What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
The words of Psalm 8.4 reflect the teaching of Genesis 1 about the nature of our humanity and our place in the created order. It captures what one of the priest’s prayers at Mass names explicitly: “O God who didst wonderfully create yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity”. The Hebrew word in the Psalm actually means mortal but in both the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, the gender neutral anthroposand homo, meaning humankind, are used, thus tying the Psalm passage to the Genesis text and to the word ‘ha’adam,’ again an all-encompassing sex neutral term for our humanity. In English that term, following the Hebrew in Genesis and the Greek and the Latin translations, has been rendered generically as man. ‘Ha’adam’ is Adam, not (yet) as a name but as a comprehensive and descriptive term – man meaning humankind.
Genesis 1 presents creation as an orderly affair which proceeds not in a temporal order but in a logical process of distinguishing one thing from another. Man, ‘ha’adam’, is a creation of the sixth day, at the end of that process but not as an afterthought and not as an accident. Genesis 1 says that man, ‘ha’adam’ is made “in the image of God,” the creator. God as Creator is utterly distinct from creation and emphatically not created since God is the intellectual principle of all reality. At once connected to everything else in the created order, from dust to angels, only about Adam, man, is it said that he is made in the image of God. It suggests profoundly the dignity of our humanity. And as the Christian prayer indicates, there is the concept of dignity both in creation and in redemption. These are powerful ideas that shape a whole tradition of ethical discourse.
This idea of our humanity as having a special relation to the Creator is critical to the Judeo-Christian understanding and carries over into Islam. That sense of connection is also there in Hinduism in the relation between the Atman, the self, and Brahma, the Creator. The idea of image becomes a matter of considerable controversy in the relations between Islam and Christianity, reflected in such things as the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries that contributes to the different artistic representations of religion, not only between Islam and Christianity but also within the Christian world between East and West. One of the Islamic Hadiths – collected saying of Mohammed – speaks of Adam being made in the image of Allah. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, one point is clear. Man made in the image of God is not God, not divine. Yet the idea of image confers a certain dignity.
To consider Genesis 1 about the place and nature of our humanity is to find a deeper and more philosophical basis for the language of rights and the dignity of man in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world. What Genesis inaugurates is a way of thinking about the dignity of our humanity as God-given and not simply as a human construct. As such it is both a challenge and a corrective to our contemporary confusions and uncertainties about identity and about our relations with one another in the human community.
What does it mean to say ‘ha-adam’ – man – is made in the image of God? It does not mean that we are in the image of God physically or sexually. We can only make sense of the idea by way of reference to what is said about God in Genesis 1. That has entirely to do with creation as an intellectual process of distinction and separation and the idea, too, that “God saw that it was good,”and, indeed, at the end of Genesis 1, in a kind of summary phrase, “God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good”! That includes our humanity. God creates and cares for what he creates. Powerful ideas.
The idea of the dignity of our humanity challenges how we look at one another for what is being said is that everyonebears the image of God by virtue of their very being. If God is mindful of us in this way, then surely we should be mindful of one another and of God in the same way.
St. Paul, commenting on Genesis 1 in Romans, observes that “ever since creation” the invisible things of God are made known in the visible things of the created order. Such is natural theology. We can go from the effects to cause, from creation to a knowledge of the Creator. But Genesis 1 also provides, it seems to me, the basis for another kind of reasoning that leads to the knowledge of the existence of God, namely, knowing God through ourselves, through an inner reflection upon our own nature as being made in the image of God. In this sense, Genesis 1 provides the basis for two intellectual traditions about the existence of God: knowing God through the senses, and knowing God through the activity of the mind. Think Aquinas and Averroes, on the one hand, and Anselm and Descartes, on the other hand.
The dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God also includes the troubling idea of domination, an idea that is easily misconstrued if disconnected from what we learn about God in Genesis 1. It can’t mean that the world exists simply for us and for our manipulation which leads to the destruction of ourselves and our humanity. No. Domination here has to be seen in relation to the Creator as Dominus, as Lord, whose dominance is fundamentally about providential care for creation. Thus Genesis 1 offers an important corrective to our misuse and abuse of nature and of one another by recalling us to our place within the created order and our relationship to God.
2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s first publication of Frankenstein, itself the modern creation myth, and one which is profoundly aware of the destructive nature of our humanity in its hubris and pride of domination. Dr. Frankenstein makes a creature, a kind of monster, and yet the real monster is himself. But Frankenstein flees in disgust and horror from the creature which he has made. This stands in stark contrast to the Genesis story. God creates our humanity in dignity and God cares for our humanity. His Sabbath rest is about taking delight in creation. Such ideas can only challenge us about how we think about ourselves and one another. We can, it seems, like Ananias, Azarias and Misael, bless the Lord and “praise him and magnify him for ever,” as the concluding verses of the Benedicite, Omnia Opera have reminded us.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy