“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan…// The proper study of Mankind is Man,” wrote Alexander Pope (d. 1774), a sublime Catholic poet touched by Protestant humanism and secular empiricism.
It’s wrong to demand philosophical rigour from a poem, even from An Essay on Man written by an exceptionally brilliant man. It’s even more wrong to yank two lines out of a long work and try to reach some conclusion on that basis.
But taking those two lines out of context, as a self-contained statement, one can still disagree most respectfully. If we “presume not God to scan,” I doubt we can succeed in “the proper study of Mankind”. Man alone provides an inadequate teaching tool.
When we study something, the object is usually to make it intelligible. My argument today is that religion alone can provide a useful cognitive tool for the study of man.
Physiologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, jurists, political scientists can join forces to advance the understanding of the physical nature of man, his physiological needs, his interactions with others – the outer shell of a man’s life and its bouncing about the larger shell of society.
If you think that this is all there is to man, please read no further – these reflections aren’t for you. However, if you acknowledge the obvious fact that there is a mystery to man that goes beyond his physical life, then you’ve just opened the door to another cognitive universe.
All three Abrahamic religions ascribe this duality of man to his creation in the image and likeness of God. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation makes this lineage especially palpable: for some 33 years God lived as fully a man, while remaining fully God.
My contention is that no philosophy probably and no moral philosophy definitely can make man intelligible if it doesn’t start from this metaphysical premise. Many have tried; all have failed.
The religious doctrine of love goes back as far as history does. Two millennia before Christ, the commandment to love one’s enemy was written in Sumerian cuneiform, and in every possible alphabet since then. But only in Christianity did it take pride of place. Christ, speaking through Matthew, thundered above all other moral teachers because he was so much more than just a moral teacher.
Loving everyone, including those out to do us harm, seems a tall order. We are brought up to treat people with the respect they deserve, no less but also no more. Here we are told to treat people with the love they may not deserve, not ostensibly at any rate.
We’ve just touched the outer edge of the mystery hidden deep inside man, taken the first step through the open door of another world. There we realise that, though our respect for people is contingent on their individuality, our love for them isn’t.
It’s not their outer qualities that we are commanded to love but the mystery hidden deep inside them, one we all share alike, regardless of our virtue or lack thereof. Suddenly we realise that we are envoys to a world governed by physical causality and human laws from another world, one governed by love and freedom.
Once they’ve reached this realisation, hermetic monks withdraw from this world and its laws. Yet such religious heroes are few, as are all people endowed with exceptional gifts touching on genius. The rest of us have to live our lives within the confines of this world and its notion of justice.
But we aren’t talking about a how-to guide to virtuous behaviour. We are talking about making man intelligible, and that’s where natural and man-made laws fall short.
A society of men can’t be run solely on the Beatitudes, but when it’s run without any reference to them whatsoever, it ignores the metaphysical essence of man. That puts human laws into sharp inquisitory focus, and they often fail to pass muster.
The modern political philosophy of inalienable rights guaranteed by a social contract was the brainchild of Hobbes and especially Locke. Both thinkers made perfunctory references to God, but only for propriety’s sake, to use the language their audience expected.
Their ideas migrated to France and to the New World, where they were tersely encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence. It stated that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
That was pure Enlightenment talk. The right to life is indeed a natural, God-given right whose exercise doesn’t impose any obligations on others and hence doesn’t require their consent. The right to liberty, on the other hand, is a political construct hinging on consensus and even definition. But “the pursuit of happiness” is especially interesting.
Contrary to the popular open-ended misinterpretation, this is a synonymous paraphrase of Locke’s term ‘the pursuit of estate’. This pursuit depends on the security of the estate gained, and indeed property rights are the cornerstone of modern political thought (this side of our Labour government, that is).
However, during the Civil War, the last act of the American Revolution, property rights clashed with the modern conviction that slavery is reprehensible. Southern planters referred to exactly the same Lockean scripture when arguing that abolitionism violated their property rights. In the end they lost the war but won the argument – assigning an absolute value to human rights in a secular context leads to an intellectual cul-de-sac.
The Southerners didn’t regard their Negro slaves as fully human, or even human at all. The morality of owning slaves was to them no different from the morality of owning livestock – they were blind to the metaphysical mystery residing in every man, no matter how poor, lowly and downtrodden. Their title to their slaves was as legal as their title to their cows, and that was all that mattered.
The Romans who developed an intricate legal code still in use throughout much of Europe saw no contradiction between their sage laws and chattel slavery. Moreover, not only did they own slaves but they also treated them with feral cruelty, of which gladiatorial fights were perhaps the mildest manifestation.
Their society was ruled by law, that of the contemporaneous Hebrews was ruled by religion. They too owned slaves, but they treated them more humanely and even set them free during anniversary years. Using our terminology, the Hebrews saw slave ownership as a leasehold, not a freehold. Religion offered them insights into the inner, metaphysical essence of man, the same for all at its core. Thus the Hebrews understood something the Romans didn’t – and acted accordingly.
When Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, he left his listeners in no doubt that his kingdom was higher than this world. It also operates in much higher strata of intelligence, where everything secret – including the metaphysical essence of man – becomes manifest.
Therefore the proper study of mankind isn’t man but God for, without God, man will for ever remain unintelligible. Man has to reach beyond himself to understand himself, and I’ll leave you with this thought.