Sometimes man’s hybrid identity is the stuff of comedy: the body can manifest itself, against our will, in all sorts of delightfully embarrassing ways. We wish to create something beautiful, but these hands and eyes just can’t coordinate themselves. We seek to live rationally and virtuously, but we often fall prey to lower passions. This hybrid character of the human being seems to present itself most vividly and frequently in the form of tensions and disharmonies. Because he is somehow spiritual, man alone among animals is able to ask the question, Who and what am I? But because he’s material, he’s unable even to look at himself from the side. ![]() As some of the great thinkers of antiquity knew, part of the reason man is so mysterious is that he is both spiritual and material. ![]() We are, as Walker Percy says, mysteries to ourselves and in many ways we know more about galaxies light years away than we do about the self with whom we have spent our entire life. The entire history of philosophy speaks to a great deal of time delving into the nature of the human being. Socrates made it his mission to get people to self-reflect: to better know their own selves. ![]() Vincent de Paul Lecture and Concert Series, endowed by Barbara and Paul Henkels
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