Individuality
Individuality
INDIVIDUALITY.The word individuality may be used merely for the quality of being an individual, but its common use is to indicate the special characteristics which distinguish one individual from another, that which, as it has been expressed, marks each one as a particular thought of God. Only in this latter sense is the word considered here.
Both in morals and in religion it has always been a difficult matter to determine the due place of individual differences. The great weakness of Deism, e.g., was that, while it abundantly exalted the individual, it had no place for individuality. Its natural religion and utilitarian ethic had, as its very standard of excellence, that it excluded everything whereby one man was different from another. Even Kant, the highest product of Rationalism, with his view of religion as an appeodage to a moral law, and his supreme test of a moral law by its fitness to be a law universal, only accentuated this limitation. The Romantic reaction had as its characteristic note the glory of individuality. The marvel of the universe was just its variety, and the glory of man that he was the most varied thing in the universe. The whole duty of man was to be himself and admit no law except the law of his own nature. Then unfortunately it too frequently appeared that what man took to be his nature was only self-pleasing, and what he thought was religion was only satisfaction of the artistic sense. There was also another very strange result. This excessive insistence upon individuality came to obliterate the individual. So much stress was laid upon what was changing and varied, that nothing was thought of what is one and unchanging. Hence everything was reduced to the great World-Spirit whose artistic pleasure in unfolding His variety constituted the history of the world.
This insistence on the importance of individuality by Romanticism, nevertheless, bore large fruit in both ethics and religion. Indeed, all modern study at least of the historical religions may be dated from Schleiermachers insistence on the marked individuality of all the great founders of religion. Nor is it possible to question his right to point in particular to Jesus. The supreme human interest in all the Scriptures is their immense gallery of persons who gave scope to their individuality. For the most part they are very far from being perfect, but none of them is fashioned on the common worldly type, none of them is rolled like smooth stones on the beach, in the continual social attrition. Yet, even in this great gallery of the children of nature and of God, Jesus stands out pre-eminent. Whatever may be said of the stories of His birth, they mark the profoundest impression made on His contemporaries by a great, a striking, an unforgetable individuality. Though the many attempts at painting His human individuality, from the Apocryphal Gospels downwards, cannot be regarded as nearer a true likeness than the attempts at portraying His human features, every reader of the Gospels feels that, amid all the things He surrendered, He never surrendered His own marked human individuality. On the contrary, it continued to be a prominent thing that forced itself on everyone. He went His own way, thought His own thoughts, lived His own life, and never accorded anything to that tyranny of fashion to which, in our weak regard for others, we continually sacrifice what is greatest and best in our natures.
Our Lords regard for the individuality of the persons He dealt with might be used as a key for understanding large portions of the Gospels. He took special care to bring out the individuality of each ones faith. He brings the modesty of the woman with the issue of blood into prominence, to give her the assurance she needed for her comfort (Mat 9:20 ff.). He rejects roughly the prayer of the Canaanitish woman, to show more clearly her right to be heard (Mat 15:21-28). He sits at meat in the publicans house, to create self-respect in the social outcast (Mar 2:15). He meets the centurion, the man of command, by working through a command (Luk 7:1-10); and He answers John, the man who had required action, by action (Luk 7:22). He justified wisdom both in John the ascetic and in Himself who came eating and drinking, and only blamed the narrow censoriousness which could appreciate neither (Mat 11:19).
In the Fourth Gospel, in particular, the key to almost everything Jesus says or does is that He knew what was in man (Joh 2:25). Nicodemus, the man dried to parchment and swathed in conventional considerations, needs to be born again into a new and fresh life (Joh 3:1-15). The woman of Samaria, no longer able to command the protection of even the poorest marriage tie, and too disreputable to appear at the well except when the midday sun kept the other women at home, is offered living water to refresh her soul parched for sympathy, and is so interpreted to herself that she said, He told me all that ever I did (Joh 4:1-26). Because the nobleman has the aristocratic spirit of his class, he is simply told to go his way, his son lives (Joh 4:50); because his bed has for thirty-eight years been the centre of all his interest, the cripple at Bethesda is told to take it up (Joh 5:8). All the Gospels are full of persons of vivid individuality. A striking feature of our Lords whole ministry is the way in which, in His presence, a mans true qualities inevitably come to light. The respectable convention behind which men hide inevitably falls away, and men appear in all their real characteristics, often with the unhonoured to their honour, and with the highly esteemed to their shame. Even the Pharisee, the type in all ages in which individuality is most suppressed by creed and custom, cannot keep the curtain drawn in His presence. At first sight this definiteness seems to be lost in the strange, vague atmosphere of the Fourth Gospel, which is so strongly irradiated by one individualitythat of the writer. But in life it is not the persons who are themselves colourless who do most justice to the individuality of others. So it is that in John we see, more than in any other Gospel, the vivid individuality, in particular, of the disciples, and how Jesus recognized it and dealt with it. Andrew and Nathanael, Philip and Thomas are mere names and shadows in the other Gospels, while in John they have each one his own characteristic note. Even Peter, in the other Gospels, is little more than an inexplicable mixture of insight and error; but in John he is drawn in a phrase by the Master Himself, When thou wast young thou girdedst thyself and walkedst whither thou wouldest (Joh 21:18). This enterprising but impetuous character appears in the whole presentation of him in John, till, in the days of heaviness, he flung off the slackness which had fallen upon all the disciples, and said with his old grip at his girdle, I go a fishing (Joh 21:3). In considering the question of the authenticity of John, this, at all events, deserves consideration, that it leaves us with such a sense of the strong individuality of the Apostles, both as children of nature and as children of grace, as to make it not incredible that a handful of poor men should start to conquer the world. In this Gospel, moreover, faith is not only an individual act, which it must always be, but also an attitude which brings out a mans deepest individuality. Men do not believe, because they trust only what they see (Joh 4:48). They cannot believe in Christ, because already they have not believed in the highest they knew (Joh 5:47). It is a certain preparedness for Christ which makes men believe in Him (Joh 6:35; Joh 6:37). Belief is a special word to oneself, a hearing from the Father (Joh 6:45). Unbelief arises from being from beneath (Joh 8:23), from being of ones father the devil (Joh 8:44). There is, throughout, a family likeness in unbelief; while belief, in the consciousness of its own special needs, finds its own call. It does not lean on Abraham, or fashion itself on the accepted model, but, like Nathanael, it seeks God under the fig-tree, like Philip it is ready to say to conventional questions, Come and see. This faith, moreover, issues in an eternal life, the present effect of which is to give us possession of our own souls, to know God in such a way as not to be greatly concerned about men, to be in the world yet not of it (Joh 17:1, Joh 17:5).
Though less prominent in the Synoptics, our Lords regard to individuality is not less significant. To enter the Kingdom, so pronounced an individuality is required that it can take by itself the narrow way, while the common course is the broad road (Mat 7:13); it is to be one in so characteristic a fashion as to cause more joy in heaven than the ninety and nine who, satisfied with the received standard, need no repentance (Mat 18:13, Luk 15:7). This strong insistence that many are called and only few chosen, indicates not arbitrariness in dealing with individuals, but the rarity of the individuality God requires (Mat 22:14). His true disciples must be of so pronounced a type that, while they shun the poor glory of self-display (Mat 6:2), they must yet be the salt of the earth, and not even fear the prominence of being as a city set on a hill. They must shun the all-pervasive, all-assimilative creed of the time, the leaven of the Pharisees; nor will the accepted Christian formula, the saying of Lord, Lord, be any more approved (Mat 7:21).
Our Lord does not really differ from the pagan view that the worth of the individual depends upon his individuality. The difference is in the estimate of that wherein this individuality consists, and of the possibilities in each man of attaining it. Even to Aristotle individuality meant something aristocratic. The qualities in a person worth considering are liberality (), magnificence (), and magnanimity (). These all require a certain social station, a certain aloofness from the petty concerns of life, which could be possible for all men only when the great mechanical slave whom Aristotle dreamt of could be made to do the drudgery. With Christ, on the other hand, a man could have true individuality in the lowest seats and at the lowliest services.
Nor is Christs conception that of modern culture, which, indeed, is much nearer Aristotle than Jesus. He does not seek, with Goethe, to build up as high as possible the pyramid of his nature. A man does not fail of that individuality which the Kingdom of God requires, even though he have to cut off an offending hand or pluck out an offending eye, and enter blind and maimed (Mat 5:29).
The classical presentation of the type of individuality permitted and required in the Kingdom of God is in the Beatitudes. Too often they are read as a suppression of individuality, which they are if a mans chief characteristics are possessions, popularity, self-assertion, self-indulgence. But in Christs eyes this should not be the way of showing a mans true nature. The description, taken as a whole, presents an energetic type which, just because of its superiority both to society and to nature, is bound to be of marked individuality. To be poor in spirit is not to be poor-spirited, not to bend and break under every trial, but is to be rich in a faith which accepts poverty or anything else in the assurance of never being broken or bent. The mourner is not one given to tears, but one in energetic opposition to wrong and in energetic sympathy with suffering. The meek is not the meek and mild, not the soft, timid person, but one who has too high a faith in a wiser power than his own to strive and cry. To hunger and thirst after righteousness is necessarily to take an independent and difficult course in the world; while to be merciful requires decided strength of character, most of the cruel things on earth being done not in self-will and malice, but in thoughtlessness and weakness. Purity of heart never could survive in this world as mere innocence and ignorance of evil; the soft people who seek to shun everything disagreeable are the chief makers of dispeace; and only persons of determined character and decided principles ever run any risk of being persecuted for righteousness sake. Were there no other condition but this last, it would mark the contrast with the accepted type, with the person whose first motive is prudence, whose guiding star is agreement with the authorities, who feels an obtrusive individuality to be in bad taste, and who regards a somewhat colourless membership of the Church and of Society as the hall-mark of the Divine approval. Instead we see one who is the old man in the hundred, one who will not walk with the crowd in the broad way, one who has something of the singularity of the prophet which will ensure for him the singularity of the prophets reward.
This large scope for individuality is maintained chiefly by resting the guidance of life not on a rule, but on a relation to God, revealed not in a code, but in a Person. This was the basis of a rule of love to God and to man to which all the Law and the Prophets could be reduced. Love is the way of at once giving scope to our own individuality and cherishing the individuality of others. Not that love can be without law. As it has been well said, What is love at the centre is always law at the circumference. But love at the centre will always keep law mindful of human differences. It will be a law in accordance with the Apostles interpretation of his Masters meaning when he enjoins us to be true to our own highest individuality, i.e. the special demands of our own conscience, to do nothing that is not of faith (Rom 14:23); to attend so far to the weakness of our own individuality as not to be enslaved to anything; and to regard the individuality of our neighbour so far as to take heed to what edifies (1Co 10:23). Nevertheless it is no true development of Christian faith or morals, as Newman (in his Development) and countless others have argued, that the faith has been elaborated into a creed that omits no detail of doctrine, and the morality into a code that lays down every detail of duty. Nor can it ever be true humility to surrender our individuality to any other man made like to ourselves.
Yet a free Protestant code and a smaller creed do not necessarily give us a true and characteristic faith, or save us from a mainly negative standard of duty, and perhaps there is no kind of consideration for others more needed at the present day than to have courage to be ourselves.
To leave room for this individuality is one of the most difficult and most neglected tasks of theology, and to leave scope for it in the Church is a task that has never been very anxiously pursued by the ecclesiastic. Yet if the true manifestation of faith is power to become sons of God in spite of society and circumstances, a very important element of it should be the maintenance of our true individuality; and though truth can only be one, there should be something characteristic in each mans faith. The preservation of this difference among the Scripture writers is the real task of Biblical Theology, which should not aim at evaporating truth into what each man thinks, but at showing how important every man is for his faith.
Literature.Goethe, Wilhelm Meister; Schleiermacher, Reden [translation On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1893] and Monologen [translation Monologues]; Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte [translation Philosophy of History, 1857]; Carlyle, Heroes; Emerson, Essays: J. S. Mill, On Liberty; Ldemann, Personlichkeit und Individualitt, 1900; Lemme, Christliche Ethik, 56, 1905; Schian, Glaube und Individualitt (Zeitschr. fr Theol. u. Kirche, 1898); A. Breithaupt, Rechte und Pflichten der Individualitt im Christlich-sittlichen Leben, 1901.
John Oman.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Individuality
INDIVIDUALITY (of Christ).Regarded simply as a historical character, or as a subject of a visible career among men, Christ undoubtedly presents as distinct an aspect of individuality, or concrete reality, as can be affirmed of any historical personage. On the other hand, when we pass from the historical point of view to that of Christological construction, we can hardly fail to raise the question whether it is possible to escape from qualifying the category of individuality as applied to Christ on the side of His humanity. Proceeding from the latter point of view, and deferring to the Catholic postulates respecting the union of our Lords manhood with the pre-existent Logos or Son of God, we are confronted with the task of explaining how a real concrete manhood can be taken into veritable union with the Logos without effecting a heterogeneous and double personality. The task is a very difficult one, and in wrestling with it a temptation easily arises to strip the manhood of concreteness or individuality, and thus to accommodate it more fully to the demands of personal unity. But a resort to this alternative has its own difficulty, and that by no means a slight one, since the thought of an Incarnation which means the union of the Son of God with a mutilated manhood, or with a mere semblance of manhood, is far from being satisfactory. Indeed, there is little hazard in affirming that the mind and heart of Christendom would sooner tolerate an element of unresolved dualism in the person of Christ, than sacrifice in any appreciable degree the reality and perfection of His manhood.
1. Among the prominent theories involving a sacrifice of this kind the Apollinarian is the most explicit and intelligible. By its supposition that the Logos took the place of the rational soul in the Redeemer, so that the Incarnation involved only the assumption of a human body with its principle of animal life, it evidently simplifies very much the problem of Christs person. But the simplification takes place at too great a cost. The immutable Logos clothed in a fleshly garment is obviously no proper subject for temptation or for a real implication in human experiences generally. He cannot be brought into accord with the Gospel representations, except by resort to an artificial, Docetic interpretation. As lacking the most essential factor of manhood, He is destitute of the most apprehensible bond of brotherhood and ground of companionship. In short, the advantage which pertains to the Apollinarian theory, on the score of simplicity and intelligibility, is overmatched by the disadvantage which it incurs by its incompatibility with Gospel facts and by its abridgment of Christs competency to enter into the life of men, and thus to fulfil the complete office of mediation. In effect it abolishes the Son of Man; for the archetypal manhood, which Apollinaris supposed to be resident in the eternal Logos, is a far off thing in comparison with the concrete reality which naturally is present to our thought when we use the term manhood.
2. A second historic theory which has a distinct bearing upon our theme is that of Monophysitism. This differs from Apollinarism in its formal acknowledgment that by the incarnation of the Son of God is to be understood the assumption of a complete human nature. This acknowledgment, however, turns out to be rather verbal than substantial. The Monophysite assertion of a single nature in the incarnated Christ involved the compounding of the human nature in Him with the Divine; and this, in connexion with the vast preponderance assigned to the Divine in post-Nicene thinking, meant virtually the reduction of the human to the rank of an accident, a secondary and contingent property or group of properties, superinduced upon a Divine subject. Such an outcome, it is needless to say, runs very close to the submergence of the human side of Christ. It leaves no place for the thought of a real ethical manhood; for a proper ethical character is not predicable of a selfless accident. And with this deficit is conjoined a serious metaphysical difficulty, since fundamental thinking insists upon a relation of commensurability between attributes and their subject, and does not approve the notion that attributes appropriate to a finite personality can be made properly to inhere in an infinite subject.
3. A theory favoured with more orthodox associations than the Monophysite, but having a somewhat questionable bearing on the Christological problem, is the theory of the impersonality of Christs manhood, or more specifically, the theory that His manhood, being devoid of a personality of its own, obtained from the first moment of subsistence its personal subject in the Ego of the pre-existent Logos (the so-called doctrine of enhypostasis). This theory was broached by Leontius in the 6th cent., was advocated by John of Damascus in the 8th cent., and has had in later times considerable currency among theologians of reputed orthodoxy, though never receiving any distinct cumenical sanction. As handled by John of Damascus, the notion of the impersonality of Christs manhood cannot be said to have been suitably reconciled with the full reality of that manhood. While formally he assigned to the Redeemer the full complement of human faculties, he felt obliged in one connexion or another to deny to them their characteristic forms of activity. It would not do, as he conceived, to admit progress in knowledge on the part of Christ, as this would contravene the truth that the hypostatic union of the human with the Divine in Him was complete from the start. For a like reason it was considered inadmissible to impute real prayer to Him. Divinity needs nothing, and a humanity that is perfectly united with Divinity shares in its sufficiency. In relation to the will also the Damascene considered it necessary to retrench from the proper human mode. The logical issue of his representations is to deny to the human will in Christ all power of initiative, and to reduce it entirely to the office of a medium through which the Logos moved the man Jesus. Quite possibly John of Damascus does not afford the best specimen of what can be done in Christological construction with the notion that the human nature of Christ, being without personality of its own, derived such personal character as pertained to it from its relation to the person of the Logos. But certainly it is difficult in the light of his exposition to discover the real Son of Man. The image of a genuine and living manhood does not stand forth in his representation of the Redeemer.
It has sometimes been concluded that a special advantage belongs to the doctrine of the impersonality of the human nature of Christ, as helping to explain the atoning efficacy of His work. The inference is made that human nature in this character is not a concrete, limited entity, such as is the human nature of the individual man, but rather generic or universal. It is then argued that Christ in perfecting His own human nature sanctified human nature in general. Again, it is claimed that, in virtue of His literal community with men, His doing was in the proper sense a transaction within, as well as for, the whole body of humanity. As an eminently spiritual writer has expressed the thought, every man was a part of Him, and He felt the sins of every man, not in sympathy, but in sorrow and abhorrence (Thomas Erskine). To such representations it is legitimate to reply, that what needs to be sanctified is not human nature in itself, but myriads of human beings; that the sanctification of human nature in Christ cannot rationally be conceived to have any immediate effect upon its sanctification elsewhere, inasmuch as human nature in Christ cannot be regarded as a stuff out of which men universally are fashioned; and that a generic or universal human nature belongs purely to the realm of the conceptual, and cannot possibly have any place in the sphere of real being. In short, the line of representation in question rests upon a fiction which modern philosophy for the most part has discountenancedthe fiction of the real existence of universal.
4. While it is impossible to be satisfied with any one of these historic theories, as respects its bearing on the integrity or concrete reality of Christs manhood, it is far from easy to offer a definite substitute which is not open to exception. Indeed, an attempt at strict construction is certain to miscarry. The extraordinary as such rebels against complete elucidation, and by supposition the union of the Divine and the human in Christ is an extraordinary fact. Any one who accepts the Incarnation must admit that the individuality of Christs manhood was specially conditioned; but equally, any one who admits the extraordinary character of the Incarnation must grant the impossibility of giving a full explanation of the mode and measure of this special conditioning. We cannot fully construe our own relation to the Divine; how then should we expect to gain clear insight into the relation of the human to the Divine in the person of our Lord? Probably the best that can be done is to form an ideal picture of the normal relation of perfected manhood to the Divine, and then beyond this to postulate the mystery of a special bond between Christs manhood and His Divinity. The forming of the ideal picture will be distinctly helpful. For, having clearly apprehended the great truth that manhood loses nothing of its proper character by intimate union with the Divine, that the human spirit is never more itself than when it is possessed by and insphered in the Divine Spirit, that freedom is never so complete as when the human will by its own consent passes under the absolute direction of the Divine will, we shall be prepared to believe that manhood in Christ suffered no retrenchment by its extraordinary union with the Divine, but rather is to be accounted the full-orbed specimen of manhood as respects ethical worth and all tender and beautiful traits.
Taken in a popular sense, rather than in relation to Christological theory, the subject of individuality suggests a discussion of those characteristics which may be regarded as specially distinctive of Christ as a historic personage. This discussion, however, is reserved for the art. Uniqueness.
Literature.J. A. Dorner, History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma; R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation; John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Lectures xiii.xv.; Contentio Veritatis, ch. ii.; Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine.
Henry C. Sheldon.