcendence, and a more humble approach to epistemology.
To say that something is contingent is to say that it could have been otherwise and that it need not necessarily have been at all. It is to recognize with the ancients that God is the source of all our being and our well-being. Our finite existence is pure gift, sustained and bounded by the eternal God who chose freely out of love for us to be here and to be blessed with his blessedness. He need not have done so. No law of nature compelled him. It was, as St. Paul says to the Ephesians, “according to his good pleasure” (Eph. 1:5, cf. Phil. 2:13). We do not therefore move through the world like a billiard ball, as one object among other objects.
We have been given a nature capable of loving union with our Creator. We were made, as Augustine said, capax Dei, capable of God. 25 The capacity of the finite to rest in the infinite, the creature to rest in the Creator, is what gives a bottomless dimension to human nature. Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “Our existence as a whole is immersed in a far deeper sea, the bottomless ocean of the love of the Father.” So, every moment, as we move through time and space, we are floating “like a ship above the immense depths of an entirely different element…, namely, the unfathomable love of the Father.” The sustaining love of the Father is a profound condition for our existence that can reframe how we think of human beings even as we live in the midst of modern devices and systems.
When Bernard of Clairvaux wrote about human nature in the 12th century, he recognized its sublime dignity and greatness as analogous to the divine Word, in whose image human beings are created. It is the essence of God’s eternal being to be blessed: “It belongs to God alone that being is blessedness.” But to human beings comes a prerogative of the second order, “that to be is to live; this is the prerogative of the soul.” He continues: “Even if it is a lowlier prerogative, it can be lifted up, not only to living well, but also to living in blessedness: not that then it will be like God, whose being is blessedness, but it will be glorified by its likeness to him by whom it was raised up…it rises to blessedness of life.” This was his way of speaking of human being as contingent, not necessary, but capable by nature of sharing in the eternal blessedness of God: “Only the soul of man is created with this dignity, which is inseparable from it, of being life from life…so that it is not far from the highest degree, where to be is to live in blessedness.” 26
So, with a sense of contingency, we become aware of a bottomless dimension to the world in which we find ourselves. But, even more, this contingency is true of us. Being ourselves made capable of God, the human person is “the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself.” 27 If we are made to be in union with our infinite Creator, finite though we are, and if we are indeed made to be “filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19), then our insides are bigger than our outsides. This is why premodern writers spoke not of the small, enclosed self—just me alone with my thoughts inside my head—but of the unimaginably vast Christian soul.
The best example of this comes from that most feisty of Spanish nuns, Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), who at age 62 wrote her masterpiece, The Interior Castle. As the title suggests, she saw the soul as something vast. “I don’t find anything comparable to the magnificent beauty,” she says, “of a soul and its marvellous capacity.” 28 The place where God lives is paradise, and logically therefore the soul of the righteous person must be nothing less than a paradise. For all our sinfulness, Teresa recognizes that the soul still has a sublime dignity and beauty of the highest order for no other reason than that it still has the capacity to be a dwelling for the Lord himself. And if the soul, like heaven, can be a home for God, then it must not only be beautiful, but like the heaven Jesus described in John 14 it must be spacious and have many rooms. And so, Teresa imagines many rooms or dwelling places in the interior castle, “some rooms up, others down below, others to the sides,” but most importantly “in the center and middle is the main dwelling place where the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place.” 29
The contrast here to modern anthropology is profound. Instead of a small autonomy, we find a large capacity. For Augustine likewise, the human person, made to be a dwelling place for God, had vast dimensions. His whole project in his autobiographical Confessions was to explore the recesses and folds of memory to find the God who was always already there as the soul of his soul, the life of his life. He realized not only that was there more to God than he could ever fully know, but also that there was more to himself, made in God’s image, than he could ever know. He confessed that he was not entirely transparent or manifest even to himself. He writes these reflections in the form of prayer in Book X, “The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, an immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am.” And then he finds himself confused when he realized this meant his mind could not contain itself entirely and that there must be a leftover bit, and where exactly was that bit anyway? He finally gets a little exasperated: “Who is to carry the research beyond this point? Who can understand the truth of the matter? O Lord, I am working hard in the field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become a problem to myself.” I think we have all felt that way sometimes. He takes a breath, as it were, and tries again. “The power of the memory is great, O Lord. It is awe-inspiring in its profound and incalculable complexity. Yet it is my mind: it is my self. What, then, am I, my God? What is my nature?…My God, my true Life, what, then, am I to do? I shall go beyond this force that is in me, this force which we call memory, so that I may come to you, my Sweetness and my Light.” He continues the search. “See how I have explored the vast field of my memory in search of you, O Lord!…Since the time when I first learned of you, you have always been present in my memory, and it is there that I find you whenever I am reminded of you and find delight in you. This is my holy joy.” He realizes at last that God was always there, both above him, below him, in him, and sustaining him, and he writes famously, “I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!…You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself…You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have no being at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; your broke my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me…You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of your peace.” 30
Augustine, like Bernard and Teresa later, recognized here the vastness of the human soul which is made to be a dwelling place for God. This was so much the case that Augustine confessed a certain limit of knowability even of himself.
Thus far, we have found two ideas to help us push back against the reductionism of anthropology in the modern world: human contingency (we are not system-dependent but God-dependent) and human capacity (we are not small and enclosed, but spacious and open to God). But we have also hinted at a third idea suggested here by Augustine: human unknowability (we are not fully known by anyone but God himself).
To explain the contingent nature of our being, theologians speak of an analogia entis, or analogy of being. We exist. God exists. But our existence is not exactly the same as God’s. It is analogical. We are finite and derivative; God is infinite and self-determining. We exist therefore because God exists. We are created being; God is uncreated Being. But there is a passage in Balthasar where he says, “The highest instance of the analogia entis is the analogia personalitatis.” 31 That is, there is an analogy, as Bernard also saw, between personhood, human, and divine. 32
I would like to draw out one aspect of this analogy as it pertains to knowability. The persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit are each eternally open to the other in a communion of perfect love and knowledge. It is of the essence of personhood to be thus known in communion. So also, for us. And yet as finite creatures, we are not able to know God exhaustively as he knows himself. For all that we know God truly and adequately in his self-revelation in Christ, there is a remainder that is beyond our knowledge. One might know more and more, and know truly, but one can never know all. The theological phrase that specifies this is “negative theology,” not in the colloquial sense that there is anything bad about God, but in the theological sense that once we have spoken of God, we must acknowledge that there is more that cannot be said. When we speak about God, it must therefore be with a chastened sense of the limits of our language to describe him. Our words cannot “circumscribe” God, in the sense of drawing a finite circle that encloses him. 33
Theologians, past and present, have been careful to describe this unknowability in God as not in a proper sense negative or dark. It is just so to us. It is, in truth, an excess of light. As the hymnwriter says, “‘Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.” To be circumspect in speaking of God is not the same as postmodern skepticism. In fact, Jacques Derrida knew the difference between post-structuralist indeterminacy and the Christian version. He called Christian apophasis “negativity without negativity.” 34
Is there, however, an analogy here for the knowability of human persons? The place where human and divine unknowability come together most significantly is in the revelation of Jesus Christ on the mount of transfiguration. Here the disciples for a moment beheld the glory of Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal Son of God, resplendent in divine light. This was also at the same time the revelation of our true humanity, the first and the last Adam, or, as Irenaeus said, the glory of a human person fully alive. 35
In the Eastern iconographical traditional, the transfiguration holds a central place. All icons are, in a sense, icons of this icon, where archetypically we see earthly, material substance bear the weight of divine glory. From the beginning of the tradition, the figure of Christ in a transfiguration icon, radiating eternal light from beyond the world, is surrounded by an almond-shaped, full body halo, or mandorla. This can be seen, for example, in the 6th-century mosaic icon of the transfiguration at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. Distinct from pagan use of such devices, the mandorla or halo shades from light on the outer edges to darkness in the center. This displays visually the theological concern that there is more to God than we can apprehend. John Chrysostom wrote about the disciples’ experience on the mountain: “For as eyes are darkened by an excessive splendor, so at that time also…the exceeding greatness of the light weighed down the infirmity of their eyes.” 36 From this point forward, we see this motif consistently in the iconography: in fresco in Cappadocia in the 11th century, on wood by the famous Russian icon writer Andrei Rublev in the early 15th century (where the dark center is presented in the shape of a star), and consistently in the Russian tradition thereafter. 37
So, God is revealed in Jesus Christ, but we cannot therefore know God exhaustively. Or, even better and more dynamically, we may say with Gregory of Nyssa that although our knowledge of God will expand for all eternity, we will never get to the end of this knowing. 38 What then is the analogia personalitatis here? It is this. If human beings are made in the image of God, made capable of God, intended for his likeness, and if in Jesus Christ we see true humanity revealed as a human being divinized, as one standing in the presence of unending glory, transfigured by the indwelling presence of God—if all this is true, then may we not say by analogy that there ought to be a negative anthropology that corresponds to negative theology? As our knowledge of the divine persons is limited, so also, we may say in a lesser way, mutatis mutandis, that our knowledge of human persons, made in his image, is also limited. If this is true, then we must be on guard against all modern anthropologies, implicit or explicit, that would reduce the human person to fit the heuristic tools of the observational human sciences. Again, to a hammer, everything is a nail. You get only the data that your tools are designed to see. Everything else is dark. A properly “negative” theological anthropology will always stand in awe of another human person as made in God’s image and limit for this sake the claims made to explain human nature and behavior. On the basis of the analogia personalitatis, one will remember, always, the partial and heuristic nature of any empirical research into human nature.
The person I know best in all the world, after more than 35 years of marriage, is my wife Carolyn. Each day, I come to know her more. As pure gift and undeserved grace, she is turned toward me in love, open to me, freely giving of herself to be known. And yet, as all lovers understand, I shall never come to the end of knowing her, no matter how many years we get together. If this is true of lovers, then how much more so for the knowledge we gain of one another through data collection and analysis.
We need to recover a sense of hushed reverence in our desire to know another human being. The universal belief of the ancients was that ensouled human beings were the highest and most complex of God’s creatures. As Bernard says, echoing Psalm 8 (“a little lower than the angels”), human persons, being made capable of blessedness, approach “that highest degree” of being that belongs only to God. 39 Drawing on Aristotle and other classical writers, premodern Christian thinkers understood there to be a chain of being, a hierarchy that rose from inanimate nature through vegetative life and sentient life to the rational life of human beings to the life of angels and God himself. 40 We might picture a corresponding rising level of complexity to the epistemology involved, from the study of a rock, a tree, an animal, and another human being. One bends over, or gets down on all fours, to study something on the ground, but one rises gradually to stand upright in the dignity of a human being to turn and look into the face of another human being as an equal—someone of the same complexity and depth as me.
The intellectual who has most nicely reprised this way of thinking in modern epistemology is the Hungarian-British scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), known for demonstrating the importance of tacit knowledge in all domains and breaking down the division of science from other forms of personal knowledge. In a set of lectures entitled, The Study of Man, published in 1959, he wrote, “As the scientist gradually advances from the study of inanimate nature to that of life, approaching first lower, then higher forms of life and eventually ascending to the study of intelligence in the higher animals, ever higher modes of comprehension come into play, and the study of man merely adds to these yet one more, still higher mode of comprehension.” 41 From physics to chemistry, through biology and zoology, to the human sciences, there is rising complexity: “These valuations become more penetrating and more complex at each successive stage. They also become progressively more intimate.” 42 Finally, “When we arrive at the contemplation of a human being as a responsible person, and we apply to him the same standards as we accept for ourselves, our knowledge of him has definitely lost the character of an observation and has become an encounter instead.” 43 And what is the proper heuristic tool for studying another person, face to face in history? “We need reverence to perceive greatness,” says Polanyi, “even as we need a telescope to observe spiral nebulae.” 44
Reverence returns us to the importance of theological anthropology. C. S. Lewis preached a famous sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1941: “The Weight of Glory.” He developed a biblical understanding of divine glory and what it means that human beings have been called to share in this glory. At the end of the sermon, he drew out the implications.
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour…It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
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Perhaps, then, while undertaking statistical analysis today, it is important to re-imagine each person not as a data point, but as a unique human being transfigured—bathed in light supernal and resplendent in glory.
Two years ago, Carolyn and I took a group of students away for a weekend prayer retreat. Part of the time was spent as a silent retreat, and while the students were off praying on their own, Carolyn and I were praying for them. While I was praying, calling my students to mind one by one, I had an overwhelming experience. It was not a vision, as such, but it was as though I could see the face of each of my students turned to God in prayer, reflecting the divine glory that was turned toward them. I was looking at them looking at God. It reminded me of those moments when you see the faces of those you love made beautiful by candlelight around the dinner table. Each of my students was unspeakably beautiful in the presence of God, and I was moved to tears by the vision of each one clothed in light from beyond the walls of the world. As Augustine said, “You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me.” This was a passing vision, but I think it witnessed to something true. It offered a glimpse of the anthropology that we need most to recover in the midst of modern conditions, categories, and calculations. Even while reading epidemiological numbers or conducting longitudinal studies of spiritual formation, we should remember: There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
