MAN
582
MAN
image of God he created him" (Gen., i, 27); and "the
Lord God fonned man of the shme of the earth: and
breathed into his face the breath of life, and man be-
came a living soul" (Gen., ii, 7; so Ecclus., xvii, 1:
"God created man of the earth, and made him after
his own image "} . By these texts the special creation
of man is established, his high dignity and his spiritual
nature. As to his material part, the Scripture de-
clares that it IB formed by God from the "slime of the
earth ". This becomes a " living soul " and fashioned
to the "image of God" by the inspiration of the
"breath of life ", which makes man man and differen-
tiates him from the brute.
B. This doctrine is obviously to be looked for in all Catholic theology. The origin of man by creation (as opposed to emanative and evolutionistic Pantheism) is asserted in the Church's dogmas and definitions. In the earliest symbols (see the Alexandrian: SI o^ r& vdirra fy^ycro. r& ip oipapoU Kal firl yijt^ dpard re Kal d^para, and the Nicene), in the councils (see especially rV Lateran^ 1215; " Creator of all things visible and in- visible, spiritual and corporeal, who by this omnipotent power . . . brought forth out of nothing the spiritual and corporeal creation, that, is the angelic world and the universe, and afterwards man. forming as it were one composite out of spirit and boay "), in the writing of the Fathers and theologians the same account is given. The early controversies and apologetics of St. Clement of Alexandria and Origen defend the theory of creation against Stoics and neo-Platonists. St. Augustine strenuously combats the papan schools on this point as on that of the nature and immortality of man^ soul. A masterly synthetic exposition of the theological and philosophical doctrine as to man is given in the "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, I, QQ. Ixxv-ci. So again the "Contra Gen- tiles", II (on creatures), especiaUy from xlvi onwards, deals with the subject from a philosophical stand- point — ^the distinction between the .theological and the philosophical treatment having been carefully drawn in chap. iv. Note especially chap. Ixxxvii, which establishes Creationism.
C. Scholastic philosophy reaches a conclusion as to the origin of man similar to the teaching of revelation and theologv. Man is a creature of God in a created universe. All things that are, except Himself, exist in virtue of a unique creative act. As to the mode of creation, there would seem to be two possible alterna- tives. Either the individual composite was created ex nihilOf or a created soul became the informing principle of matter already pre-existing in another determination. Either mode would be philosophi- cally tenable, but the Thomistic principle of the suc- cessive and graded evolution of forms m matter is in favour of the latter view. If, as is the case with the embryo (St. Thomas, I, Q. cxviii, a. 2, ad 2uin)^ a suc- cession of preparatory forms preceded information by the rational soul, it nevertheless follows necessarily from the established principles of Scholasticism that this, not only in the case of the first man^ but of all men, must be produced in being by a special creative act. The matter that is destined to become what we call man's " body " is naturally prepared, by successive transformations, for the reception of the newly created soul as its determinant principle. The commonly held opinion is that this determination takes place when the organization of the brain of the foetus is sufficiently complete to allow of imaginative life; i. e. the possibility of the presence of phantasmata. But note also the opinion that the creation of, and information by, the soul takes place at the moment of conception.
III. The End of Man. — In common with all created nature (substance, or essence, considered as the principle of activity or passivity), that of man tends towards its natural end. The proof of this lies in the inductively ascertained principle of finality. 77fe imtur»! end of imn may b^ conriaered from two
points of view. Primarily, it is the procuring of the
f^or^ of God. which is the end of all creation. God's
intnnsic perteetion is not increased by creation, but
extrinsicaliy He becomes known and praised, or
glorified by the creatures He endows with intelli-
gence. A deoondary natural end of man is the attain-
ment of his own beatitude, the complete and hierar-
chic perfection of his nature by the exercise of its
faculties in the order which reason prescribes to the
will, and this by the observance ot the moral law.
Since complete beatitude is not to be attained in this
life (considered in its merely natural aspect, as neither
yet elevated by grace, nor vitiated oy sin) future
existence, as proved in psycholorv, is postulated by
ethics for its attainment. Thus the present life is to
be considered as a means to a further end. Upon the
relation of the rational nature of man to his last end —
God — is founded the science of moral philosophy,
which thus presupposes as its ground, metaphysics,
cosmology, and psychology. The distinction of gooa
and evil rests upon the consonance or discrepancy of
human acts with the nature of man thus considered;
and moral obligation has its root in the absolute ne-
cessity and immutability of the same relation.
With regard to the last end of man (as "man" and not as "soul"), it is not universally held by Scholas- tics that the resurrection of the body is proved apo- dictically in philosopher. Indeed some (e. ^. Scotus, Occam) have even denied that the immortahty of the soul is capable of such demonstration. The resurrec- tion is an article of faith. Some recent authors, how- ever (see Cardinal Mercier, "Psycholo^e", II, 370), advance the argument that the formation of a new bodv is naturally necessary on account of the perfect final happiness of the soul, for which it is a condition sine qua non, A more cogent form of the proof would seem to lie in the consideration that the separated soul is not complete in ratione naturce. It is not the human being; and it would seem that the nature of man postulates a final and permanent reunion of its two mtrinsic principles.
But there is de facto another end of man. The Catholic Faith teaches that man has been raised to a supernatural state and that his destiny, as a son of God and member of the M3rstical Body of which Christ is the Head, is the eternal enjoyment of the beatific vision. In virtue of God's infallible promise, in the present dispensation the creature enters into the covenant by baptism; he becomes a subject elevated by grace to a new order, incorporated mto a society by reason of which he tends and is brought to a perfection not due to his nature (see Church). "The means to this end are justification by the merits of Christ communicated to man, co-operation with grace, the sacraments, pra^rer^ good works, etc. The Divine law which the Christian obeys rests on this supernatural relation and is enforced with a similar sanction . The whole pertains to a supernatural provi- dence which belongs not to philosophical speculation but to revelation and theological dogma. In the light of the finalistic doctrine as to man, it is evident that the "purpose of life" can have a meaning only in reference to an ultimate state of perfection of the in- dividual. The nature tending towards its end can be interpreted only in terms of that lend; and the activi- ties by which it manifests its tendency as a living being have no adequate explanation apart from it.
The theories that are sometimes put forward of the place of man in the universe, as destined to share m a development to which no limits can be assigned, rest upon the Spencerian theory that man is but "a highly-differentiated portion of the earth's crust and gaseous envelope ", and ignore or deny the limitation imposed by the essential materiality and spirituality of numan nature. If the intellectual faculties were indeed no more than the developed animal powers, there would seem to be no possibility of limitin|( th^U
