On Human Nature & The Task of Education
Thomas Cole (American, born England, 1801-1848). A Pic-Nic Party, 1846. Oil on canvas,
If the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy was the biggest issue for early 20th century Christianity, philosophical anthropology looks to be the defining question of the 21st. In recent months, major questions that center around human nature have made headlines: a transgender activist funeral held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City; Alabama declaring that embryos are fully human and merit legal protections; a fifty year old male swimmer identifying as a teenage girl on a high school swim team. We’ve lost consensus on what we are as human beings, and chaos follows.
In such an era, classical education remains a vital source of wisdom. Education has the same goals it always has - introduce the rising generation to the truths of the great tradition, and help them rightly perceive themselves and their neighbors within God’s creation. Classical education begins with a right understanding of human nature, and from that foundation proceeds to the task of education. Because so many voices are loudly proclaiming that there is no universal human nature, I thought a post with the Beza Institute that attempts to delineate three aspects of human nature would be helpful.
We humans exist as embodied spirits. In Genesis 1-2, God makes humans as the pinnacle of creation. He makes us “male and female;” he fills us with the breath of life. As embodied beings, we have the ability to come together, male and female, and create more image-bearers of God. This was the first command given to Adam and Eve - “Be fruitful and multiply.” Our bodies are themselves an expression of the imago dei. As such, the Christian educator has a deep respect for the body. We see each child as “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and the processes of puberty as part of God’s design for each person. For all the taint that sin adds, we believe that sin cannot destroy the beautiful goodness that is the body. In his Incarnation, God the Son hallowed the body; in His resurrection, Jesus shows us that the redeemed body is eternal. “As he is, so we will one day be,” the church fathers stated. Our anthropology begins with the body.
That anthropology is not complete with the body, however. We also exist as eternal souls. From the soul come our passions, our reason, our ability to communicate. It is the soul that most clearly evidences God’s creation within us. The soul exists with God until reunification with the body. When Jesus told the thief on the cross, “This day you shall be with me in paradise,” he testified to the difference between body and soul. Plato understood the soul to be made up of three elements: reason, spirit, and desires. The rightly ordered soul is governed by reason; reason rules the passion and constrains the desires. The Christian teacher sees in his classroom procedures, policies, and pedagogies the attempt to cultivate reason to choose holiness over sin and to orient the spirit to “love that which merits love and hate that which merits hate” (as Aristotle defines the goal of education). When we rightly perceive ourselves as teaching embodied souls, we see why teaching and preaching go so closely together in the New Testament. Both the teacher and the preacher have a concern for the eternal nature of the soul, and they function in adjacent shepherding roles. These embodied souls have at least more quality that merits reflection: we are born in media res.
The great poets began their epic poems not at the beginning, but in the middle of the action. The Odyssey opens with Telemachus longing for his father’s return; The Iliad opens after years of war; The Aeneid opens with Troy burning. The principle of beginning a great story in the middle of the action also describes the human experience. None of us are the first humans to exist. Instead, we are all the children of our parents. We enter the story God is telling after several acts, scenes, themes, and triumphs have occurred. We grow to adulthood learning of what has preceded us. Such a position requires the child, and the student of whatever age, to approach learning with humility. As the Hebrews entered the land, God required them to erect monuments, so that fathers would tell their sons of what YHWH had done on that day. Fathers were to speak of the work of God as they rose from bed, sat at table, journeyed the roads, prepared for sleep. The deeds which came before are the primary knowledge a child needs to become an adult. Such knowledge prepares the child to step into adulthood, and speak “standing on the shoulders of giants,” to borrow a line from Bernard of Chartres. It is only after learning what has preceded him that the young adult is ready to enter the conversation.
To be human is to be an embodied soul within time. As such, we grow, we learn, we reach for wisdom. The world is confused about what it means to be human, and it trumpets that happiness is found in transcending our limitations. The opposite is true. It is in learning the limits that define us that we learn what we all have in common. In so doing, we submit to the God who made us and find great joy.
