First of all, I would distinguish Man as that one creature, in all of creation, who makes no sense apart from the most close-grained, intimate, yielding, surrendering dependence upon God. He is also that one who makes less and less sense - i.e., becomes infinitessimally that much less both useful and beautiful to anyone - insofar as he flees from or denies that dependence.
Again, what makes us most distinctly human - which is to say, most resonantly, permanently, Divinely human - is not anything which makes us more independent of nature, or detachable or divorcible from nature. Even less is it that which disregards, distorts or subverts our human nature. (And remember, there's nothing like naked, unashamed derision and contempt of nature as a whole for eviscerating our own humanness).
What makes us most like the First Man, then? It is that intimate, intricate, inextricable dependence on God which defined Adam from the Beginning - at the very height of his dominion over creation - as something radically distinct from either angels or beasts. Something that made him almost as pliant and yielding in the hands of his Father as, indeed, the Second Adam was to become, in that fulness of salvific time which we know as His passion and death. It is also, I'm inclined to believe, what may have inspired the first Scriptural authors to characterize us all, at our most truly and Divinely human, as by nature sheep, rather than goats.
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