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Jun 174 min read

Man in the Constitution

The Human Being

in the American Constitution 

(Why There Is No Universal Definition of Man)


« We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. » (Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776)


Those who genuinely pledge allegiance to the American Constitution hold these truths spelled out in the Declaration of 1776 to be self-evident, that all men are created equal: created equal under the law, meaning that the law treats all citizens as having equal God-given rights. The Constitution provides a legal vindication of the dignity of the human being under God. Rights should not be conceived as stemming from anything falling short of God—a God that is the absolute source (terminus a quo) and objective (terminus ad quem) of all rights.  All men who are blessed with God-given rights under a legal Constitution are as One (e pluribus unum)—all equally citizens of a nation and as such partakers in a Commonwealth.* 


The American Constitution is not defining man as man (the anthropos), but the citizen relatively to law and God.  Indeed we are most evidently not all intellectually and morally equal; nor should we be in our fallen world.  God does not define us as equal men based on our moral, intellectual, etc. differences, but legally and so in the interests of the Common Good we are all to serve (each of us in his own varying way).  Beyond our legal definition, however, our fates are not at all equal.  As for the essence of man, or what man ultimately is (not merely what he seems to be), here we are facing a divine mystery, even as this mystery is manifest in many competing ways (relatively to the divine mind).


What the Constitution does not do is define man as man. Indeed, we have no universal definition of man. Any such definition would imply the reducibility of man as man to a definition; it would entail a legalistic conception of the human. Yet again, the absence of a universal definition of man does not depend upon our differences, but upon our transcending all differences in a divine mystery transcending all laws.1 We are thus not defined as human beings by any nation’s legal Constitution, but by God himself and in God’s own mind, where we are ultimately judged.


In our « Age of the Death of God» people will inevitably tend to struggle to define themselves relatively to our differences. Where we assume that God does not define us in the abyss of his unerring mind, and insofar as we do not accept to be defined by mere legal constitutions, we are driven at once to define ourselves relatively to our differences, the most evident of which are physical. Accordingly and unsurprisingly today most people struggle daily against each other based on primarily physical appearances, competing against each other relatively to vain considerations, against the interests of any Common Good.


There is no way out of this destructive tendency aside from a return to an anthropology tied to a mature understanding of both law and God given which understanding all men are equal legally–serving a nation’s Common Good—by being rooted ultimately in God. Otherwise put, we are by God at once equally men and citizens: all created equal as citizens (united under a legal Constitution), so that we may all rise—necessarily unequally—to a recognition of our identity—thus to what we most eminently are—in a divine mystery transcending legal definitions and altogether-contingent differences alike.


Our being « all created equal » indicates that we are citizens by God—that we are not equal if not by God—or that the path to God is at once that of the servant of the Common Good. As long as we seek our identity aside from the Common Good, the unity of « life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness » will remain a Chimera for us. For we would then live pursuing, not a happiness compatible with liberty, but ends that are destructive of nations and so that render life most brutish.

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* Today's tendency to invoke human rights in a radically secular and therefore planetary context contributes to obscuring the meaning of the Declaration of 1776 and consequently that of the Constitution of 1787. According to globalist ideology, "human rights" would be defined in strictly evolutionary terms that invite technology as preferred manager of our “environment” without presupposing any essential distinction between man and beast. Here, not only is right extended in principle to any living being (where by life we mean the organization of an “ecosystem,” a term presupposing universal immanent autonomy as its finality); what is more, human right is relativized diachronistically, whereby the door is opened to a revisionism involving the possibility of universally establishing that man as a species is an (expendable) obstacle to the consolidation of an ideal biological system.


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1The question of differences is not settled “biologically,” or by defining particulars relatively to an overarching species (defined in turn by selected distinct traits). “The human species” is no less of an abstraction than any legal definition of man; indeed, as a “class” we belong to, it is less compelling, for it is concretely less primordial than the class of nationhood. Why, long before we begin seeing ourselves as belonging to a biological/physical species, we come to know ourselves in terms of social/familial allegiances. The physical as such is an abstraction presupposing socio-political realities.


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