On Being Human

Joan of Arc

saint, joan of arc, church militant

Being human is the strangest being of any. We are material, alive, naturally intelligent and loving, but most wonderfully, we possess the gift of supernatural life.

A being is alive if it has the potency to act for its own good or the good of another of its own kind. This potency is expressed in plants in their ability to assimilate and reproduce. In plants these capacities are exercised without knowledge. Assimilation and reproduction occur at the level of biochemistry.

Animals have no direct control over assimilation and reproduction, but do influence them through sense knowledge and appetite. In their capacity to move, animals can hunt for food and, prompted by appetite, they eat, thereby initiating the biochemical processes of assimilation.

Humans have not only a wider range of movements than other animals, but such actions are under intelligent control and volition. However, the powers of intelligence and will do not extend over the biochemical processes of assimilation and reproduction.

The intellectual and volitional control of material processes is only over one’s own muscles. At the level of influencing the material world about them, humans like other mammals can only move things about due to their musculature. Human ingenuity is not the cause of physical and chemical processes. Humans move things in proximity to facilitate physical and chemical processes. As elaborate as any engineering feat may be, it is ultimately the result of moving things from place to place by animal musculature.

This is preliminary to introducing and analyzing a statement of blasphemy I read some years ago. That blasphemy claimed that God made water, but it took man to make wine.

God conceived of the very nature of water and brought it into existence. This is true of all material things including grapes and yeast. Man can only move material things from place to place. It is God who creates all things including wine.

Man may have discovered what things to move into proximity so that the result is wine. It is blasphemy, in comparing water to wine, to think that moving things about the way an ant can move things about, is greater than creating the nature and existence of a material entity.

It is due to the intellectual and volitional control over the movement of our human musculature that we are able to move the material things within our scope of observation. This is a very low level control over material things.

I recall a movie in which a little girl was able to move material things solely through thought. Thereby she was able to thwart the nasty mistress of a boarding school. But, of course, it isn’t so.

Considering the limits of human abilities, it is no wonder that Jesus tells us that the final judgment will depend upon our doing or not doing the corporal works of mercy (Mathew: 25: 35-46). Yet, the true wonder is that these acts are not merely the result of moving things about by the exercise of musculature under intellectual and volitional control. They are elevated to the supernatural level of grace, which is beyond human surveillance, so that grace is a matter of faith (CCC 2005).

A beautiful theological insight into sanctifying grace was prompted by its being beyond human surveillance. Because grace is thus beyond us, we can have no direct consciousness of it. Knowledge of our possession or lack of sanctifying grace is through a moral judgement.

The court trying St. Joan of Arc tried to trick her into claiming direct consciousness of grace. She was asked, “Do you know if you are in the grace of God?” She replied, “If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God.”

A negative answer would be interpreted as saying she was in serious sin, implying the ‘voices’ she heard were demonic. If she had answered yes, the court would have charged her with heresy in violation of the virtue of Hope by presumption, by claiming objective knowledge of her state of grace. We might anticipate such a reply from a holy scholar. Yet, St. Joan was an uneducated, even illiterate, girl of nineteen.

It is in the Incarnation that the material is imbued with Divinity. As such the material is raised to a greater level than that of natural human existence. The graceful fiat of Mary, another teenager, saves us all.

Though the Divine economy of grace remains undetected by mere human surveillance, matter itself is freed by the Incarnation from the bondage of sin. Matter is imbued with Divine power in the material acts of the sacraments.

In the sacraments, human intellectual and volitional control of our musculature, immediately effect a supernatural result from natural acts. The conferring of Sanctifying Grace occurs through movement caused by human musculature in forming the words and in pouring the water of baptism. The sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin is present to us through the priestly words of consecration. We are enabled materially to consume the Lamb of Sacrifice under the appearances of bread and wine.

Other than the control over our personal musculature, we still lack any direct control over matter. Yet, through the Mass, the sacraments and prayer we influence the order of grace, which is incredibly greater than the material order.

Due to the Incarnation we do not live in a merely material world. We live in a material world imbued with grace, which does not contradict nature, but truly glorifies it. In contrast, sin disfigures nature.

Thanks to Holy Mary’s fiat, the Incarnation conquers sin and death. Joy to the world. All things are made new.

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