The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive – The Classical Vision

From the Essay, “To Be a Man Fully Alive”

Gloria Dei Vivens Homo

By Fr. Bruce Wren

PART 1

I have been thinking recently about the superb statement of St. Irenaeus: “Gloria Dei vivens homo.” We can translate that as “The Glory of God is the living human person.” Others translate it as “The Glory of God is man fully alive.” Both are valid: what is clear is that God, He who made what is already so awe-inspiring here on earth—the mountains, oceans, etc.—and the incomprehensible majesty of the vast universe itself, is glorified principally not in these, but in human beings. It is a very daring statement, and to our scientific age, almost incomprehensible, but it is also 100% Christian. We know this because God Himself became man: “And the Word became Flesh.”

So what does it mean to be a “vivens homo,” a man fully alive? We all desire that, I suppose: to be a person fully alive, the person we are supposed to be, a person who gives glory to God. One of my Catholic heroes, John Senior, once wrote that by enlarging our capacity to experience the world, we enlarge our life.[1] For almost all of us, that’s what we want to do: enlarge our life, be a person fully alive.

But the obvious question follows: what is a man fully alive? What does he look like? I think there are fundamentally two ways of answering that question. The first way is classical antiquity’s portrait of such a man, but it isn’t only antiquity’s; this model continues to significantly influence our contemporary idea of what it means to be a genuine human being. It is this: those who have the will, intelligence, and character to strive, and generally succeed, toward greatness, wealth, power, and fame. In literature, we see this in characters such as Achilles for the Greeks, Aeneas or Turnus for the Romans, or the Count of Monte Cristo for the French. But it also holds for historical personages: Alexander the Great for the Greeks, Julius Caesar for the Romans, Napoleon for the French, etc. If we follow this answer, everyone who is not like this—those among the great and powerful—are basically to be forgotten or at least ignored: they were certainly not “men fully alive,” but more like second-class humanity, small fry, who must only scratch their life out of the meagerness of their means. If we were to ask those who follow this concept, “What is the true nature of man and how is it to be realized?”, their answer would be something like, “By a life of grandeur.”

This grandeur is not only for soldiers or those who succeed in war: it can be found in all the “great” occupations or vocations of life. It can be found in statesmanship: Pericles for the Greeks, who said in his famous speech for the fallen heroes of Ancient Athens: “For this too is our way: to dare most liberally where we have reflected best.” For the Romans, it would be Augustus; for the English, Churchill, etc. It can be found in philosophy: Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes: huge minds that changed men’s way of thinking! It can be found in the great authors of humanity: Homer, Virgil, Cervantes, and Tolstoy. But what marks them all is this striving for excellence that includes power, or fame, or fortune, or a combination of them all.

I want to provide you with an example of how to answer our question in this manner. Recently, I reread Virgil’s Aeneid. To make a long story short, the Trojan hero Aeneas, the legendary “father” of Rome, has sailed to Italy, and there encounters a people that will not give him the land, and so there is war. His opponent is Turnus, the epitome of what the classics would consider a great man: courageous, generous, defiant, self-confident, undefeated in battle. At one point in the war, Turnus’ people, the Latins, are losing badly to Aeneas and his Trojans, and they ask the Latin king to sue for peace. The king’s counselor, Drances, stands up, takes the word, tells Turnus that he is beaten, and asks him to submit. But Turnus responds:

“Me—beaten? Oh, you worm—who’d say that, seeing The Tiber swelling with the blood of Trojans, Arcadian armor stripped, Evander’s house Brought down, without an heir?... The thousands I subdued and sent to Hades While penned inside their walls and earthworks? War Can’t save us? Chant these omens to the Trojans— And to your own self, madman. Keep on muddling Our plans with terror… If you can place no further hope in fighting, If we’re abandoned, if from one retreat Ruin prevails, and Fortune can’t turn back, Let’s hold our weak hands out and beg for peace. I long for any trace of our past courage, And I prefer the man who won’t surrender, Who’d rather bite the dust, once and for all: He has the most heart, he’s most blessed in hardship… Why shamefully give in already, quaking Down to our toes before the trumpet sounds? If Trojans challenge me to single combat, And you say yes, since I’m our stumbling block, I’m willing. Victory hasn’t yet rebuffed me: No matter what the risk, to me it’s worth it.” (Book XI, 392–437)

Thus, the great man of antiquity.

(End of Part 1. In the next post: the revolutionary Christian contrast.)

---

Get Involved with the Catholic World Mission Family

MAKE A DIFFERENCE TODAY