The "Becoming" of Man

This morning, one of my professors recounted the unfolding of a massive, three part civil war in Congo-Brazzaville that spanned most of the 1990s. He ended his description by stating that the situation had essentially been doomed from the beginning, that "rational actors could have acted in no other way."

In a sense, the message echoed the theme preached to elementary and high schools throughout the Cold War: inevitably, because of who man is, he will destroy himself.

In a slightly different context, this idea and its powerful implications came up at a recent conference on Machiavelli's Thought. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli attacks Christian humility as the cause of massive political abuse. Taught by Christian doctrine to turn the other cheek and wait for heaven, he believed that the peoples of Christendom were giving an open invitation to repressive, weak statesmanship. Mid-way through a discussion on this topic, a professor observed that by removing Christian humility, Machiavelli also removed the possibility of being more than human. To avoid the cost of this heavenly perspective (whether rightly or wrongly perceived by the church at this time) Machiavelli chose to reject the spiritual realm entirely for what he saw to be the good of actual, tangible reality. However, as the professor rightly perceived, under the right circumstances, the rational nature of man might very well lead to the abolishment of man.

Josef Pieper, in his essay on Hope, writes about what it means when we describe humans as pilgrims. He explains that this is more than a convenient metaphor, it is a metaphysical truth. To be human is to literally be "on the way." Though we may seek after the good, we do not yet possess it--to fully know the good would mean we were like angels, or even God himself. God is a "being" in the fullest sense, but man is perpetually in the state of "becoming." The implications of this, if we follow Pieper's logic, is that to talk about man in terms of only man himself isn't to talk about man at all! If man is in the process of becoming something more than himself (or, as is also possible, less than himself) he can only be properly understood in terms of the spiritual ends which he is pursuing.