{"id":81,"date":"2014-02-19T16:56:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T16:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/2014\/02\/19\/errare-humanum-est\/"},"modified":"2025-03-19T17:10:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T17:10:35","slug":"errare-humanum-est","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/2014\/02\/19\/errare-humanum-est\/","title":{"rendered":"Errare Humanum Est"},"content":{"rendered":"

The wrongs and injuries of base mankind
\nFresh to my sense, and always in my mind.
\nThe bravely-patient to no fortune yields:
\nOn rolling oceans, and in fighting fields,
\nStorms have I pass\u2019d, and many a stern debate;
\nAnd now in humbler scene submit to fate.
\nWhat cannot want? The best she will expose,
\nAnd I am learn\u2019d in all her train of woes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These words are from Alexander Pope\u2019s translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/i>. Odysseus, on reaching the palace at Ithaca, considers the trials he has endured on his ten-year odyssey and the uncertainty of what the future holds, and is resigned to the comfort of his fate.<\/p>\n

Alexander Pope was by all accounts a remarkable man. His translations of Homer\u2019s epic poems, completed early in the eighteenth century, are regarded by many as the classic rhyming translations by which all others are measured. He was an avid poet and critic, and if not for the Illiad<\/i> and Odyssey<\/i>, is probably best remembered for having penned the phrase To err is human, to forgive<\/i> divine<\/i>, possibly the best known of all English proverbs. What wisdom could have been embedded into these seven simple words to have caused them to be remembered for so long and known to so many? I think it\u2019s that they capture, in the most concise way possible, the two poles that lie at the very heart of the human condition.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a revelation to me how, as I\u2019ve got older, I\u2019ve increasingly found wisdom in ancient writings. \u00a0I recall dwelling on the biblical concept of original sin in years gone by, and of the notion of we as human beings\u00a0having fallen, and coming to the conclusion that it was ridiculous and nonsensical. If eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was a metaphor for our transition to rational beings, how could the act possibly be sinful and constitute our fall? \u00a0I\u2019d always considered our intellect and ability to reason as the essence of our humanity and correspondingly as our greatest gift; \u00a0Shouldn\u2019t we celebrate the event instead?<\/p>\n

While I still do see reason as one of our great gifts, time and experience have tempered my views to the point where it\u2019s impossible for me to look upon intellect with the same indiscriminate reverence that I once did. Is it really our greatest gift, or are there other gifts that rival or surpass it? What good is intellect if it\u2019s misdirected, and having asked that, what is it that provides direction and guidance to our thoughts and ultimately to our actions? It\u2019s by asking questions like these that we begin to wade into the deep waters of ethics and aesthetics, and our notions of perfect love and perfect beauty that lie at their heart.<\/p>\n

My favourite modern philosopher is Bertrand Russell, not because I think he was the smartest or made the most significant contributions to philosophy, but because he was so acutely human and aware of it. In mathematics, he single-handedly destroyed the dreams of the idealists by showing that even mathematics, our purest science that many had thought perfect, had inescapable logical flaws. He wrote prolifically on a multitude of subjects and was never afraid to\u00a0voice his opinion. His work was and remains controversial, and Wittgenstein, his pupil, famously said that Russell\u2019s works should be divided into red books on mathematics, that everyone should read, and blue books on everything else, that nobody should be allowed to. \u00a0It was of Russell, defending his controversial appointment to a post at the\u00a0College of the City of New York, that Einstein wrote:<\/p>\n

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a 1959 BBC inverview<\/a>, Russell was asked what message he would choose to pass on to future generations, were he given the opportunity.\u00a0 Fittingly, he broke his advice into two parts, the first intellectual, that when searching for truth we should try to consider only the facts,\u00a0putting those facts above any desired outcomes or presupposed notions, and the second moral, that hatred is foolish and love wise.<\/p>\n

Truth, and love. If these are our two great gifts, where do they come from? We certainly don\u2019t need them for survival and it\u2019s curious to me that we have either. It was Einstein again who noted that the only unintelligible thing about the universe is that it\u2019s intelligible to us at all. It needn\u2019t be so. And what about love? Surely we would be just as well off, or even better off, had we been more like other animals who go about ensuring their survival with brutal and banal efficiency?<\/p>\n

Whatever the answers and despite the oddities of our human predicament, I cannot but think\u00a0what an unlikely\u00a0journey we\u2019ve had in getting here.\u00a0From the very instant of the Big Bang, in those first zillionths of a second when the universe started, had the explosive force been even minutely more or less, the elements that are the building blocks\u00a0of life and everything around us wouldn\u2019t have been formed and the universe as we know it would simply not exist. I read somewhere once that the precision required of that explosion was so great that the probability of it happening as a chance event would be like shooting an arrow in a random direction and having it strike a bulls-eye at the other end of the known universe. Yet, despite the odds,\u00a0it happened.<\/p>\n

In Carl Sagan\u2019s Cosmos<\/i>, he discusses experiments in pre-biological organic chemistry at Cornell University, where some of the basic building blocks of life, like amino acids, can be synthesised easily from inorganic compounds.\u00a0Easy as that may be, the step from\u00a0amino acids to even the most simple life forms, such as\u00a0bacteria, is like the step from a chunk of brass to a functioning Swiss clock.\u00a0Of course we can\u2019t discount that it happened by accident, but the spontaneous creation of life as a chance event must leave even the arrow analogy pale by comparison.<\/p>\n

These are only two unlikely events on a road that is staggeringly full of fortuitous accidents of nature from beginning to end.\u00a0Sometimes when\u00a0I think about\u00a0the events\u00a0that have led us to where we now are, and even given the billions of years that it\u2019s taken for us to get here, it’s\u00a0hard for me to accept that it\u2019s all been purely accidental. As a person of science with an enquiring mind, I don\u2019t for an instant believe that we should ascribe any event to the realm of supernatural miracles, but an essential part of life for me has become embracing the uncertain and the unknown as a necessary part of our existence, and\u00a0celebrating the reality that we are surrounded by ordinary miracles every minute of every day.<\/p>\n

The religious zealots will have us believe that the existence of God can be proved, while at the same time the fanatic atheists will ridicule all who choose to believe in any form of deity. The truth, of course, is that it\u2019s a matter that can neither be\u00a0proved nor disproved, nor will it ever be, for the answers lie in a realm beyond anything we can conceive. But I can\u2019t help wondering what if, before anything else,\u00a0there\u00a0was a singular God of beauty and of love? Is there anything more cruel and\u00a0lonely than love unrequited? It leads me to feel, sometimes overwhelmingly, that we are Children of a Lonely God. That perhaps all those uncanny accidents of nature were somehow not accidental at all, but part of a larger play that has culminated in the existence of us as rational beings, floating on this pale blue dot in the vast loneliness of space and\u00a0able to grasp and marvel\u00a0at the beauty and majesty of nature. That it\u2019s no accident at all that we have been given reason and love, and that the most important choice we can and must make is the choice to love, and through love to connect with and discover\u00a0the Divine. If this is true, then perhaps the Universe and everything in it\u00a0is nothing but a celebration of beauty and of love.<\/p>\n

But despite the divine origin of the seeds that lie within us, the tragic\u00a0human reality is that\u00a0we as beings are\u00a0fatally flawed. It\u2019s as though we\u2019ve been given the notions of perfect beauty and prefect love, but for us they remain just that.\u00a0Notions.\u00a0We dream of replicating perfect beauty or realising perfect love, but for us, such perfection will be forever elusive.\u00a0 However noble our intentions and no matter how\u00a0hard we might try, it will always be impossible for us\u00a0to turn those notions into perfect reality, as under the critical judgement of our own honest intellect,\u00a0we will always fall short.<\/p>\n

Should we just concede defeat or resign ourselves to bitterness in the futility of it all? Of course not. For me,\u00a0being human is about accepting the flaws that are part of my makeup and\u00a0choosing to try and rise above them.\u00a0About taming and tempering the animal within and\u00a0striving to exist beyond the physical plane. About never abandoning those perfect notions of beauty and love and all the virtues they inspire, and trying to live up to them and do them justice. This, for me, defines human purpose and I believe that it\u2019s this singular activity that has the ability to truly enrich and add meaning to our lives.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it really matters how we choose to go about it – whether it\u2019s raising children with love,\u00a0writing poetry, creating a beautiful garden, or nothing short of setting out to change the world –\u00a0ultimately I think it\u2019s less about what we do and more about the way in which we do it. Whatever we choose to do, if we do it with earnest, it will be a road on which we will often need to go by feel and which will never be without risk. And we cannot allow ourselves to shy from risk for fear of devastation; In the end,\u00a0there is little to be gained from living a life in which we are not true to ourselves or which is less than the one of which we are capable. It\u2019s inevitable that\u00a0at times we will err in our judgement and make mistakes – we\u2019re only human after all.<\/p>\n

Although we\u2019re all familiar with Alexander Pope\u2019s famous proverb, fewer are aware that the saying itself had its roots in antiquity with Seneca\u2019s less forgiving Errare humanum est, sed in errare perseverare diabolicum<\/i> (to err is human, but to persist in the error is diabolical).\u00a0A stoic philosopher, Seneca has always been considered\u00a0to be a humanist saint and it\u2019s fitting for me that having been born in 4BC, his life and that of Christ, the divine saint, would have been concurrent so that we today can imagine the human and the divine juxtaposed in time, just as it is within ourselves. I have little doubt that Seneca himself felt these poles in his own being and that had he chosen to define this, he might instead have written\u00a0Errare humanum est,\u00a0am\u0101re\u00a0sacrum.<\/i><\/p>\n

You couldn\u2019t easily find a better partner for human nature than Love.\u00a0 That\u2019s the basis for my claiming that every man should hold Love in respect, and I myself respect the ways of love and practice them with exceptional care. That\u2019s why I urge others to do the same, and on this and every other occasion I do all I can to praise the power and courage of Love. ~ from Plato\u2019s Symposium –\u00a0The closing of Socrates speech.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The wrongs and injuries of base mankind Fresh to my sense, and always in my mind. The bravely-patient to no fortune yields: On rolling oceans, and in fighting fields, Storms have I pass\u2019d, and many a stern debate; And now in humbler scene submit to fate. What cannot want? The best she will expose, And Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-errare-humanum-est"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":642,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anordinaryhuman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}