WHAT IS A HUMAN BEING?
I have touched lightly on that question here on the page these last couple of years, and thought seriously about it for more than twenty.
Ever since, in fact, one evening when I suddenly found myself, to my own surprise, in a Darkness I could not find my way out of - and it therefore dawned on me that I had to be something other than what I went around imagining. And something entirely different from what I had been taught. At school. On television. By everyone I trusted and believed in. And by the culture.
Now the culture war - or what I call the Battle for Reality - has intensified across the whole Western world, and we are being leaned on hard by arriving cultures and faiths that come with their own chillingly clear - and, for some of us, chilling - answers. So it seems like a good time to open the question.
Because no society, no culture and no civilisation lasts very long without answering it.
So.
I would like to go first. Then you can all laugh, and then go home and think and come back with better answers. I would appreciate that.
I will begin at the Beginning, a place where everyone can follow along. But first we need to take a trip to Greece.
Follow me.
If you dare.
The Greeks had a custom when two friends were to be parted for a long time. They took a potsherd and broke it down the middle, and each kept his half. Many years later a son or an envoy could lay his half against the other's, and if the broken edges fitted, both knew that they belonged together.
The shard was called a symbolon, from sym-ballein - 'to throw together'. We still have that word, we have just made it much smaller. When we say "it's only a symbol", we mean that it isn't real.
The opposite word, dia-ballein, 'to throw apart', we also still have. Diabolos.
That word we gave horns and a tail, so we could laugh at it. Even though there is nothing to laugh at in what the word points to - that which divides and splits.
But there was a word before both of them, the word for the very thing that gathers, and that word we have lost in an even stranger way. We still say it, we even swear with it, but there is no one left who can say what it means.
God.
So let us start by trying without the words and only with what can be measured and weighed. The way the Spirit of the Age has taught us that Reality is - that, and nothing else.
What all our best science can tell us begins a fraction of a second after the Beginning, which is estimated to lie just under fourteen billion years back.
What came before, and why there is anything at all, it does not know, and the honest ones among those who work in the field say so themselves. But from there - whatever set it all going - they can calculate.
And their calculations tell us, cut very tight, the following -
Everything was gathered, unimaginably dense and hot, and it expanded and cooled, and in the course of the first minutes the lightest nuclei came into being - hydrogen, helium and a trace of lithium. There was nothing more. No stone, no water, not a single atom of carbon.
Then almost four hundred thousand years went by before it was cool enough for the nuclei to hold on to their electrons, and the first real atoms came into being. In that same moment the universe became transparent, and the light that escaped back then is still on its way. It hits us from every side of the sky to this day, stretched so far out that the eye cannot see it, but we can measure it, and what we measure is a picture of a gas that was almost perfectly even. In some places it was one hundred-thousandth denser than in others, and that difference became decisive, because had the gas been perfectly the same everywhere, there would have been no place where anything could begin.
For there was something in that tiny little thickening that pulled. We call it gravity, and we have an equation for it that holds to many decimal places, but the equation says how much it pulls, and not quite why matter seeks matter at all. But let that lie. It apparently does. The slightly denser places drew more to themselves and grew denser still, and it took its time, a couple of hundred million years in darkness in fact, before the first clouds had collapsed so far that the pressure at the centre ignited them. That is how the first stars were made.
A star is not just a lump of condensed mass hanging out there somewhere in space. It is an equilibrium, where gravity pulls inward and heat pushes outward, and it shines for as long as neither of the two wins.
And inside that equilibrium happens what could not happen anywhere else. Hydrogen is pressed together into helium, helium into carbon and oxygen, and in the largest stars all the way on to iron, and when they die and explode, it is all scattered and gathered again in new stars with planets around them. Our own sun is one of the late ones. The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood were made in stars that burned out long before it was lit.
That is not an image. It is what matter is.
Try noticing how it is built all the way through. In the smallest, an electron around a nucleus. In the middle, a planet around a sun at exactly the distance where water can be liquid. And in the largest, several hundred billion suns, our own among them, in slow orbit around the centre of the galaxy, one lap taking more than two hundred million years. Things that are different, held in relation to each other - close enough to belong together and far enough apart not to collapse into one.
It is the same move all the way from the atom to the galaxy. Not sameness, not chaos, but differences held together by something. And that move is what you need to keep an eye on now, because it comes back.
But Thomas... What on earth does all this have to do with what a Human Being is?
I'm getting to you. Have a little patience, it is not easy material to unfold. But let us take the first step here.
Your body does the same thing, only closer in.
You began as one cell, and it divided, and somewhere along the way the cells became different. Even though they all carry the same recipe, some of them became an eye and others heart muscle and others again skin. And so on. Right now you consist of around thirty trillion cells, each with its own membrane, its own boundary, its own task, and yet you are one. And it gets stranger. Because the matter does not even stay. Most of what you consisted of ten years ago has been replaced, eaten and breathed in and carried away again. What has remained, and what is you - Human Being - is the form, the way it is all held together.
In that sense you are less a thing than a river or a current that has kept its shape.
Lucky enough, you might say. So the rest of us can more or less recognise you from day to day - and year to year.
Now take a Human Being one minute before death and one minute after and put them on the scale. Nothing is missing. Every atom is still there, the same nuclei from the same stars. What is gone is the holding-together, and the scale cannot see it, even though it was the whole difference.
Here I must for a moment go further than the scale can follow. Those of you who read along here on the page know well where I stand with regard to Man. But let me refresh it anyway.
A Human Being is what we can see and touch, but it is also everything that has not yet taken form through it, its dreams and thoughts and the stories that circle around it - like weather around a mountain, all the things no one has ever been able to put on a scale, even though anyone who has loved someone knows that that was what they loved. And deepest within, I believe that Man is Light. A Spark, laid at conception, which everything else gathers around, the cells and the thoughts and the years, the way the gas once gathered around the place that was a shade denser than the rest.
And that spark does not sit in a random place.
In my understanding a Human Being is stretched out between two lines. One runs horizontally, through time and things, work and bills and the people we have to put food on the table for tonight.
The other runs vertically, through everything that does not pass away, what we bow to and what we reach for when no one is looking.
There are many words for exactly those two lines.
The horizontal and the vertical. The temporal and the eternal. The worldly and the spiritual. I am not as concerned with what we call them as with the fact that none of us can let go of one without losing ourselves.
Because whoever lives only horizontally goes flat, and whoever lives only vertically never comes down to do the dishes. We are stretched, the way the star is, between what pulls and what pushes, and the spark, what Man deepest is, shines and burns precisely there, where the two lines cross. In the middle of the cross.
And no. I absolutely do not believe it is a coincidence that it was drawn that way. Though I am ready to discuss which shape of this cross, crossing, span or whatever we should call it shows most clearly what I am writing about here.
But I wrote that Man deepest is Light. A Spark. And I have a reason for that.
Because when that spark leaves us - whether it is put out or fetched Home, I don't know, I only know what my faith tells me - the opposite process begins straight away.
Within minutes the cells set about dissolving themselves, and what for eighty-some years held together - against all odds - lets go piece by piece, until the form the human body was is completely gone and only the matter is left, ready to become something else.
“For (star)dust thou art, and unto (star)dust shalt thou return.”
You don't have to follow me there. Call it what you like, or don't call it anything. But see that there was something that everything gathered around - and that it is that which is missing afterwards.
Death is just the place where it is easiest to spot, because there it happens all at once and cannot be undone.
But the holding-together can also fail while the heart is still beating, slowly and one place at a time, and that is the kind of failure we actually live with. That is why it is worth knowing what it looks like, because it does not happen in only one way.
There are two ways it can go wrong, and they are the same two wherever in a Human Being we look.
The body knows both of them. One is rot, where the parts let go of each other. The other is the tumour, where cells stop listening to the whole and just become more of the same. Dissolution and uniformity look like opposites, but for the body they are one thing, namely the loss of what held the differences together.
The same goes for what is in us that cannot be put on a scale. A Human Being can break apart inside long before the body does. It says one thing and does another, it wants three things at once and none of them fully, and it is one person at home and another at work and a third when no one is looking.
Take a completely ordinary Wednesday. You drop the kids off, answer emails, do the shopping, that is the horizontal line. And then there is the moment when you watch your child sleep, or stand by a coffin, or promise someone something you know will cost you. That is the vertical. They are not two lives. It is the same life, seen from two directions.
We have an old word for the opposite. Integrity.
It means nothing more than wholeness, being of one piece. And a Human Being can go wrong the other way, when one thing grows and eats the rest, an anger or a cause or a grief that in the end is the only thing speaking in there. The one Human Being is in pieces, and the other has become one big piece of the same thing. Neither of them is whole.
And it also applies, I believe, to the deepest thing in us, what we orient ourselves towards.
Whoever has nothing above him does not get peace because of it. He gets many small masters instead, desire and fear, envy and the gaze of others, and all the other voices pulling each in its own direction. And whoever has had his Highest laid down over him from outside, as a rule he is not allowed to question, may well hold together, but only the way a clenched fist does. Strained. Tense. In both cases it is the crossing - the cross, the span - that is gone, the place where the two lines meet, and where a Human Being both stands under something and stands on his own. Willingly. Freely. And Responsibly.
And holding together costs something, that is perhaps the most important thing physics has to say here.
A house no one lives in does not fall down because someone tears it down. It happens by itself. The warmth seeps out and the damp gets in. Anyone who has had a garden or a marriage or a club knows it.
*Division* needs no help, because it is where things end up when no one does anything.
*Gathering* is the one that has to be chosen, every day, by someone.
And that is where Man stands.
For fourteen billion years things gathered without any Human Being choosing it. Gravity asked no one, and the cell follows its recipe and cannot do otherwise. Wherever that recipe came from. And then a creature turns up that can see it. It can see that things hang together, and wonder why, and it can decide whether it wants to take part.
A stone cannot split anything. A wolf cannot lie. Only a Human Being can do diabolos' work, and only a Human Being can do the opposite with open eyes, build and forgive and keep a promise no one could force it to keep.
...
That is my answer.
Man is the place where what gathers stopped happening by itself and became something that has to be answered.
...
The star cannot choose to shine. The cell cannot choose to listen to the whole. You can. And that means that what for fourteen billion years happened by itself now depends on what you do - in your own life, in your family, in the country you live in. It is not a burden you asked for. But it is the only one that makes you a Human Being and not just matter.
I believe that is why the Ancients built temples. They did not necessarily understand the word better than we do, and it has probably never been possible to understand it, because what holds everything together cannot itself be one of the things. But they had noticed that it does not stay put in a Human Being by itself. So they set it high and built houses for it, and they bowed, so that the direction would not be lost in the years when no one could explain it. "Aim for what gathers you and those around you and the world and the cosmos". That was the whole content, and the rest were ways of remembering it.
We did something else in our time, and we had good reasons.
We learned to take things apart. Analysis literally means 'dissolution', loosening something into its parts, and it is the best method Man has found for understanding how things work. It gave us penicillin, aeroplanes and the internet, and I would hate to do without any of them.
The method works so well that we forgot it was a method. We began to believe that what it could not find did not exist. And it cannot find the holding-together, because that is not a part. It is what the parts are held together by.
The mistake we made, in my view, lies in a small, almost imperceptible conclusion we drew along the way - that when you have taken something apart and found only parts, then the parts are what there is.
And once that is settled - and for the vast majority of us it happened without our being asked, we were simply taught that there are only the parts - then Love is chemistry, and Man is an ape with a spreadsheet. And then the good is a matter of taste.
The idea is old. It has lain with "the learned" for nearly four hundred years, ever since someone first described nature as clockwork and shortly after Man as a machine. A hundred and fifty years ago there was someone who said out loud what it would cost us. And in the last fifty it has stopped being an idea and has become what we all just *know*.
We say that we are just being sober. Realistic. Fact-based. “Trust the Science.
But look at what we do.
We build houses no one would paint a picture of... and we have started to look like them.
Take a walk through a new housing estate and then through an old part of town, and look at the people along the way. You know what I mean.”
What once gave a man or a woman a figure you could recognise from a long way off has become something you would rather apologise for, and what is left are people who are pleasant and rounded off at the edges and hard to tell apart. We cannot agree on what a woman is. We have more connections than any generation before us and are more alone. And in the evening two or more people sit in some deadly dull television studio looking very clever, while they kindly explain to us that no one can know what is true and good.
They even say it as if it were true and good to know.
I don't even blame them, they have really just taken the method at its word 🤷🏼♂️
But a society, a culture and a modern faith that has no usable answer to what a Human Being is, an answer that inspires and draws people in, does not stand empty for long. Into it now come others, from other places in the world, who have never been in doubt, and their answer is clear - a Human Being is a servant, the law lies finished, and your task is to bow beneath it without question. And I understand well why that pulls, because at least it holds together.
So now there are two answers on the table. Here.
One says that you are just parts, and that you can do with them whatever you like. Because there is no meaning. A Human Being is a piece of meat with a bit of current in it and a somewhat befuddled consciousness, only here and now, and only what we can measure and weigh. And that's it. The other says that you are a part, and that you must do as you are told.
The one dissolves and the other makes uniform.
The one has only the horizontal line left, and the other lays the vertical down over the Human Being like a beam, instead of letting it run through it.
In the one your choice doesn't matter, and in the other it has been made for you.
What we once knew here in the Western world was a third.
That every Human Being carries within it an image of what gathers everything. That the spark I wrote about is not my invention, but the oldest thing we have said about ourselves.
The ancients had a name for it.
Imago Dei.
The image of God. And that does not mean that we look like God in appearance, the way children draw him with a beard. It means that in every single Human Being there sits a small version of what gathers everything - a spark of it - and that this is why we can do what nothing else in the universe can. See the connection. Wonder at it. And choose to serve it or break it. A stone does not carry that image. Nor does a wolf. We do, all of us, from the first day.
And from that followed everything we take for granted today and can no longer give reasons for. That a Human Being has a worth no human gave it, and which no human can therefore take from it. That it has its own boundary and its own task and still belongs together with the others. That no state, no system and no herd can own it. And that even the king stands under something higher than himself.
And you feel it, don't you. That there is something there. You stand and look at it, and it makes no sense that you should be just meat and current - and on top of that you have been told that meaning isn't something you can expect either.
So.
Try anyway the one experiment that doesn't require you to believe in anything.
Notice what happens around what you orient yourself towards. Not what you think about it, but what it does to you and those around you.
Try it on a week with training and a week without. On a conversation where you said what you meant, and one where you didn't. On an evening with the people you care about, and an evening with the phone. On a promise you kept even though it cost you, and one you let slide.
See if you can spot that some things make you clearer and braver and at one and the same time bring you closer both to those you care about and to yourself. They make the room more beautiful once you have been in it. While others make you dull and scornful and alone, and a little smaller than you were before you began.
You don't need me to read the result. You need no faith to see it, and you have seen it your whole life.
I ask no more than that you look. There is a direction where things fall into place, and one where they fall apart, and it was there long before us. It has never asked what we thought of it. It only asks what we do.
You are - Man is - one half of the shard.
Who might have the other?
❤️🔥🪽
