In this extended essay I have traced the origins of a number of contemporary disputes about the nature of the human person, setting them against what I have identified as the ‘Mainline Tradition’: that is, what was to become a specifically Christian account of the human person gradually built up from its philosophical origins in Greece and the theology of the Hebrew Bible and through Christian centuries in Europe down to the High Middle Ages. I have argued that a substantial portion of such an account had been developed – though still presented somewhat incoherently – by the time of Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. I have then gone on to show how although subsequent thinkers right down to our own time have added potentially important material to the tradition – not least by extending accounts of self-awareness and the human powers of imagination – there has also developed what can be seen as an attempt, whether more or less conscious, to demolish the earlier Tradition and substitute something very different: a supposedly more scientifically objective and impersonal ‘contemporary’ account of human nature that has the effect of calling that nature’s ultimate worth ever more into question.