The Battle of Anthropologies: Self-authoring vs. Christian Personhood
Introduction
Our age is not merely debating policies or preferences; it is undergoing a civilizational crisis over what it means to be human. The battles over law, sexuality, technology, and identity are not peripheral cultural skirmishes — they are expressions of a deeper war between rival anthropologies, two fundamentally incompatible visions of the human person.
In the first vision — increasingly dominant in Western institutions and popular psychology — the self is a project of self-creation. One’s “true identity” is presumed to reside within the private theater of feeling and self-declaration. The body, social norms, and inherited traditions are treated as external constraints, useful only insofar as they affirm the inner self’s narrative. According to this view, personhood and identity are psychological constructs: I am who I feel myself to be. Critics have called this outlook a new Gnosticism, for it treats the material body as irrelevant or even deceptive — a “meat suit” hiding the authentic inner being. Even language becomes morally charged: words that contradict or question one’s declared identity are labeled violent, as though speech itself can inflict ontological harm. The result is an anthropology of radical interiority, where every external authority — nature, law, family, even God — is regarded as a potential oppressor of the self’s secret truth.
By contrast, the Christian tradition proclaims a vision of personhood rooted not in self-authorship but in gift. Identity is not invented but received. Humanity is not a self-written story but a divine calling. As Genesis teaches, “God created man in His own image… male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). The human person, therefore, is not an autonomous will floating free of embodiment, but a unity of soul and body, created in the image of the Triune God. The body is not a shell to be overcome; it is a sacrament — the visible form of a spiritual reality. In this view, our sexed embodiment, our families, and our limits are not enemies of the self but revelations of our vocation. As one theologian writes, “Our identity is a gift from God, not a fabrication of our own will or the devil’s whim.”
The confrontation between these two anthropologies is not merely academic. It is a collision of gospels. Each offers its own story of creation, fall, and redemption. The modern, Self-authoring anthropology preaches liberation through self-naming and perpetual affirmation: salvation comes when society finally mirrors back the self’s chosen image. The Christian anthropology proclaims freedom through communion — the discovery that one’s life is hidden with Christ in God, received through grace and lived in obedience. One seeks validation through recognition; the other finds peace through relation.
This conflict, therefore, cannot be resolved by policy compromise or rhetorical softening. It is not simply a “culture war” but an ontological war — a contest over what kind of creatures we are and who has the authority to name us. Beneath the surface of every moral or political dispute today — from gender and bioethics to law and speech — lies this deeper struggle: Are we self-authored beings, or are we, as the Christian confession insists, creatures lovingly spoken into being by God?
The answer to that question will determine not only how we define justice and truth, but whether we can recover a coherent meaning of the human person at all.
The Gnostic Vision: Self-authoring Humanity
Modern man no longer asks what he is, but what he feels himself to be. The horizon of self-understanding has collapsed inward, and the human person is recast as a self-creating consciousness housed in a disposable body. In this new anthropology, desire is ontology and emotion is revelation. To feel something deeply is to declare it true. As critics have noted, this vision functions like a modern Gnosticism: the true self is imagined as an inner light imprisoned within flesh, tradition, and law—a spark yearning to define itself against the world’s limits. Biology, family, and social inheritance are viewed as instruments of oppression to be overcome through acts of self-narration.
Here, identity is not discovered but asserted; not bestowed but declared. “Personhood,” in this schema, is no longer grounded in nature or divine image but in psychological self-expression. The body becomes a costume, a “meat suit” that conceals the authentic inner self, and language itself becomes morally charged: any word that contradicts one’s chosen identity is seen as violent, even sacrilegious. The ancient question, “Who am I?” is replaced by the demand, “Affirm what I say I am.”
Identity as Desire
In this vision, the human core is collapsed into appetite—particularly sexual and emotional impulse. Desire is treated as destiny, and the feelings of the moment are enthroned as the deepest truth of the self. To challenge desire is to deny existence; to restrain it is to commit a kind of blasphemy against the inner god. The inner psychological landscape becomes the sole authority, and every external structure—parents, Church, community, nature—is valued only insofar as it mirrors back the self’s self-portrait. Modern therapeutic culture enshrines this logic: authenticity is obedience to one’s feelings, and salvation is the absence of shame. In this way, the language of self-care has become a kind of inverted liturgy—rituals of self-absolution without repentance or grace.
Body as Obstacle
In ancient Gnosticism, the material world was the tragic work of an ignorant demiurge; the soul’s task was to ascend through secret knowledge. The modern secular echo of that myth teaches that the body, too, is an imposition—an arbitrary material cage from which the self must escape through technology, medicine, and linguistic redefinition. Chromosomes, hormones, and inherited roles are “accidents of matter,” not integral to personhood. Thus, to name biological realities is increasingly framed as oppression, and to deny them is seen as liberation. Where Christianity once saw the body as the visible form of the soul, our new creed treats it as an inconvenient husk—raw material for self-expression or surgical correction. The body no longer reveals the person; it obscures the self’s true will. Reality itself must now be disciplined to conform to inner emotion, rather than emotion disciplined to conform to reality.
Self as Creator
At the metaphysical core of this anthropology lies the re-enactment of the primal temptation: “You shall be as gods.” The human person, once understood as a creature, now imagines himself as creator and legislator of his own essence. The modern slogan “be your authentic self” hides a more radical creed: be your own god. In this framework, moral law is replaced by personal narrative. The self becomes simultaneously the sculptor and the statue, the author and the text, the idol and its worshiper. Every act of affirmation becomes a small liturgy of self-worship. To contradict someone’s self-description is not merely to disagree but to commit sacrilege. Thus, the sacred has not vanished in the modern age—it has merely been relocated from heaven to the mirror.
Salvation as Recognition
The new salvation is not forgiveness but validation. The individual’s inner declaration must be recognized by society to feel real. The crowd becomes the congregation; social media the sanctuary. Public affirmation functions as a kind of secular Eucharist—consumed daily to maintain one’s fragile sense of being. To be “seen” or “affirmed” is to exist; to be ignored or contradicted is a social death. Language becomes sacramental in the negative sense: pronouns are confessions of faith, disagreement a form of blasphemy. Because identity is self-constructed, it is also endlessly precarious, dependent on the applause of others for stability. The self that creates itself must be constantly worshiped to survive.
This dependency produces volatility. Since dissent feels like annihilation, discourse collapses into hysteria. Every contradiction becomes an existential crisis. The individual raised in this paradigm, taught that authenticity equals unbounded autonomy, inevitably experiences the world as hostile and unsafe. To be contradicted is to be erased; to be corrected is to be violated. The result is a society of fragile gods—each divine, each wounded, each furious that others refuse to join their liturgy.
The Gnostic Pattern Reborn
What emerges is an anthropology that mirrors the old heresies in secular form: the hidden self as divine spark; the body as enemy; salvation through esoteric knowledge (psychological insight, ideological purity, technological transformation). The vocabulary is modern, but the structure is ancient. The world, once seen as creation, becomes the prison of the self. Liberation means escaping givenness—nature, tradition, even one’s own flesh. And yet the paradox is inescapable: the more the self deifies its own autonomy, the more it becomes enslaved to anxiety. A god who must continually prove his own divinity quickly becomes a tyrant to himself. The modern “gnostic” is haunted by insecurity precisely because his freedom has no foundation. Having rejected all gift, he must manufacture meaning from scratch, and so must shout constantly into the void, “I am!”—hoping the echo will sound like salvation.
This is the tragedy of Self-authoring humanity: it promises divinity but delivers exhaustion. The self becomes a performance with no audience sufficient to sustain it, and when the applause fades, nothing remains but loneliness. It is, in the end, a theology of despair disguised as liberation.
The Christian Vision: Personhood as Gift
The Christian vision begins not with the cry of the self but with the call of God. It does not say, “I am what I feel,” but rather, “I am because He has spoken me into being.” This is the oldest truth in creation — that existence itself is not an act of self-assertion but of divine generosity. To be human is to receive oneself from God, not to invent oneself from chaos. Christian anthropology, therefore, begins in worship rather than will.
Where modernity proclaims, “Know thyself,” Christianity answers, “Receive thyself.” Our identity is not a product of our interior feelings or our biological data but of a relationship — a covenantal belonging to the One who fashioned both our body and our soul. The self is not a project but a vocation. Every man and woman is a word spoken by God into history, called to respond with a life of gratitude. In this, the Christian is not self-authored but Christ-authored; his task is not to create meaning but to live as meaning already given.
Identity as Image of God
At the heart of Christian anthropology stands a simple yet inexhaustible claim: the human person is the imago Dei — the image of God. “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27): two ways of being human, complementary and co-revelatory. The person is not a solitary self but a reflection of divine communion — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, human identity is neither raw material nor random psychology but a participation in God’s own relational being.
The Fathers of the Church saw this clearly. St. Gregory of Nyssa called humanity a “living mirror of the divine archetype.” St. Maximus the Confessor described man as the microcosm who unites heaven and earth in his very being. To be human, then, is to bear the icon of the Infinite — a dignity that no sin, weakness, or rejection can erase. Our worth does not fluctuate with our passions or our popularity, for it is rooted in God’s eternal knowing of us. The creature who forgets this becomes a shadow; the one who remembers becomes light.
Body as Sacrament
Where the Gnostic spirit sees the body as a cage, the Christian sees it as a chalice. The flesh is not an obstacle to the soul but its language — the means through which love, sacrifice, and worship become visible. The Incarnation seals this forever. When the Word became flesh, He sanctified embodiment; when He rose, He carried that flesh into eternity. The human body now stands as testimony that matter itself is capable of bearing divinity. “The body,” wrote St. John Paul II, “and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible — the spiritual and the divine.”
To be male or female, therefore, is not a constraint but a calling. Sexual difference is not an error in the code but the syntax of communion. As Christ wedded Himself to the Church, the male and female forms of humanity express, in icon, the covenantal nature of love itself. In a culture that treats the body as plastic, Christianity reasserts that the flesh is prophetic — that the very shape of our existence declares the goodness of creation and the wisdom of the Creator.
Self as Receiver
Man does not speak himself into being; he listens himself into being. Our life begins in hearing: “Hear, O Israel.” The Christian life is a discipline of receptivity — the courage to let oneself be defined by divine love. The modern mind hears “obedience” and imagines servitude; Scripture hears “obedience” and names it communion. As Christ Himself said, “It is not you who chose Me, but I who chose you” (John 15:16). To be chosen is not to be diminished but to be named into freedom.
Augustine’s confession remains the human story: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Freedom is not the absence of limits but the alignment of the will with love’s design. In Baptism, the self is “named” in the Trinitarian formula, claimed as beloved, and incorporated into a communion that transcends private identity. The true self is not a private invention but a public belonging: one’s name spoken by the Father through the Son in the Spirit.
Salvation as Communion
Where the modern project promises affirmation, the Christian promise is communion. Salvation is not achieved through infinite self-assertion but received through infinite self-giving — through kenosis, the self-emptying love of Christ. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Christian does not build an identity; he abides in one. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
In this, even correction becomes healing, not humiliation. A brother may rebuke another in love without erasing his dignity, for personhood is inviolable. Sin wounds but does not redefine. The Church’s discipline and the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist serve precisely to restore communion, not to deny personhood. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) — because their identity is anchored not in behavior but in being.
As St. John Paul II taught, “Man can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself.” The Triune God is communion, and man, made in His image, fulfills himself only in communion — with God, with others, with creation. In this lies the cure for the loneliness of the modern self: we are not saved by being recognized but by being reconciled.
The Stability of Grace
The Christian vision offers a stability that modern anthropology cannot replicate. The self that knows it is loved by God cannot be destroyed by rejection, failure, or death. It no longer needs constant affirmation because it lives from an inexhaustible Source. Grace secures identity where emotion cannot. Even the penitent and the fallen remain bearers of divine likeness, for Baptism marks the soul indelibly: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27).
The Christian anthropology therefore restores peace to the restless heart. It anchors identity in relationship, truth in love, and freedom in obedience. It heals the division between body and soul, desire and reason, self and other. It calls man out of the echo chamber of self-creation and into the eternal dialogue of the Trinity — the “communion of persons” in which every human life finds its home.
Where the modern creed begins with I am, the Christian creed begins with He is — and from that confession flows all freedom, all meaning, and all joy.
The Collision
When the Self-authoring worldview meets the Christian vision, it is not a debate between two opinions but a collision between two worlds. They do not share a grammar of meaning. Each speaks in a tongue the other finds alien and threatening, for each begins from a different creation story. The modern creed begins with the sovereign self: “I am what I declare myself to be.” The Christian confession begins with God’s Word: “I am because He has spoken me into being.” Between these two logoi there can be no peace, because each proclaims a different god and a different gospel.
Thus, misunderstanding is not accidental but structural. When the Christian says, “You are not reducible to your passions,” the self-authored person hears, “You are being erased.” What the Church intends as healing sounds to the modern ear like annihilation. For the Christian, sin is an illness to be cured; for the self-creator, it is identity to be affirmed. The Christian calls for repentance — a return to truth; the secular mind hears repression — a return to slavery. The conversation collapses into accusation, because both speak out of incompatible ontologies.
In this way, nearly every cultural argument today is sacramental in disguise. The slogans about freedom, love, or tolerance are not neutral—they are fragments of competing liturgies. The Christian sees the world as a temple to be sanctified; the modern sees it as a laboratory for self-invention. To one, the body is the language of God; to the other, it is raw material for the will. And so when they meet, neither is merely disagreeing about ethics—they are disagreeing about what a human being is.
This is why the discourse is so volatile. A Christian warning is heard not as moral counsel but as ontological aggression: to question my desire is to question my existence. Meanwhile, the demand for unconditional affirmation strikes the believer as idolatry, a re-enactment of the serpent’s promise that man can name himself without reference to God. The self-creating person demands to be adored; the Christian cannot offer adoration to any being but God. Thus, what begins as dialogue quickly becomes liturgical warfare — rival acts of worship clashing in the public square.
Even the tone of debate reveals this deeper schism. The secular imagination, unmoored from transcendence, lives perpetually on the edge of hysteria, because its peace depends on constant validation. The Christian imagination, when healthy, lives from the calm of gift — identity anchored in grace. But even here the collision infects both sides. The believer grows defensive, interpreting every challenge as persecution; the secular mind grows paranoid, reading every moral distinction as violence. Two wounded anthropologies stare at each other, each convinced the other’s existence is an act of harm.
This is not merely psychological but spiritual. In the language of Scripture, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities” (Ephesians 6:12). The conflict over identity is not just political—it is liturgical warfare between rival thrones: Leviathan twisting justice into ideology, Asmodeus enthroning desire as deity, Behemoth mechanizing humanity into data. These thrones do not argue; they devour. And yet, Christ does not meet them with rage but with revelation. The Church’s task is not to outshout modernity but to outshine it—to bear the calm, cruciform anthropology of grace into the chaos of self-creation.
For this reason, the Christian must refuse both hysteria and hatred. We are not called to win arguments but to embody truth. The early Church converted an empire not through polemic but through peace that surpassed understanding. The collision of anthropologies will not be resolved by clever rhetoric but by sanctity—by a people whose lives quietly prove that identity received in love is stronger than identity fabricated in fear.
The Spiritual Dimension
The struggle over personhood is not merely cultural or psychological; it is liturgical and spiritual. The war between the self-authored and the God-received human being is a visible theater of an older conflict—one that began not in the universities of the West but in the heavens before the foundation of the world. What we are witnessing in our age is not simply the confusion of ideas but the reanimation of ancient thrones—spiritual intelligences that mimic virtue while corrupting it. The Fathers called them archai and exousiai—principalities and powers—fallen intelligences that twist divine goods into their opposites.
In Scripture and Patristic teaching, these powers are sometimes named, not as myth but as typology. Names like Leviathan, Asmodeus, and Behemoth describe archetypal patterns of dominion—forms through which fallen intellect seeks to enthrone itself in the human mind. These names should not be taken as literal bureaucratic demons, but as signs of metaphysical regimes—distorted logoi that rule culture when the true Logos is forgotten.
Leviathan — Dominion through Law
“On that day the Lord will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and He will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1). Leviathan is the ancient image of legalistic tyranny—the order that devours rather than governs, the serpent who coils truth upon itself until justice suffocates beneath procedure. In the modern world, Leviathan manifests as the deification of law detached from Logos: the rule of pure policy, regulation without wisdom.
Here, good and evil are inverted through legislative enchantment. Leviathan takes the divine gift of justice and hollows it into a weapon. He declares that objectivity is oppression, that truth is violence, and that mercy is discrimination. It is the spirit that wraps sin in legal virtue and calls rebellion “rights.” Under Leviathan’s dominion, language itself becomes juridical—every word must be policed for offense, every conscience licensed by ideology. This is not governance but ritualized accusation: the permanent inquisition of the self-righteous. Leviathan’s law promises equality but produces paralysis, a frozen sea where nothing can breathe. It is justice without mercy, and therefore without love.
Asmodeus — Dominion through Lust
If Leviathan enthrones the intellect against truth, Asmodeus enthrones the appetite against holiness. The Book of Tobit describes him as an “evil spirit” who slays each husband of Sarah before the marriage can be consummated—a symbol of love turned sterile by obsession. In the spiritual order, Asmodeus rules wherever eros ceases to be covenant and becomes consumption. He is the false cherub of liberation, whispering that passion unrestrained is purity itself.
In our time, his dominion takes the form of erotic Gnosticism: the creed that desire is destiny and that chastity is a lie against nature. Asmodeus baptizes the libido and enthrones it as sacrament. He mocks virginity, sneers at marriage, and calls the union of male and female “a social construct.” Under his rule, bodies cease to be icons of divine communion and become commodities of self-expression—avatars in an infinite scroll of appetite.
This is not freedom but enslavement. For the man ruled by lust cannot love; he can only consume. His hunger is insatiable because it feeds upon phantoms. Asmodeus’s counterfeit gospel preaches liberation but ends in despair, because it severs desire from its telos in divine love. When eros is stripped of transcendence, it devours its object—and eventually, itself.
Behemoth — Dominion through Machinery
In the Book of Job, Behemoth is the primal beast of earth: vast, mindless, and powerful. “Behold Behemoth, which I made along with you; he eats grass like an ox… his bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron” (Job 40:15–18). Patristic interpreters saw in Behemoth the spirit of materialism—the brute worship of creation divorced from Creator. In our age, Behemoth has become the god of the algorithm, the mechanized totality of systems that reduce the human person to data.
Behemoth governs through scale: bureaucracy, technocracy, surveillance, abstraction. He whispers that efficiency is salvation, that progress is perfection, and that man is an obsolete organ in his own creation. Under Behemoth’s reign, even rebellion is automated; algorithms amplify outrage until every soul is quantified by its consumption. The human being becomes a unit of engagement, a digital idolater bowing before the machine that measures him. It is not that technology is evil, but that under Behemoth’s hypnosis, it ceases to serve man and begins to define him. The image of God is replaced by the image of code. Man becomes not creator but created artifact of his own machinery.
The Rage of the Powers
These thrones rage when unmasked. Just as the idols of Babylon trembled before the Ark, the false powers of modernity recoil when their lies are named. Their fury is not merely human passion but spiritual recoil—the convulsion of parasitic gods whose dominion depends on ignorance. The modern self’s perpetual outrage is not random; it is the smoke of burning idols.
The “Self-authoring” myth is their common language: Leviathan promises to legalize the lie, Asmodeus to eroticize it, Behemoth to mechanize it. Together they form a counterfeit trinity of rebellion—Law without Grace, Desire without Love, Power without Wisdom. Their work is the de-creation of the human being: to unmake the creature by severing it from the Creator, to dissolve the image until only appetite remains.
Yet the Christian is not powerless before them. Their dominion is parasitic; it feeds only on negation. Where truth is spoken in love, their spell is broken. The Incarnate Word is the antidote: the Logos who reconciles law with mercy, eros with agape, and matter with spirit. Christ is the one who conquers Leviathan in the waters, purifies eros from Asmodeus’s poison, and tames Behemoth under His feet. In Him the fractured cosmos is re-knit; the false thrones fall silent before the true King.
The Christian Response
The Christian response cannot be panic, nor can it be retreat. Silence cedes the field to false gods; outrage concedes our peace to them. The only faithful answer is witness — the calm, disciplined manifestation of truth lived without apology. The age of mere opinion is over; anthropology has become warfare, and only those who embody what they believe will endure it. The Church must therefore recover her original posture: not of cultural accommodation, but of ontological defiance — the steady, incarnate resistance of those who know what a human being is.
To confess Christ in this generation is to contest the very definition of man. But this contest is not waged by slogans or algorithms. It is fought through formation, sacrament, and brotherhood — through the restoration of human personhood under the Cross.
Catechesis in Ontology: Rebuilding the Foundation
Catechesis today must begin not with doctrine alone, but with being itself. Children must be taught — from infancy — that identity is received, not invented. They must hear not only “Jesus loves you,” but “You were made in His image.” Proverbs 22:6 commands us to “train a child in the way he should go,” which includes training in the grammar of existence: that the body is good, that creation is order, that truth is not cruelty but love in structure.
Psalm 139 must again be read aloud in our homes and schools: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb… I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is not sentiment; it is metaphysical armor. To know that one’s being is crafted is to be inoculated against the myth that one must self-construct to be real. Ontological catechesis forms not just believers, but stable souls.
Narrative Inoculation: Reclaiming Story as Weapon
Modern ideology advances not through argument but through story — through the myths of self-creation. Therefore, the Church must reclaim story as its native art. The saints are not mere moral examples; they are ontological counter-narratives, lives that refute despair by radiating communion.
Tell again the tales of Moses the Ethiopian, Mary Magdalene, Peter who failed, and David who repented — not as archetypes of shame, but as witnesses that identity is restored in grace, not performance. These lives are antidotes to ideology, because they remind us that dignity is never self-made but always received.
The world’s stories end in exhaustion; the Church’s stories end in resurrection. To retell them is to re-enchant the imagination with truth — a spiritual inoculation more powerful than any argument.
Rhetorical Reframing: Turning the Questions
The Christian must become fluent in re-framing reality without rancor. The modern world is a theater of false dilemmas: You either affirm or you hate. Our task is to expose the falsity of this logic, not by shouting, but by asking better questions. “Is it really loving to affirm what destroys?” “If feelings define truth, what happens to truth when the feelings change?”
Christ’s rhetoric was never defensive. He met ideology with parable, aggression with paradox. To speak truth with gentleness and authority is not to debate but to diagnose. We are not arguing with enemies, but attempting to heal patients of amnesia. Our words must therefore be precise, disarming, and rooted in the calm of those who already know the outcome.
Embodied Life: The Counter-Liturgy of Communion
The early Church converted empires not through policy but through presence. Acts 2:42–47 records their method: teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer, and shared life. The world saw men and women living as if heaven had already begun — and they believed.
We must recover that model. Christian life itself must become a visible anthropology: marriages that are covenantal, friendships that are sacrificial, parishes that live as small fortresses of joy. The faithful home is a catechism with walls; the community meal a liturgy of personhood. When the world encounters a people who love each other with order — not chaos — it encounters the truth about God and man.
This embodied anthropology extends to mission: disaster relief, parish protection, community preparedness, education, mercy. Every act of provision becomes catechesis in the image of God. Every shield raised for the weak preaches that strength and gentleness are not enemies but kin. It is not rhetoric that will convert this age, but example — incarnate truth that moves through neighborhoods, workplaces, and cities like a quiet army of light.
Formation as Warfare
The Church’s struggle is not political but ontological — not a campaign for dominance, but for clarity. We do not fight flesh and blood, but the illusions that enslave flesh and blind the heart. Every prayer, every fast, every act of generosity is a strike against the false powers. To confess the Creed is to conduct counter-insurgency against Leviathan; to keep one’s vows is to defy Asmodeus; to teach truth to a child is to jam the gears of Behemoth.
This is why the Church must train her members as if for battle — not in hatred, but in holy readiness. Doctrine without discipline collapses under pressure; love without form dissolves into sentiment. The future belongs to those who can endure, not merely argue. The saints are our proof that endurance is possible.
Recapitulation in Christ
Every response, every act of resistance, flows from one central mystery: the Incarnation. The Word became flesh to restore the unity of body and soul, heaven and earth, man and God. In Christ, the shattered image is made whole. St. Maximus the Confessor called this recapitulation — the gathering up of the scattered logoi of creation into the one Logos who is Love Himself.
Thus, the answer to the crisis of identity is not innovation but remembrance: to remember what it means to be human, and Who made humanity. The Church’s witness must therefore be confident, joyful, and unyielding — not because we are superior, but because we are stewards of the truth about man. Our task is not to shout at the darkness but to light the candles and hold formation until dawn.
Conclusion: The Recovery of Man
In the end, every argument about culture, law, or freedom reduces to a single question: What is man? Beneath all policy and rhetoric lies this primeval struggle — not between parties or classes, but between two gospels of being. The first proclaims man as his own maker, author, and redeemer; the second proclaims him as creature, image, and son. The age has forgotten that these are mutually exclusive liturgies. One worships autonomy; the other adores communion. One enthrones the will; the other bows before the Word.
What we face, therefore, is not a debate but a schism in ontology. The modern mind seeks freedom through disincarnation — a flight from nature, sex, and history. It calls this liberation, but it is exile: the loneliness of a soul untethered from reality. The Christian vision, by contrast, begins in the humility of reception: You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Here, identity is not seized but bestowed, not performed but revealed. Man is not a project but a mystery — a creature spoken into being by Love, destined for communion rather than isolation.
This is why the war over anthropology is so fierce. It is not merely about morals; it is about metaphysics. The Self-authoring creed offers infinite choice and delivers infinite anxiety. It promises transcendence and produces exhaustion. The Christian Gospel offers surrender — and through surrender, peace. For to be named by the Father is to be freed from the tyranny of the self; to bear the image of Christ is to find that our personhood was never lost, only buried beneath our inventions.
Our task, then, is not to panic, nor to accommodate, but to stand. To hold formation in the ruins of Babel. To teach again that freedom without truth is slavery, and that the body is not the enemy but the icon of meaning. We must rebuild from first principles: the home as catechumenate, the parish as fortress of light, the brotherhood as living anthropology. The world is re-educating humanity into abstraction; we must re-form humanity into incarnation.
The Christian does not despair at the darkness, for he knows it cannot comprehend the Light. The Word through whom all things were made has entered the battlefield of meanings and already won. His Cross is the axis where anthropology is healed: there the false gods are unmasked, there Leviathan is pierced, Asmodeus silenced, Behemoth tamed. The Crucified One redefines man not by erasing his nature but by fulfilling it. In Him, obedience becomes freedom, and humility becomes glory.
To confess this truth now is to join the great resistance of the saints — a quiet, radiant insurrection against unreality. The battle of anthropologies is not the end of the story; it is the prelude to restoration. The world may rage and invert the order of creation, but creation still sings the Name that called it forth. That Name cannot be unsaid.
And so the Church endures, even under mockery and exile, bearing witness that the human person is not a variable but a vocation. Our hope is not in the triumph of our argument, but in the victory of the Logos — the Word made flesh, who alone restores what has been fragmented. In Him, the body is redeemed, desire transfigured, and the mind renewed. In Him, the noise of self-creation gives way to the quiet joy of being known.
For there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus — only peace, and the slow resurrection of the real. The recovery of man begins wherever that peace is lived.
Coda: The Last Word
“The age of the self has ended; the age of the soul begins again.”
For man cannot author himself without erasing himself.
But the Word who spoke us into being still speaks — softly, through sacrament and suffering —
calling us out of abstraction and back into communion.
The Cross is not a symbol of repression but of restoration:
where law is redeemed by mercy, desire by love, and flesh by Spirit.
There, the human form is remade.
There, the world remembers its Maker.
There, the war of anthropologies ends — in the silence of God’s own heart.
Endnotes :
- Scripture and the Image of God
Genesis 1:26–27 forms the foundational text for Christian anthropology: humanity as imago Dei — male and female, endowed with relationality and reason as divine likeness. This understanding grounds personhood not in feeling but in being — a created participation in God’s Logos. - Gnostic Parallels and Modern Self-Authoring
The comparison of modern identity ideologies to neo-Gnosticism has been made by numerous theologians and cultural critics. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); and Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020). Gnosticism’s core motif—salvation through hidden, self-revealed knowledge—finds reincarnation in the modern cult of “authenticity.” - The Concept of ‘Self-Authoring’
The term and idea echo Charles Taylor’s description of “expressive individualism” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Taylor notes the moral inversion of modernity, wherein the self becomes its own lawgiver, and authenticity replaces virtue as the measure of good. - Psychological Fragility and Recognition
Sociologist Anthony Giddens articulates the concept of “ontological security” in Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). When identity depends upon perpetual external affirmation, it becomes inherently fragile—performative and emotionally unstable. - Christian Personhood and the Patristic Vision
Early Church Fathers define personhood (hypostasis) not as autonomy but as communion. See St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, II.22; St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man; and St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (trans. Nicholas Constas, Harvard University Press, 2014). To exist rightly is to participate in divine relation; sin is, at root, ontological isolation. - The Body as Revelation
St. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006). John Paul II argues that “the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine” (§19:4). The body is thus not a mask to be overcome, but a revelation of the person. - The Demonological Typology: Leviathan, Asmodeus, and Behemoth
These figures function as theological symbols rather than literal entities:- Leviathan (Isaiah 27:1) represents perverse legality—law without love, bureaucracy as blasphemy.
- Asmodeus (Tobit 3:8) personifies eros corrupted into idolatry—lust posing as liberation.
- Behemoth (Job 40:15–24) symbolizes mechanized impersonal power—the reduction of soul to machinery.
Cf. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972), which classifies demonic “logismoi” (thought-patterns) as distortions of the intellect that corrupt desire and perception.
- Law Without Logos: The New Leviathan
Modern “Leviathanism,” as framed by political philosophers from Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) to Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952), reappears today in juridical totalism—the sacralization of bureaucracy and the weaponization of process. It represents the inversion of justice into ideology: law turned into coercive catechism. - Asmodeus and the Cult of Desire
The idolization of erotic identity mirrors Paul’s warning in Romans 1:25: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” Desire detached from divine telos becomes self-consuming nihilism, multiplying its objects without fulfillment. - Behemoth and the Technocratic Order
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), offers a prophetic critique of technocracy as “means without ends.” Behemoth thus represents the spirit of totalized instrumental reason—efficiency without wisdom, algorithm without conscience. - The Rage of the Powers
Modern outrage culture manifests the old spiritual truth that false gods demand sacrifice. The altars are digital; the incense is fury; the priesthood is anonymous. As seen throughout Scripture, idols react violently when exposed (cf. Acts 19:28–34). Ideological hysteria is thus not merely sociological but spiritual. - Formation as Warfare
Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian describe the ascetic life as stratēgía—spiritual warfare of the intellect against demonic deceit. See Cassian, Conferences (trans. Boniface Ramsey, New York: Newman Press, 1997). The Church’s disciplines of fasting, prayer, and vigilance serve as anthropological formation — a counter-insurgency against interior disintegration. - The Incarnation as Recapitulation
St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Ioannem (PG 91, 1084–1417), teaches that Christ unites and recapitulates the divisions of creation: heaven and earth, spirit and matter, male and female. In the Logos incarnate, anthropology is healed — the human form restored to divine meaning. - Christological Anthropology in Practice
Acts 2:42–47 provides the early Church’s model of personhood as communion: shared life, sacrament, and charity. The Christian community becomes the visible anthropology of the Gospel — a living icon of relational being. See also Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005), §25: “The Church’s deepest nature is expressed in her threefold responsibility: proclaiming the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, and exercising the ministry of charity.” - No Condemnation, Only Peace
Romans 8:1 proclaims the final word: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This is not passivity but restoration — the ontological reconciliation of creation through the Logos. The victory of Christ is not merely moral but metaphysical: man reconstituted in the divine design.
Postscript: On the Task Before Us
To recover true anthropology is to recover civilization itself. No society can long survive if it forgets what a person is. The Church, therefore, must not only defend doctrine but model humanity — to show that freedom, chastity, hierarchy, and mercy are not opposites but harmonies.
The hour is late, but the pattern remains unbroken. The Logos still speaks through the chaos; the image still glimmers beneath the dust. The war of anthropologies will end not with argument but with transfiguration — when man finally remembers that to be human is to be known by God.