JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
2010
A
Human Being What?
A human being. “A human being what?”, I always think when I hear this strangely tautological phrase.
“I’m gonna walk the dog being”—a phrase you never hear. “There’s a mouse being in the kitchen!”—equally rare. “Flowers are pollinated by bee beings”—worthy of a court jester. Yet humans go around calling themselves “human beings” constantly.
Dictionaries blithely make it a distinction without a difference: “human being” simply means “human,” they unhelpfully say. The abridged “Oxford English Dictionary” buries the term as a pendant usage to “human.”
Where lexicons are more specific, they become only more confusing. An old “American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language” I have lying around inexplicably defines “human being” as bearing a specifically scientific connotation: “A member of the genus Homo, and especially of the species Homo sapiens.” And under the “human” entry, it offers this bizarre usage note:
“Human (noun) is acceptable on all levels and in contexts not limited to the scientific or technical, according to 72 percent of the Usage Panel…In somewhat earlier usage, human being was often recommended as the better choice on a formal level, though human has a long history as a noun.”
A long history, indeed, as “human” predates “human being” in print by at least two centuries. (“Human” is itself a tautology; it is derived from the adjectival version of “Homo,” which is simply Latin for “man.”) Whatever “72 percent” of a “Usage Panel” may blither on about, we still have zero explanation from our linguistic overlords as to why “human being” would be considered preferable, or why it exists at all.
Google is a far more nimble authority on usage than any dictionary. The first 10 results it spit up for “human being” were mostly mystical and philosophical. “What Is a Human Being?” asks a Theosophy article. “On the Human Being and Being Human,” expounds a chapter in a Marxist book. There is even a Human Being Company—with a trademarked name—that will make humans even being-er in exchange for a bunch of money. (Another mystery is that no one is ever a “human non-being,” even when they’re dead.)
These usages affirm my instinct that “human being” is a specialized referent to the moral or religious. “Being” is not some mere honorific or intensifier. It means exactly what it says: the human considered existentially.
Other top-10 Google hits elaborate the theme. “Human-Being.us” is an art site featuring portrait photography. “Is this a new species of human being?” asks the Guardian newspaper about an odd hominid fossil find; a usage that at first appears technical, but really describes yet another clue in the great mystery of our existence. Employing that great leveler, triviality, Google offered as its number one hit a news story about an ex-girlfriend of pop starlet Lindsay Lohan (my deliberate, blissful ignorance of whom I sacrificed for the sake of this column) calling her “an angry human being”; a depersonalizing, denigrating usage that nonetheless speaks to morals and something vaster than the word “person” would suggest.
The full, online edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary,” or rather the “Oxford English Thesaurus,” once again offers synonyms rather than definitions for “human being.” Yet the answer is right there in its usage citations: “human being” is a theological term formulated in direct contrast to “Supreme Being.”
The “OED’s” first citation for the term comes from a 1694 booklet by Matthew Tindal, a Protestant freethinker, titled “A Letter to the Reverend the Clergy of both Universities, Concerning the Trinity and the Athanasian Creed.”1
The Athanasian Creed is a now unfashionable religious oath in which the faithful declare their belief in the Christian Trinity—the concept that God has three personages (including Jesus and the Holy Spirit), yet is still one deity.2
The Creed is obsessed with the concept of personhood. (“Person,” often presented as another rough synonym for “human being,” has a more casual and rootless meaning; it derives from a Latin term for the masks worn by theater actors, a sense that survives directly in our word “persona.” In a typical religious irony, the wrong person is credited with the Athanasian Creed’s authorship.) Christians must “acknowledge every Person [of the Trinity] by himself to be God and Lord.” They must agree that “the whole three Persons are coeternal, and coequal.” They must believe in the Trinity while “neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance.”
To Tindal, this was “wholly unintelligible….It is a Multiplication without an Addition…,” and little more than pagan polytheism hiding behind a cloak of fake mystery.
An acerbic, incisive rationalist, Tindal wrote his booklet to demolish Trinitarianism and mysticism and to call for religion to be tied to naturalism.3
“…[T]here are almost as many Trinities as Writers…,” Tindal noted of the bevy of conflicting, contradictory apologias for the Trinity. He outlined some of the arguments for a three-in-one Swiss Army knife God. One example of many was Modalism, which claimed that each person of God is a kind of expressive gesture of a single deity. Just about the only thing the various Trinitarians agreed on, he noted, was persecuting Unitarians.
Trinitarian theology, Tindal said, amounts to “wrangling about the meaning of the word Person.”
“Person is a Term which we give to all Intelligent Beings, either Man, Angel or God…,” he said, dissecting the argument down to its skeleton: the meaning of “being.”
“To be, is common to all things, it is the different ways of Being that makes the difference between Things; and three different ways of Being makes three different Things,” Tindal argued.
Then, setting up the Modalist argument so he could knock it down, Tindal gives us the first known use of our phrase in print: “…[T]he three Persons…are the same in Divine, as Posture in human Beings.”
Thus “human being” arrives as an analogue to “divine being.” And Tindal goes on to concern himself with the classic euphemisms “Almighty Being” and the “Supream [sic] Being,” along with such populations as “real Beings,” “substantial Beings,” “self-existent Beings,” “sensible Beings” and “self-conscious Beings.”
Tindal’s use of “human Beings” is singular. If he had punctuated the sentence correctly (with a comma after “human”), it would not even be a separate term per se. He does not use the term again in his “Letter,” nor could I find it in a skimming of two of his later works on the same subject.4 It is unlikely that Tindal was the source, or even a significant popularizer, of the term.
But his usage is natural and surely illustrative of the reasons other writers hit upon the term as well. “Being” is that strange road on which we run parallel to the divine, or the natural, or call it what you will (cf., the “great chain of being”). Appending the word to “human” is a nudge in the ribs to think about not just what we are, but who we are.
So useful is this theological term that “human being” now appears in modern-English versions of the Bible. It always connotes a high moral purpose; e.g., Levitcus 24:17: “Anyone who strikes down any other human being will be put to death.”5
After a reading of Tindal, “human being” strikes me as a pretty Modalist term itself; intended not as a repetition, but rather as an elaboration that tries to plumb the depths of what it means to be human. In attacking the idea of a divine trinity, Tindal presaged how we would soon talk about ourselves as a human duality.
1 Accessed via Early English Books
Online research database. (In all quotes, I have modernized the spelling where
it used the long S.) In an odd coincidence, the librarian who helped me access
the database was wearing a T-shirt for a band called Godsmack.
2 A representative text
is available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.iv.i.iv.html.
3 Some of Tindal’s
thoughts on mystery in religion:
If anything be so far a Mystery as
to be hid from Human Understanding, it is impossible to believe it: A Man may
believe there are Mysteries, or hidden things, but he cannot believe those very
Mysteries, as long as they continue such.
….
A Man that is obliged to believe a
thing, must first know what it is before he can believe it, otherwise he may be
obliged to believe he knows not what; it being impossible to believe any thing concerning empty Sounds, or Words that have no
Idea’s [sic] fix’d to them.
4 “A Reply to the Second Defence of the XXVIII Propositions, Said to be wrote in
Answer to a Socianian Manuscript” (1695); and “The
Reflections on the XXVIII Propositions Touching the Doctrine of the Trinity, In
a Letter to the Clergy, &c. maintain’d, against
the Third Defence of the said Propositions” (1695);
both via Early English Books Online.
5 “The New Jerusalem
Bible” (Reader’s Edition), Henry Wansbrough, ed. Cf.,
the New International Version Bible: “If anyone takes the life of a human
being, he must be put to death”; and the King James Version Bible: “And he that
killeth any man shall surely be put to death.” The
NIV also uses the term “human” several times, but in less morally charged
passages. The Contemporary English Version Bible uses “human being” even more
than NIV, but in different passages. (See the Bible concordance site
BibleGateway.com.)
A significant source not cited in the text or
footnotes is “Matthew Tindal, Freethinker: An Eighteenth-Century Assault on
Religion” by Stephen Lalor (via Google Books). Many
thanks to the librarians at the Joseph P. Healey Library, University of
Massachusetts Boston, for extraordinary assistance, and to Sean Scheiderer for “Oxford English Dictionary” assistance. Posted May 2, 2010. Updated May 3, 2010.