What is a human being?
What is a human being?
What is a human being?
What a human being is, what makes up one’s substance, is not designated by one’s body, nor by one’s soul. One only acts, expresses and is revealed with the way one’s body and soul function. Because of this, there cannot be a physical disability, a lesion or a deformity, a psychological illness, a stupor or dementia that can offend the truth of every human, the inner ego that composes someone as an existing reality…
What we call a “body” is not a final given, an unchangeable entity, but it is a dynamic “happening”, a totality made up of uninterrupted functions that are continually being actualized…. And what we call the “soul” is also a dynamic “happening”, a totality made up of uninterrupted actualized functions that show forth and express the living existence of humans… So, regardless of what language someone wants to use, we could come to verify that the human’s biological-physical and psychological individuality “is” not [does not exist] but is brought to a completion in a dynamic way. It is brought to completion with a progressive development, a decline and weakening, and a final amortisation of one’s psycho-somatic energies with the oncoming of death. Yet, what a human is remains inaccessible [unaffected] in the process of development, maturation, aging and death….
The reason for this is because, what makes up a human as a substance, that which gives someone an ego (a self) and an identity, is not one’s psycho-somatic functions but one’s relationship with God; the fact that God is in love with him and her in a unique (“erotiko”) way.
Christos Giannaras
Synaxi
Spring 1982, Vol. 2, p. 44