A lecture by Prof. Dr. Joseph Ratzinger, Tübingen.

According to Prof. Dr. Siegfried Wiedenhofer from Frankfurt am Main, who was Ratzinger’s assistant from 1966 to 1977, this is a lecture from the Tübingen period (1966-1969). So far a more precise date cannot be determined. The recordings are at the archive of the Pope Benedict XVI Institute, and they were provided by Prof. Dr. Vizenz Pfnür from Münster in order to be published in German. ("Was ist der Mensch?" Vortrag 1966/69, in Mitteilungen, Institut-Papst-Benedikt XVI. 1, 2008, 28-32; 41-49). Mrs. Jutta Gerardy from Trier has made the transcription. Prof. Rudolf Voderholzer has slightly edited the text and has inserted headings. Overall the text preserves the style corresponding to a lecture. HUMANITAS Review publishes this lecture for the first time in English with authorization of Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

What is man? This was declared by Kant to be one of the fundamental questions of philosophy. And beyond that, it is simply a question that is posed to man through his very existence. It is a question he cannot avoid at all, simply because he exists as an open question; because he is not a closed, round essence, which is, so to speak, already made, and that is self-answered and consummates itself by itself. Rather, the decision regarding what man is must fall anew within the sphere of his very existence; his existence lies before him as an open possibility, which he himself must answer. Whether he likes it or not, he will reach a decision, for even if he lets his ‘being a man’ pass him by undecided, he gives it a form, namely one which does not understand itself by itself. He thus answers the question about what man is. This has been strongly emphasized by existential philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre views this as a frightening fact of man’s destiny: that man is so to speak condemned to freedom; that he cannot at all avoid this abysmal openness of his essence, which lacks the beautiful shelteredness enjoyed by the animal, whose essence is fixed and realizes itself in its unmistakable form. On the contrary, man is condemned to have no essence, as it were. He is condemned to create himself anew as man; to have to answer anew what it means to be a man.

I. The frightening Openness of the Question

In view of the collapse of complete conceptions of man during this century, we become newly aware of the breadth of the question about man, of the frightening openness of this question. And also the question about freedom becomes visible again. In a time when the old normative conceptions can all be put into question, when nothing is stable anymore, the full immeasurable openness of the question about man has become an existential problem.

Yet at the same time the opposite experience is certainly characteristic of our century. For in the same period in which we witness the disintegration of everything firm that seemed to structure man, and in which we again palpate what man can become from this essence, we have at the same time become The man is the being of manipulability, not only in the sense that he views the world as an object for his power to make things, but in the sense that he increasingly experiences himself too, his essence, as material for his manipulating techniques. (…) H49 conscious, again and forcefully, of the enormous subjection of man within the biological universe. We see that man emerges from evolution; that he himself forms part of the chain in this stream of ever changing life; that his biological past not only continues to have an effect upon him, but that—as behavioral research strives to bring out—it remains its present; that he represents therefore an element of the stream, of life, of coming-to-be, and of evolution, still in its way in a process of development which we do not yet see where it leads. 

This idea, which, as it were, pulls man down from the high spheres of his illusion of freedom, and which teaches him to recognize that he comes from the midst of animality and carries it forth with him, can nevertheless be made coherent with the idea of freedom. This is possible insofar as we come up with the idea that evolution has reached a phase with man, in which he himself makes the evolution; in which he himself has become manipulable, and can in great measure determine what it means to be a man both for others and for those to come. He is the being of manipulability, not only in the sense that he views the world as an object for his power to make things, but in the sense that he increasingly experiences himself too, his essence, as material for his manipulating techniques.

This whole picture runs into a third stream of thought coming from the Marxist camp, which always makes us ever more firmly aware of the fact that man cannot be explained merely by recourse to his individual freedom, nor simply by means of biological laws. Rather, man is a product of society and its economic relations: a new disappointment for the spirit, which thereby appears as a reflection of social necessities. This, I think, roughly describes the whole seething picture of the question about man and our own existence, in the midst of all this openness and closeness. 

When in this situation one makes an effort to see and understand what the Christian actually thinks about man; where (in which place or path) in this process of being and becoming man does the Christian stand, then one becomes very disappointed with (…) This whole picture runs into a third stream of thought coming from the Marxist camp, which always makes us ever more firmly aware of the fact that man cannot be explained merely by recourse to his individual freedom, nor simply by means of biological laws. Rather, man is a product of society and its economic relations: a new disappointment for the spirit, which thereby appears as a reflection of social necessities. H50 the current answers, which we once heard—more or less—in school. Before this openness, which we find there (however much is left unexplained and unsatisfactory), Christian answers seem notoriously stale now. For example, when we are told that man is a being consisting of a mortal body and an immortal soul. And then it looks as if it all came down essentially to keeping the soul (constantly threatened by the body) out of this shell, in order to save it for a better eternity. 

The whole new problem regarding the essence of man, into which he is thrown by the experience of freedom, and by his being formed by historical, societal, and biological necessities, has at least the advantage of forcing us to ask in this place what the Christian answer actually is—the Christian contribution—to the question about man’s ‘being able to be a man’ [Mensch-Sein-Können].

I would not dare to present this Christian answer, in the midst of all the uncertainties of our present time, actually as the answer. For the Christian answer is in a certain way similar to the being of man itself. This answer is not to be taken as a finished round block; rather, it can only be lived and vividly experienced always anew, and thus be translated into the new situation of man. Today we face the task of living Christianity anew, and of thus making it again translatable and expressible, so that we stay in the midst of this open endeavor to experience again as living a word of Christian faith in our present humanity. In this way we can provide it again with its contemporaneity, but we must not thereby falsify it in its originality, which alone can guarantee its sense. For Christianity is not the reflection of our desires, but the answer to what we are and should be.

What has lastly been said demarcates the limits of what I can (and could want to) do here. What I would like to say now can only be a tiny part, as it were, of this great endeavor, imposed on every generation (and on ours quite especially), to bring Christianity into the present. There are two equally important things for the endeavor, namely: that what is brought into the present be genuine Christianity; but also that it be truly brought into the present, so that others listen to it and it becomes effective.

II. A First Answer: Man as Image of God and its Interpretations

I would like to do this just by referring to a couple of fundamental passages of Scripture about man, in which we encounter the Christian discourse about man; and by translating them into our thinking.

As is known, the first great fundamental text about man is to be found in the story of creation (Gen 1:26-27), where the creation of man is presented with that especial solemnity; a creation in which God does not only speak a word of power, but even describes the mystery of man. He lets man come into being within His own dialogue with Himself: thus man, so to speak, is from then on already integrated into God’s inner soliloquy. This is again confirmed when it is said that man is created in God’s likeness as an image of Him. And the same fundamental idea appears in Psalm 8, in which man is presented as a paradoxical being, that is actually so miserable, so insignificant, that one is surprised at the fact that God should look after him: this experience challenges us today in the infinitely changing universe, in such a way that we discover man really as a completely insignificant particle of dust in an immeasurable world, and ask: How could it be that God’s theater revolves around man? Which naïve anthropocentrism lies behind the desire to make this miserable particle of dust on the tiny point called Earth the center of God’s action? We are not the first ones to experience this. The prayer in the Old Testament was also challenged by it. He also knows man as a worm that already by the time it rises fades; and thus one cannot actually understand that he be worthy of God’s concern. Yet the Psalmist experiences man at the same time as a paradoxical being, which in the midst of its quantitative insignificance, has something by means of which it immeasurably outshines quantitative magnitudes, so that at the same time it can be said: “Yet You have made him a little lower than God” (Ps 8:6).1

We could affirm, therefore, that this is the first great statement: man as man is an image of God. Now, what does this really mean? The Bible has not attempted to define and fill in this statement with content. The Bible rather provides a functional statement, albeit one with truly revolutionary weight. Indeed, for the Bible this ‘being an image of God’ means that those who have the countenance of a man thereby acquire a divine rank. That is, the unconditional universality of the picture of man surfaces for the first time. Man is as man an image of God, regardless of race or achievement. This discovery of man behind historical particularities—the discovery that man as man is a king, and that fundamentally it is more to be a man than to be a king or minister or anything else: this takes place in this discourse about the image of God, which is how Adam, that is, man as such, was created, and in him every man. Even in what is most miserable shines the image of the Lord of magnificence.

The decisive knowledge expressed there becomes clear in Gen 9:5f., i.e. in the text following the one about the flood. In this passage man is, as it were, set once more in the story of creation, and all things, even animals, are handed over to him. The world is at his disposal. He has appropriated it, and it has been entrusted to him as his domain. Only man, it is claimed, is inviolable. Animals and plants belong to him. But the blood of him who sheds a man’s blood shall then be shed by another man, for God has made man in his image. Now, here the meaning of the idea that man is an image of God actually comes to light: not a substantial, philosophical definition of man, but a functional statement of the highest gravity. Man is an image of God. A certain dignity corresponds to every man, however miserable, deprived of rights, or insignificant he might be. This dignity is independent of his social position and racial origin. A certain dignity corresponds to every man, which nobody can take from him. He is as man a good reserved for God, inviolable. Things belong to man, but he does not belong to himself. Man is not, and cannot become, anybody’s property. It is very important to listen to this again in a world in which the slave is treated as an object to be purchased, as subject to property law, as property, and as a thing. He is nobody’s property, nor is he his own property. He is a good reserved for the Creator Himself. Being an image of God, then, primarily means the fundamental equality among all men; the discovery of man in man; and it means the higher value of every man in opposition to all merely biological and sociological considerations. It means the holy inviolability of man, who can by no means ever become the mere property of man, but preserves a dignity in virtue of which he always soars infinitely higher than all other creatures. And it also means—and this, I believe, concerns us, like the whole of it, even now—that man never owns himself as a thing, but encounters in himself also the mystery, the utterly other, the eerie, which he does not have at his disposal, but must respect. He encounters that which is infinitely greater than him; or, as Pascal expressed it: “L’homme passe infiniment l’homme.”2 Man is always infinitely more than himself. Nor is he ever given to himself as a thing, for this mystery of self-transcendence is present in him and constitutes him.

The Bible does not directly say more about the content of man’s ‘being an image of God.’ Scripture expresses only this directly, namely that all men have one thing in common: they are all aliquid divini; there is something divine present in them, a divine right. They have a right which has not been established by man, and which cannot be abolished by him either. There is an entitlement in them which is not the product of man, and over which he is also no lord, but can only bow before it. A right of which he is not the source, but which exists independently of him, and which he cannot abrogate without doing something illegitimate. A higher value which does not proceed from his own valuations, but exists independently of them. And we, who have experienced, and still experience, totalitarian regimes; who also know the hidden totalitarianism of the so-called free society, with its cult of technological feasibility; we shall know the function that accords to faith in keeping this alive, and what it means: that there is a right here that man has not established and that therefore no man can abolish; which is not at his disposal, nor is it manipulable; a right that impedes men from being co-opted, whatever be the political system.

Of course, theology has increasingly asked whether, over and above this, one could not determine a bit more of the content and intelligibility of that in which it consists to be an image of God (a functional statement which is clearly very important, and for the history of mankind, not only once, but always revolutionary).

Theologians, under the influence of philosophy, frequently thought they must give the following answer: man’s ‘being an image of God’ consists in man’s spiritual nature. God is God, it was said, man has a spirit, and this is the element connecting him with God; the element that makes him appear as an image of God. Yet nothing in the text justifies this limitation. And so it becomes understandable that since the last century an objection came up, namely: the thought that Scripture assumes a naïve conception of God and views man’s similarity with God rather as something corporeal. The Bible has a specific conception of God, and man would be similar to Him, for example, because of his erect appearance, and the like.

I think it can be shown that both interpretations are mistaken. The text never made the distinction clearly between spirit and body. Such a philosophical division is foreign to it. All anthropological concepts of Holy Scripture refer to man as a whole. The Bible views him from different angles, stresses therefore certain aspects more than others, yet none of those concepts divide him. For example, when the concept of soul appears, an existence, a whole man, is meant, and vice versa: when the concept of flesh appears, man as a whole is viewed from a different angle. The Bible, therefore, knows of no division. It only knows man as undivided and as a unity ultimately indivisible; as man who is a creature of God, and who as such and as a whole is a work of God. So he, as this creature, as an indivisible creature, is a good reserved for God. Consequently, this man, the actual, living man as such and as a whole, is the image of God and the good reserved for Him.

If one wants something more in terms of elucidation, one could at most turn to a couple of facts from the history of religion, which, as it were, show the spiritual line in which the texts are to be placed; and which, by means of what was overcome, allow us to see more clearly what is actually meant here from the path that was travelled, and from the part of the path that was by then finished. The history of religion does not initially start with the anthropomorphic God. For the primitive man defines himself, i.e. man, as a being so weak and miserable and vulnerable; so miserable compared with the powers and forces he has to deal with, that he by no means could view himself as, so to speak, the paradigm of absolute power—which is what he means by God. And so he initially worships the powers he has to deal with, which he encounters in the forces of nature, or also in the land and trees and so on, to then arrive at a God—naturally schematized—of animal form; to find the mightiness of the divine expressed in the wildness of beasts, in the lion, the bull and so on, more than in anything else. Then, a God came of mixed form (already a certain form of abstraction), which makes it apparent that no existing being suffices to represent and name this different power, which he means by God. Already the knowledge that this different power is something distinct, that it is to be found behind this being, and that the latter can only be codified through it, can be expressed through this. And then finally, only in a very late stage, the anthropomorphic God appears. The conception appears, therefore, that man is the purest and highest approximation to God. At first one could think that there is a regression here when compared with the abstraction of the being of a mixed form, with this codification that singles God out from existing beings. Actually, one should rather speak of a higher form of abstraction, though the danger of a regression exists, for this conception of God does not look at what is externally powerful; rather, it has understood that what is distinct, which shines forth in man, is greater and the greatest. Man is the greatest approximation to the form of God. Accordingly, there is a prohibition in the Old Testament of making images of God, for He Himself has made an image: man. This is the only rightful image: the living man. Only he, the living man, is the image that to a certain extent allows us to rightfully suspect what God is, who Himself has made this image and therein presents Himself. What God is becomes visible in man’s humanity: yet not in what once could be painted of a man, but in man’s humanity, which alone God can make and has made. Man is the only authentic image of God. This is not only the breakthrough of the humanization of religion, as we tend to see it, but also the reverse process. It is man’s final breakthrough to himself, in that he discovers that there is more in him than he himself. The statement: man is the only authentic image of God, is not only the discovery of God instead of the gods. It also comprises the discovery of man, who then for the first time finds himself therein. Man is man, therefore, when he expresses more than himself, when he does not merely represent himself, but is an expression of the divine, the holy, the utterly other. He is not man when he confines himself to himself and considers himself with no perplexity as his own. Rather, he is mostly himself when he has stopped wanting to be only himself, when he has recognized that behind him an abyss lies open, that his essence reaches the infinite. In other words: He is a man when he stops acting only for himself; when he stops considering himself as finished and closed in himself; when he recognizes himself as the irruption of the divine. He has first discovered man when he has discovered God.

This comes close to a thought that was developed in the theology of the Church Fathers, which does not in this way follow directly from the Bible, yet corresponds to its overall conception. I present it in a single sentence from St Augustine, who once said: Eo quippe ipso imago eius est quo eius capax est eiusque esse particeps potest:3 Man is an image of God because he is capable of God and can form community with Him. Or one could shortly translate: being an image of God means being capable of God—capax est et particeps esse potest. Being an image of God, as can be seen, is not here defined as a substantial concept, so that one would say that the substance of man is something similar to the substance of God; rather, it is understood as a relational concept. Being an image of God consists in being capable of God. That between man and God there is a relation of a special kind is of itself understood by means of the concept “image.” Something is an image not on account of its substantiality, on account of the substance of the colors used and so on. If I consider quantity in itself, then the latter remains in itself. Something is rather an image on account of its relation that consists in being an indication of something that is being imaged. His being an image is therefore based on a relation, not on what he is in himself, but on his being an indication of something imaged beyond himself. And so it is understood here regarding man. His being an image is not something he has in himself, but consists in his referring to something beyond himself; it consists in a relativity of his existence by means of which it points beyond itself. Unlike a dead material image, the relation and the relativity here is itself alive; something that as movement, at least as a capacity to move, resides in man. To be an image of God amounts to intrinsically indicating—to being an indication of—transcendence. It amounts to our being-an-indication’s possibility, to its intrinsic necessity, as it were, of transcending itself to the absolute. In other words: being an image of God does not simply amount to a relation from top to bottom, as is proper of all things insofar as they are created (according to our faith), but as it were to a back and forth relation— like the recurrence of the echo, but now as something living, such that man relates to God not only as Someone who is behind him, but now faces Him. ‘Being an image of God’ is an expression for the unmediated relation of the human spirit with God; a relation that is signalled by the fact that man is capable of God. ‘Being an image of God’ refers to the essential openness to God, which is thereby declared as the proper constituent of the essence of man, so that one could literally say that man’s being-an-imageof- God consists in his being capable of God, which befits him insofar as he is a corporeal-spiritual person.

The pretension of defining what man is can be made clearer by means of a contrast. The question: What constitutes man actually?—Where is, so to speak, the Rubicon of ‘becoming a man’?—, has become acute again in a completely new way because of the theory of evolution and paleontology. Scientists have looked for the most disparate criteria to be in a position to say: here one may speak of a man; this or that constitutes man. Many proposals have been made: for example, the ability to speak, or the use of fire, and the like. Marxism has taken a stand on this subject in its own way, for it says that the use and production of work tools is what differentiates man from the animals. The first fundamental condition of all human life, says Engels, is work, and certainly to such an extent, that we must in a certain sense affirm that work has made man. You see that, evidently, behind all these efforts to find a boundary and a constitutive feature, a picture of man, a picture of the world, a fundamental decision about man is implied. Here for example: work is what created man. Behind this there is the world picture of the homo faber;4 this determination of man ultimately derives from his technical condition.

I think that, as Christians, we must from here say: man is the being capable of transcendence. The Rubicon of being and becoming a man is passed where a man is not only capable of having a world and an environment, but of projecting himself into the absolute. This does not mean that everyone actually does it, or even that everyone actually tries to be able to do it. Rather, it means that the constitutive feature of man is fundamentally to have the capacity, even if it perhaps does not actually come to be exercised, of projecting himself into transcendence. And we must say: this is what ultimately constitutes man as man, such that he stretches beyond the world, that he is capable of the absolute, that he bears in himself the being-an-indication-of of his existence, which relates him with the eternal, beyond all worldly relations. And this relation gives him the higher value which protects him, as a partner of God, from being monopolized by what is merely mundane. 

III. Man’s two-fold Countenance in light of the biblical subject of the two Brothers 

With this, we would be referring to the first line of the biblical statement about man. I would like to shortly place a second one by its side. If, on one hand, we find in the Bible the epic poem, as it were, of human greatness, man as the being who is directly connected with God and hence remains always a good reserved for him; there is, on the other, a second group of statements in the Bible that show the latter’s incredible realism, and also that it does not loose itself in idealistic fantasies. I mention, without commenting too much on them, a couple of passages. The wellknown text after the flood, Gen 8:21: “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Man, the impotent being that fundamentally does not have the strength to hold on to transcendence, but rather moves along the ordinary natural needs and the laws prescribed by these needs. Or Gen 2:7: Man formed from dust. He does not belong to a divine, but to an earthly world. This actually appears to be a descent to the ground of our condition. According to the great narration, man is described as belonging to God’s sphere, yet now he is the one made of dust. He is thus shown to be just dirt, like the other animals of this world. The text shows in this way his interlocking with the stream of life. Here now emerges a second universality, completely different from the one we found earlier, according to which even the poorest is a man, and as man he can be more than a king or an emperor. The different universality we find now is this: that man, even at his highest, remains only dust; and that all, even those who have risen higher, ultimately belong to this stream of cosmological becoming, and are nothing but a part of it. This is confirmed in Gen 3:19: “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” A word that surely reacts to the fateful and sinful fallenness of man, but which nonetheless only extracts what from the beginning is constitutive of him.

This we see again in the New Testament, when Jesus, in Mt 7:11, with the obviousness of that which one does not especially need to say, mentions in passing: “If you then, who are evil,” do this and that. These words clearly make explicit again what was said after the flood: What can one actually expect from man? He is the one who carries a heavy weight, the heavy weight of his egoism, and who has to see to his own existence, and who simply revolves solely around himself and his ordinary needfulness: dust and ashes before God. Yet this takes on an even more dramatic line, if we think of what follows from the story of the fall at the beginning of Scripture, in Gen 2: the fall in Paradise; in Gen 4: the first death; in Gen 6: the decadence leading to the flood; in Gen 11: the Babylonian tower. Throughout this whole narration man does not appear merely as the fallen one anymore, but at the same time as obsessed with his fallenness, as the rebellious being that reaches for heaven and thereby lands on the earth or the gutter. He appears as the inconstant, hounded being, disagreeing with himself, dissatisfied, homeless, and incapable of finding satisfaction anywhere: man as a filthy and pathetic being. And if we heard earlier, in exalted and purer form, everything great that men ever knew to say about men; here we are presented with that existential experience that dominates the literature of our century, which we have, on one hand, in Kafka, and, on the other, in French existential literature. This experience of fallenness, of filthiness, that is to be found in man’s being, and that imposes itself again and again over any idealism, is here presented and rendered without gloss, in all its realism. The harrowing conclusion of this whole series of experiences that we encounter in Scripture is at the same time clearly the point from which they are overcome from within. I mean the passage in John 19:5: “Pilate brings Jesus before the people.” This text penetrates deeply into spiritual history. Diogenes tells us that he looked for men with a lantern, a scene which was then again picked up by Nietzsche: the mad man who searches for the dead God. Diogenes looked thus for men. So little is given to man, that one has to look for him on the brightest day. And the Cynic Pilate, the Skeptic, follows the Cynic Diogenes. And although he belongs to Diogenes’ school and does not believe in man, at the sight of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns a belief escapes from his lips: idou ho anthropos—see, here is the man. We do not know how consciously he said this, but for the evangelist this becomes a word that, as it were, rises in the middle of world history. The Cynic becomes unwillingly a prophet that affirms the truth. This is the man, and probably the passage goes back to the text in Gen 3, at the place where, after the flood, God says: “now, this is the man,” a king dressed in fool’s garment, a wounded, impotent being, disfigured and degraded: that is the man. Yet this is not mere cynicism and skepticism and resignation that does not believe in man (and that has put the lantern aside a long time ago) because it is convinced that the man of whom we dream, the humanitas of homo¸5 is nowhere to be found. On the contrary, it is said: here you have found without a lantern what you were searching for. That is really the man you were on the way to search for. Because this king dressed in a fool’s garment, in which the pitifulness and the needs of man come into view so properly, is nevertheless a king. Christ, Jesus Christ, should be understood here as the answer for the world to the open question about man. Here is a man, who is completely human like us, and yet who truly is the man whom we had searched for in vain with all our lanterns.

What has just been said points to and anticipates a third, concluding point. Here we shortly want to state how these two series of statements stand together, namely the one about man as a being belonging to God, and the other about man as a piece of clay that hardly rises above animality and always falls back into it. The Old Testament makes a first attempt to elucidate things with this dilemma, with this paradox of the two-fold essence of man. It is striking that the Old Testament repeatedly presents the pair of brothers who stand opposite to each other like brightness and obscurity, light and darkness. We have Cain/Abel as the opening of history; and then again we have Ishmael/Isaac, Esau/Jacob—and it is quite clear that this is a conscious theological construction, for we know in each case that also other children, for example, those of Abraham and others, existed, and that the prominence of these two6 is meant as a theological schema to show the dilemma, the paradox, the division, and the ultimately ineradicable unity of man’s dual essence, of an essence that comprises a two-fold countenance.

There is thus, on the one hand, the genealogy of Cain, the “race of Cain,” the men of power, the men whose hands are tainted with blood, the men who seek a sevenfold vengeance seven times; and there is, on the other, the genealogy of Seth, the “race of Abel,” the subjected, the powerless. In connection with this, I would like to refer to the poem of a priest from East Prussia, Otto Miller (1876-1958), who in the Nazi period gave expression to this two-foldedness of man’s fate. I think here the truth of what is said in these dualities of the Bible becomes quite clear against the background of the then present situation. It says:

Race of Cain, despiser of God, you, the highly honored, Yours is might on earth, and with might also right, Fools and literate alike admire you astounded, The mob and the king and the servant give yells of approval

Race of Abel, with pure hands and pious thoughts Favorite of misfortune, your share is the opprobrious blow. When on life’s way of sorrows your weary knees falter, Cain’s laughter resounds, his hordes laughing with him.

Cain, with pleasure you wash the fraternal blood on your hands, Victory and success and the glory of History are yours. Whereas you, Abel, bleed out silently without complaints, No one testifies for you, no one defends you.

Cain, you idol of the masses, crowned as destiny’s chosen one, Reverent the mob still gawks amazed at your pretentious grave. But I see branded in your forehead The mark of God, and turn away in silence.7

We certainly know the concrete character this had in that time of the trials of the Jews, of the triumph of injustice, which establishes itself as law through might. Yet we also know the terrible persistent reality of man that is expressed here. 

If one looks closer in the Bible, something quite peculiar can be detected. Both halves of the story, which seem to be so opposed to each other, are not so distant from one another. One can note, indeed, that, considered merely from the standpoint of the history of literature, which immerses us into the inner core of the conception, both genealogies—the genealogy of Cain and that of Seth— are from the beginning fundamentally two variants of one and the same genealogy. Therefore, Cain is in Abel, and Abel in Cain. And this is even clearer in the case of Esau and Jacob. Here we are consistently told how strangely, and in a deeply human way, fates cross. Here Jacob is not exalted, such that he would appear as the pure Abel, who would stand in opposition to the brutal Cain. And at last there is the word of Jesus to the one who called him good teacher: “Why do you call me good? No one is good; no one can exalt himself.” This outrageous and for us sometimes depressing realism of the Bible demythologizes, as it were, what we interpret as the proper gloire8 of being a man. If we are objective, there are certainly great differences between men, yet Cain is in every man. When the powerless come into power, it becomes evident all too quickly how true this is, how much the reality deprived of all our illusions is what actually takes place: oudeis agathos—no one is in his innermost core reliable and good; no one belongs in his innermost core to the divine sphere. In this sense, it may be said that in the Old Testament this ends depressingly; and Ecclesiastes expresses the depression of the enigmatically dark essence of man with its almost existential tone, with its skepticism devoid of all illusions.

IV. The new Adam

 Paul picks up this two-fold grouping, which we have examined in the Old Testament as the grouping Abel/ Cain, Esau/Jacob, etc., in his doctrine of the two Adams, and leads it to its conclusion and to a new path. For him, too, there is this duality, viz. the first and the second Adam, which for him means: the whole of mankind is a single man, is Adam, not just Cain. But neither is it Abel: the whole of mankind is in all respects Adam. But in Jesus Christ, the crucified and the risen, a new humanity has appeared, the second humanity so to speak, and only this second humanity, the humanity of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, is the true and real humanity, i.e. man is only this being still to come. He is a being of the future, which remains to be made and which in Jesus Christ began to enter into its own true future. He is a being which does not have its origin in his technical skill, but in the gift of a greater love; a love which can only be donated and which opens the real future of the being called “man” that is still to come.

Perhaps I can try to bring this to light in a clearer way with the aid of the old Christian hymn which is preserved in chapter 2, verses 5-11, of the Letter to the Philippians, where it says: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

” What does this say? The passage gives expression to the doctrine of the two Adams, and so to the promise of a man as the being still to come, which became real in Christ. It is said that the man Adam is the one who on his own authority considers himself a God, and degrades himself by deceiving himself, by turning his being into a lie, for he is not God. On the contrary, in the humility of the cross Jesus is the opposite image of the first Adam, who presumptuously strives to be like God. He is the one who does not use his high position to exist for Himself, but to distance Himself from Himself and approach others. Thus man comes to his proper possibility. The arbitrary self-aggrandizement of the first Adam amounts to the self-destruction of man. For if each one knows only himself and considers himself as a God and the center of the world, then the essence of man is torn apart and destroyed, and man himself is turned into a lie. The service of the second man, his “being-for-others,” his being a man as being a man for others, had as a consequence the reinsertion of man in the kingdom once lost to him, and the admission into God’s community. The crucified is elevated, and here the right path to the elevation of man is indicated. It can only be an elevation in the second Adam: in the community with Him as the new way to be a man, received by us as a gift, which does not proceed from what is technically feasible, but from the donation of love. We all—this is what the text wants to say—are the first Adam, i.e. the being of arbitrary self-aggrandizement and self-assertion, which amounts to self destruction. That does not mean that every spark of the dignity I first mentioned is lost in us. That dignity is indestructible. It does mean, however, that we repeatedly conceal it with our own power; that we are not in a position to create the real future of man, for the latter is essentially impossible to create. The message of the crucified Christ says the salvation of man primarily and solely takes place when he is ready to become the second Adam, that is, when he replaces self-assertion with donation; self-aggrandizement with service. Man comes into his real kingdom when he gives up his authority and turns to the weaker, vulnerable values of truth and love. He becomes truly man when he abandons the first disposition, this natural heavy weight of our existence, the tendency of our existence towards egoism, and replaces it with the fundamental tendency to donate himself. Only the second humanity is the true humanity: man’s becoming man. This means that the actual discovery of man follows only from Christ as the ultimate man; and that man comes to completion in this design and self-design based on Christ, and in throwing oneself upon Christ. This implies many things, which cannot be developed here any further, for they should only be pointed in the direction of the movement of the whole. This I would like once more to clarify with the great passage in Titus 3:4, where it says: “The humanity of our God has appeared to us.” This is the true humanity, the answer to the open question about man; the answer that challenges us to become men. The true opposition of the Bible is not that between body and soul, but that between the first and the second Adam; between the being which is turned backwards and the one turned forwards; between the fundamental tendency towards egoism and the fundamental tendency towards donation. The answer to the question about man is Pilate’s finger, which points to the King crowned with thorns: “This is the man”! (John 19:5).

1 T.N.: This is the reference given in the original text. However, in many English translations of the Bible the quotation
corresponds to verse 5.
2 T.N.: In French in the original text: man transcends man infinitely.
3 Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, 8, 11 (CCL 50A, 436).
4 T.N.: In Latin in the original text: man the laborer, the maker, the artificer.
5 T.N.: In Latin in the original text: the humanity of man.
6 T.N.: The author presumably means the pairs of brothers just mentioned.
7 Otto Miller, Die Rasse des Kain und die Rasse des Abel [The Race of Cain and the Race of Abel], in: Ermländischer
Hauskalender A.D. 1959, 92nd year of Julius Pohls Hauskalender, 112.
8 T.N.: In French in the original text: glory.

Translated from the German by Rafael Simian