Being Before Doing

Why Human Nature Is Not Optional

We live in the most connected age in human history. We can speak instantly across continents, construct digital identities, and surround ourselves with constant streams of information and entertainment. And yet loneliness continues to rise. Anxiety deepens. Relationships fracture more easily than before. Many people describe a quiet exhaustion, as if something is not fitting together the way it should.

It is tempting to assume the solution is simply more connection. More expression. More options. More freedom. But the problem does not appear to be a lack of opportunity. We have more choices than any generation before us. Perhaps the problem is not that we lack freedom, but that we misunderstand what freedom is for.

Loneliness is not merely an unpleasant feeling. It is a wound. Rejection destabilizes us in a way few other experiences do. To be unseen or unwanted unsettles something deeper than preference. The intensity of that wound suggests that isolation is not natural to us. If it were, it would not hurt so much.

This raises a more fundamental question. What kind of beings are we?

To say that a human person has a nature is not to reduce him to biology or temperament. It is to say that he is a determinate kind of being. A thing’s nature is what it is, such that it tends toward certain forms of activity and flourishes under certain conditions. An acorn becomes an oak and not a horse because it has a nature. In the same way, a human being is not neutral existence waiting to define itself. We are embodied and rational creatures. These are not inventions of culture but aspects of our being. If this is true, then human flourishing cannot be arbitrary. It must correspond to what we are.

If we have a nature, the next question follows naturally. What does that nature require for flourishing? Not every pattern of life integrates us. Some fragment us. Others stabilize us. The difference cannot be explained by preference alone. It must be rooted in what kind of beings we are.

This is where the conversation often becomes uncomfortable, because the word nature immediately raises objections.

There is a further question worth pressing. What kind of thing is a nature, and why should having one constrain us? The objection will be raised that natures, if they exist at all, simply describe what things do, not what they ought to do. A stone falls because it has weight. We do not say the stone ought to fall. Why should human beings be any different?

The answer lies in what kind of beings we are. Unlike a stone, we act. We deliberate. We pursue ends under the description of the good. No creature with appetite is indifferent to outcomes in the way that matter without life is indifferent to motion. The stone does not seek to fall. But a creature with appetite, however dim, tends toward what it registers as fitting to it. And a creature with reason does not merely tend. It recognizes, evaluates, and orients itself toward ends it grasps as genuinely good. This is precisely what opens the space for flourishing and its failure. When a being that acts for reasons acts against its own constitutive ends, something has gone wrong, not merely malfunctioned, but violated.

To have a nature, for a rational and appetitive being, is therefore not merely to be a certain kind of thing, but to be called toward a certain kind of completion. The acorn’s completion is given from outside, by time and soil. The human person’s completion must in some sense be appropriated, lived into, chosen, embodied. That is why virtue is a human category and not an arboreal one. Trees do not flourish badly through laziness. We can.

What follows is that the pattern of human flourishing is not arbitrary. Some ways of living integrate us, bringing the rational, desiderative, embodied, relational dimensions of our nature into proper order. Others fragment us, set one dimension against another, starve what we fundamentally are while feeding what is peripheral or disordered. The persistent sense that certain modes of life diminish us, that isolation degrades, that cruelty deforms, that betrayal wounds something that cannot simply be willed away, is not mere cultural inheritance. It is the recognition of structure. We are not infinitely plastic. We are a particular kind of being with a particular kind of constitution, and that constitution has requirements.

The skeptic may concede this much while resisting the further step: that this nature, and its requirements, points beyond itself to an origin that is not blind. But consider what is required if the structure is purely accidental. Accidental structure could account for why certain arrangements tend to persist. It could account for pressures, incentives, and conditioned responses. It cannot account for authority. It cannot explain why we experience violations of our relational nature not merely as unpleasant, but as wrong.

The depth of our response to betrayal, the way abandonment strikes us not as misfortune but as injustice, suggests that our relational constitution is not merely descriptive. It is normative. And a purely accidental process cannot generate genuine norms. It can generate patterns. It cannot ground the truth of the claims we make.

If our nature is normative, if living against it is genuinely wrong rather than merely suboptimal, then that normativity must have a source. A norm requires something that can be violated, something that resists, something whose authority is not merely our own preference dressed up in universalizing language. Either our nature is given by something that can ground norms, or the language of flourishing and violation is systematically misleading, a kind of poetry we tell ourselves to make patterns feel like commands. Our experience refuses the second option. We do not merely prefer not to be betrayed. We know we ought not to be. That knowledge is not reducible to preference, and its persistence across cultures and centuries suggests that it is tracking something real.

If isolation wounds us so deeply, perhaps it is because we are not meant for isolation. We do not merely prefer companionship. We depend upon it in ways that are difficult to explain if we are fundamentally self-contained beings. To be known, to be trusted, to be received are not luxuries. They are foundational to human flourishing.

We do not choose to be affected by betrayal. We do not decide that abandonment wounds us. To live at all is to know that one does not want to be betrayed or abandoned. We do not reason our way to this. We encounter it. And we do not treat betrayal as mere inconvenience. We treat it as violation. These responses reveal structure.

This does not mean that every relationship is equal. Some are fleeting. Others are permanent. Some require little of us. Others require everything. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have structured their lives around bonds of trust, loyalty, and shared responsibility. That pattern is not accidental. It suggests that communion is not an accessory to human life but part of its architecture.

If this is true, then freedom cannot mean mere self-expression. Freedom would have to be the capacity to enter into and sustain those bonds in a way that corresponds to our nature. A freedom that avoids vulnerability altogether may reduce pain, but it also prevents the depth that communion requires. It is possible that the loneliness of our age is not the result of too little freedom, but of a freedom unwilling to risk vulnerability.

If human beings are not self-created, then our relational structure is not something we invented. It is something we cannot avoid encountering. We find ourselves ordered toward communion whether we would prefer to be or not. If that structure is real, then it must have an origin. A being that does not author its own existence must derive from something that does. Either our nature is the accidental product of blind forces, or it reflects intentional causation.

If it is purely accidental, then the language of flourishing becomes unstable. Loneliness would not be a wound but merely a preference unmet. Love would not be gift but strategy. Moral obligation would reduce to convenience. Yet our experience suggests something more. We assume that certain ways of relating are fitting to us and others deform us. To say that our nature is given is to say that it is meaningful. It has direction because it was meant.

If our relational structure is meaningful rather than arbitrary, then it reflects something about its source. Effects resemble their causes in some way. If creatures are structured for rationality and communion, then rationality and communion cannot be foreign to the origin of being. Christian revelation names this more precisely. The source of all being is not solitary but communion. Knowledge and love are not accidents within reality. They belong to its deepest structure.

If this is true, then our longing for communion is not a defect to be overcome. It is a trace. The desire to be known and to give oneself corresponds to something real at the foundation of existence. The deepest fulfillment of our relational nature cannot be exhausted by horizontal relationships alone. However essential those are, they point beyond themselves.

Still, horizontal communion matters. If vulnerability is necessary for love, then love requires structure. Without structure, exposure becomes chaos. Throughout history, human beings have recognized this and formed covenants. A covenant is not merely an agreement of convenience. It is a binding commitment that stabilizes vulnerability and orders it toward a shared good.

Among human relationships, one bond stands out as uniquely comprehensive. It involves exclusivity, permanence, shared life, shared responsibility, and the possibility of new life arising from that union. Marriage is not simply intense affection. It is a covenant of total self-gift.

It is worth lingering here because the logic of totality is not obvious. We are accustomed to thinking of gifts in partial terms. One gives time, or money, or attention, always retaining the giver as a kind of background remainder. The gift of the self in marriage is of a different kind. It does not give things that belong to the self. It gives the self. And to give the self is to place the entirety of what one is at the disposal of the other, not merely one’s resources, but one’s future, one’s fertility, one’s vulnerability, one’s very identity as it unfolds in time.

Now, if the gift is genuinely total, what follows? Several things, and they follow with some logical force.

A total gift cannot be given to more than one. Not because there is some rule against it, but because the structure of totality itself is exclusive. To give oneself wholly to another is to constitute a relationship in which nothing of the self is withheld or redirected. The moment a second claim on the self arises of equal standing, the original gift is redefined retroactively as something less than total. What was offered as everything is revealed to have been a portion. Exclusivity is not an add-on to the total gift. It is internal to its meaning. One cannot simultaneously give everything to two people, for the same reason one cannot give the same object to two recipients, not because the law forbids it, but because the nature of the act forecloses it.

The same logic extends to permanence. A total gift given under conditions is not total. It is conditional. Imagine someone who says: I give you everything, unless circumstances shift, unless you fail to be what I need, unless a better offer arrives. That person has not given themselves. They have loaned themselves, subject to recall. The totality of the gift is precisely what makes withdrawal a form of self-contradiction. One cannot take back what has been fully given without implicitly admitting that the gift was never real, that what was offered as the self was in fact a performance of the self, a presentation that retained the presenter as an observer who could walk away.

Marriage at the level of natural reason has always recognized this, which is why cultures that permitted divorce still spoke of it as a rupture, something torn rather than simply dissolved. What is merely contractual can be dissolved without damage to either party. What is covenantal wounds when broken, because the bond that was made was not between assets but between persons.

There is a further dimension, and it is the one that marks marriage off most decisively from other covenants of great depth. The self that is given is not a disembodied self. The person who enters marriage brings a body. And the body is not merely an instrument through which a person acts. It is the mode of the person’s presence in the world. The body expresses the person. The union of bodies in marriage is not, therefore, a separate event alongside the union of persons. It is the sign that the gift of persons has been made and received.

And because the body is inherently oriented toward the generation of new life, because the union of the sexes is, in its deepest biological grammar, the kind of union from which new persons come, the total gift of embodied persons is ordered, by its own structure, toward fruitfulness. Not every marriage produces children. Not every act of conjugal love results in conception. But the openness to life is not an external requirement imposed on the structure of self-gift. It is entailed by what self-gift, in embodied persons, actually is. To give oneself totally while structurally foreclosing the possibility of new life by choice or by act of will is to give something other than the whole self. It is to hold back the generative dimension of one’s embodied being, to offer the person while refusing the fruitfulness that belongs to that person’s nature.

This is why the ancient language of marriage has always spoken not merely of two but of three: husband, wife, and the love that bears fruit beyond themselves. The covenant creates a particular kind of surplus. The love given and received does not merely remain between the two. It generates. This generative openness is not about whether children come. It is about whether the love that constitutes the marriage is a love that includes the full scope of what the persons giving themselves to one another are.

If any of these dimensions are removed, the structure changes. The bond may remain meaningful, but it is no longer total. Marriage, at the natural level, is the most complete human image of structured and reciprocal self-gift. Yet even this does not exhaust the meaning of our relational nature. Human covenants participate in a deeper communion but do not replace it.

If the human person has a nature ordered toward communion, then dignity is not self-declared. It is inherent. We are valuable not because we construct meaning but because we are a determinate kind of being capable of knowing, loving, and giving ourselves.

Loneliness wounds because isolation contradicts our structure. Freedom exhausts when it is severed from purpose. Vulnerability frightens us because it exposes us to rejection. And yet without vulnerability, there is no love. Without love, there is no flourishing.

Human beings are not self-defining creatures. We are embodied, rational, relational beings ordered toward communion. Flourishing is not achieved by escaping that order, but by entering it more deeply.

What if the unrest of our age is not evidence that nothing has meaning, but evidence that we are living against the grain of our own nature? What if the wound we feel is not proof that love is impossible, but proof that we were made for it?