The idea of the person, the individual, is not as old as you might think.
So says Griffin Blood, a classics and philosophy major, one of three seniors named a Fenwick Scholar for the 2025-26 academic year. One of the most prestigious academic honors conferred on a student, the Fenwick Scholarship supports a student’s independent research on a project of their choosing and design. Blood’s project is a thesis, “The Genealogy of Personhood: A Study into the Origins of Personhood in Greek Thought and the Christian Tradition,” 90 pages on the theological and philosophical origins of personhood.
“The idea of personhood is just incredibly bizarre,” Blood says. “There was nothing of that sort in the ancient world. It’s not until the rise of Christianity that you get this notion, this idea that the individual has some sort of inherent worth.
“If you were to try to give a date to the start of the notion, the incarnation, the birth of Christ would have to be the beginning because in that you have the highest form of being coming down and assuming human flesh,” Blood continues. “You have this total inversion of ideas where suddenly the highest thing is taking on the [form of the] lowest thing, and that means the individual is higher than, say, the universal.”
Blood’s thesis traces the development of personhood through the writings of three major figures in theology and philosophy: St. Augustine, John Zizioulas, and Christos Yannaras, representing ancient and modern thinking on the concept of the person. He is guided in his work by three Holy Cross scholars, his advisor John Manoussakis, associate professor, philosophy, Rev. John Gavin, S.J., associate professor, religious studies, and Rev. Peter Nguyen, S.J., associate professor, religious studies.
Human dignity is not earned nor can it be revoked
“In the ancient, pre-Christian world, the individual only has worth by virtue of his membership in a greater collective,” Blood says. “The individual was always subsumed into the universal. Christianity says, no, the individual has worth by virtue of being an individual. It’s not something earned. It’s not something bestowed by the community that could be revoked. It’s something inherent."
In fact, thinking of personhood as beginning and ending with an individual is only half the equation. Personhood is social and requires communion with others, Blood says.
"One of my philosophical heroes, the Jesuit philosopher W. Norris Clarke, defines the person as 'substance in-relation,'" Blood says. "Likewise, another philosophical giant, Robert Spaemann, notes that we can only talk about persons 'in the plural,' that is, there is no such thing as an autonomous self.
"We cannot exist apart from others; we are always interconnected in a web of relations that requires recognition of the other person and their dignity," Blood says. "Essentially, to be a person means that communion with others is our 'mode of being.'"
Manoussakis says Blood’s scholarship transcends the purely academic, reflecting a caring for others tied to the hallmarks of a Jesuit education.
“His Fenwick thesis offers the textual and conceptual groundwork for the two pillars of the Jesuit pedagogy, which our College has embraced as representative of the College's mission, namely cura personalis and the imperative to become ‘men and women for others,’” says Manoussakis. “To be a person, Griffin argues, is precisely to be for and before the other, to define yourself not as a self-subsisting entity but as a relational being, always inscribed within a community. I personally think that his thesis offers a pertinent and highly timely reminder of the uniqueness and value of the human person.”
Blood says he was drawn to Holy Cross for its nationally recognized classics program; his father had read good things about the department in parent forums on College Confidential, Blood says, then grins.
“Holy Cross was my dream school. If I were to do the whole college selection process all over again, I would make the same choice,” Blood says. “The faculty, the course offerings are amazing.”
Blood noted two other Holy Cross offerings that have developed him as a scholar. The first, the College’s Montserrat program, places first-year students in living and learning communities arranged around interdisciplinary themes: Contemporary Challenges, Core Human Questions, Divine, Global Society, Natural World, and Self. There, in addition to a year-long deep dive into questions about the relationship between God and science, Blood learned note-taking, critical reading and organizational practices that inform his work on his thesis.
The second, the Weiss Summer Research Fellowship, financed an eight-week research project under the supervision of Fr. Gavin, in which Blood and four other students translated four homilies on Psalm 36 attributed to the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria. The homilies, thought to be lost, were discovered in April 2012 by Marina Molin Pradel in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
“We produced original translations of both the Greek and the Latin, and we also reconstructed the Greek texts of the psalm that Origen would have been writing,” Blood says. “The Weiss work was a great opportunity to refine my theological and research methods.”
“Griffin is an exceptionally talented scholar whose interdisciplinary project demonstrates the College's ongoing dedication to the liberal arts. As a scholar of ancient Christianity, I feel privileged to work with a student like Griffin, whose strong background in classical languages and ancient philosophy enables him to do graduate-level research and writing,” Fr. Gavin says. “I have also enjoyed collaborating with colleagues—Professor Nguyen and Professor Manoussakis—in helping to guide Griffin's work. I believe that I speak for the three of us when I say that Griffin's work has enriched our own thinking about the meaning of personhood and human dignity in our own time.”
Blood will begin a master's degree in philosophy at Boston College next fall. As commencement nears, he says he’d advise younger and future students to treat their education as an experience on par with the Graeco-Roman epics or Tolkien’s fantasy “The Hobbit.”
“I remember thinking I’m going to take this intellectual and academic adventure that is going to very much change me,” Blood says. “And it’s something that, yeah, I guess I was very much putting myself in the steps of Bilbo Baggins going on his adventure.”
