About some limitations in researching the human being. Theological perspective

The concept of a person has gone through several stages of development in the history of thought. In the classical tradition, a person is considered to be a substance. In modernity, John Locke brought forward the notion that social existence and consciousness are the most salient properties of a person, which brought about a possibility of renouncing one’s personhood because of a lack of some perceivable and observable traits. This is why in a Christian anthropology there is such an emphasis on personalism, which from the very beginning of the twentieth century has been opposed to the treatment of people as obscure elements of matter, or elements be manipulated unquestioningly. In this paper we have indicated some elements of anthropology that demonstrate important limitation of any attempt at explaining away the mystery of being a human person.