By Jeffrey Kirby

The Human Person as a Source of Unity

In his first celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, Pope Benedict XVI preached on the culture of life. Officiating at the baptism of ten children, the Pope exposed the lies of the culture of death, which makes the human being a “thing”. It does not recognize him as “person”, but only as “merchandise”.¹ The culture of death denies the fundamental dignity of the human person.

Rather than mere merchandise, the human person stands as a wonderful existent. He is the most admirable being in contingent reality, because in him are joined the depths of matter and the transcendence of spirit. Interestingly, he is not at the summit of the created order, but he holds the mysterious centre-place in the hierarchy of being. Through him, the various levels of existence can be found in personal unity, when they would otherwise exist only separately. The unity of things so distinct in nature arouses a profound sense of awe in the human person. How does the human person benefit from such an existence?

As a source of unity for contingent reality, the human person is not estranged from the world, but has an innate openness to each part of it, as a portion of his own existence. He not only possesses in his own nature the organic and intelligible realities, but also shares in the particular perfections of each of these different dimensions of being. The human person, as an embodied spirit, exists as a type of bridge, a source of authentic unity, between spiritual and material ways of existence. This unique position provides the human person the opportunity to express the two great dimensions of reality, matter and spirit, as complementary elements which enrich each other and form a single whole.

The human person is not a stranger to the realms of being around and within him. As a being consisting of matter and spirit, he has the sole privilege of consciously existing both here and now. Living in time and space through his body, he can surpass these realities through the functions of his spiritual soul. The angelic persons must marvel at the peculiarity of the human person, of a spirit wedded to a body. Christian angelology provides an example of this marvel-turned-rebellion. Gregory of Nyssa wrote that Lucifer, who was the guardian angel of earth, revolted because he saw that the human person, who was a part of the physical world, would one day surpass him in greatness.² What effect does this union of matter and spirit have on the human person himself?

The Gnostic Attack on the Dignity of the Body

For the human person, the union of his body and soul has been a source of bewilderment and sanctification since the Fall, which introduced a clashing discord into the harmony of the human person. The Fall introduced the paradox of a being with both a body subject to death and an immortal, spiritual soul. Before the Fall, there existed no such paradox. The human person’s body and soul were harmoniously united and his body would have naturally shared in the immortality of his soul. How has the human person attempted to resolve the tension, caused by the Fall, within himself and the world around him? The human being, and various cultures of death created by him, have unrealistically sought to solve this paradox through an attack on the dignity of the body. Rather than discovering the goodness of the body and thus seeing it as a part of his redemption, Man has attempted to disgrace this essential dimension of his own existence, thereby epitomizing the effects of the Fall. This indignity, which has been termed Gnosticism, has expressed itself in human history in two major campaigns against the human body.

The Gnostic Attempt to Escape through Spiritualism

The first expression of Gnosticism hid in the spiritual nature of the human person and focused on meditation and sacrifice. It sought to elevate the human person to the exclusion of his body, renouncing it and denying its value through neglect and abnegation. This was the view of Epicurus and his Roman disciple Lucretius. They overly emphasized the spiritual and refused the co-existing material reality of the person. In the century before Christ, Lucretius wrote: “Of course, to think that mortal and immortal could live, sense, act, in mutual partnership is nonsense”.³

This approach expresses a desire for escapist deliverance or extinction. It can be observed in eastern mysticism. Buddha taught a man who was suffering: “If you make for yourself an island of the True Self…though the body may be sick, the True Self is never sick, and you may take refuge in that, an island amid the storms of life’s suffering”.⁴ This wayward view has become the rallying assertion of the New Age movement with its implicit refusal of the body’s dignity, and its unguided emphasis on the human spirit.

The Gnostic Attempt to Escape through Materialism

The second expression of Gnosticism rejected the existence of the soul and wallowed in the base materiality of the human body, centering solely on empty self-pleasure and raw power. It denied the body’s value through hedonism, seeking only self-centred, fleshy enjoyment and advancement. Bodily dignity and purpose were seen as essential to the person.

This was the view of the proto-capitalists. Adam Smith wrote: “But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only.” He continued, “He will more likely prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of him”.⁵ One can see this approach to the human body in the Greco-Roman religious custom of the Baccanalia, and in modern materialism. Karl Marx, the father of materialistic communism, satirically asked: “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions – in one word, man’s consciousness – changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life?”⁶

This disbelief in the value of the human body was epitomised by Thomas Hobbes, who wrote: “Man is in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war, as private appetite is the measure of good and evil”.⁷ Following this view, the sexual revolution, as well as the demands of Wall Street, dangerously dismissed the body’s significance and continually over-emphasised self-centred pleasure and unrestrained power.

Current Approaches to the Body

Contemporary thinking continues this denial of the body, and refuses to give it any substantial place in a meaningful human personhood. Wrongly, current thinkers see the human body as just an instrument or mere tool for some function. The humane and Christian view, however, sees the human person as including a spirit which needs a body as a complement and mediator to fulfil his destiny as a traveler to God, the Ultimate Good, through the goodness of the material cosmos.⁸ It must be realized, therefore, that the question of the human body does not deal only with biology and chemistry, politics and economics, but also with meaning and value.

The Christian Belief and Response

Understanding the Gnostic violence to the human body, what can be made of the numerous ascetics of the Christian Church? Is their approach to the body consistent with those of the Gnostic belief? Or are their practices in unison with the Christian and integrally humane belief concerning the body’s dignity? Is there anything to learn about the body from the Christian saints and their practices?

Of those Christian ascetics, what can be said of the desert fathers, such as Abba Daniel who fought not to sleep in order to keep vigil through the night in prayer, or Abba Macarius and his resolution of silence and strict solitude, or Abba Benjamin’s radical fasting?⁹ What explanation is possible of Benedict’s horarium, Francis of Assisi’s poverty, or Ignatius of Loyola’s indifference? Does John of the Cross summarise the authentic Christian view when he wrote that the human person is to deprive himself of the “gratification of the appetite in all things,” giving up all the desires for the delight of hearing, smelling, seeing, tasting, touching, with the result of finding oneself in a “darkness and void”?¹⁰

The appropriate explanation of Christian asceticism begins with the dignity of the complete human person, not only his soul but also his body. This dignity calls the person to excellence, to actualize the image of Divinity within him. Due to the Fall, the person is marked by an attraction to lesser and disordered goods. This attraction and the surrender to it makes the person a slave to self-gratification, to Gnostic self-hatred, whims and fancies, as well as social trends and opinions. The person is lost within this pool, unless he labours to find something beyond them. By himself, he cannot do this work. He must look to the One who has come and provided the way and example out of this self-enclosed and promoting trap. The work of redemption does not remove the distractions of lesser goods, but does give the grace to restore them to their proper place and purpose.

The Human Person as an Ascetic and Aesthetic Being

In this effort for redemption, the person’s dignity, extended to both body and soul, gives him the singular power among the contingent world to be an ascetic being, with the ability to say no, to protest, or to break away.¹¹ He is not a creature of uncontrollable instinct. Additionally, while the human person shares many areas of life with the living sub-personal creation of the plants and animals, he is called to personalize his acts, to seek the “sublimation of the common-place”¹² For example, the human person eats for nourishment like the animals, but he personalizes the act by giving thanks and by establishing rules of civility and protocol. Furthermore, the human person can recognize Truth and Beauty through his actions in the material world, making his life and the culture around him reflect these realities.

The Real and Restless Battle for Integration

Influenced by Gnosticism, many conceptions of the human person, his body and soul, of personal acts, and the flourishing of Goodness and Beauty in personal and communal life, are either too pessimistic or optimistic. They fail to see the human person as a united being, and make no concession for the real and restless battle within him. Christian asceticism is unique because, while it acknowledges the body and soul as good, it realizes that they must be disciplined and put at the service of one another, in order that the full person will be made capable of elevation to glory. The discipline and penances of the body and soul are born out of an awareness of the evil which exists in the person’s attachment to the fallen world through the senses, the intellect, and the spirit. They are meant to assist in the purification of these fallen attachments within the human person. In contrast to Gnosticism, the acts of Christian penance, however simple or extreme, are not ends in themselves, but rather acts directed towards both positive growth and edification of the person, and acts of love towards the One who is carefully redeeming them. As John of the Cross wrote: “To arrive at what now you do not enjoy, you must go where you do not enjoy. To reach what you do not know, you must go where you do not know. To come into possession of what you do not have, you must go where you have nothing”. He continues, summarizing the purpose of Christian asceticism:

Hence, we call this nakedness a night for the soul. For we are not discussing the mere lack of things; this lack will not divest the soul, if it craves for all these objects. We are dealing with the denudation of the soul’s appetites and gratifications; this is what leaves it free and empty of all things, even though it possesses them…Since the things of the world cannot enter the soul, they are not in themselves an encumbrance or harm to it; rather, it is the will and appetite dwelling within that causes the damage.¹³

The goal, therefore, of Christian asceticism is not to reject, manipulate, or suppress the natural instincts of the body and soul, but merely to control and spiritualise them.¹⁴ As Bonaventure explained: “The mirror presented by the external world is of little or no value unless the mirror of our soul has been cleaned and polished”.¹⁵ The focus is not a renunciation from an evil, but an ordination of the goodness of the body, spirit and passions of the human person towards the One, and the fullness of life he offers. It is an integration of the various dimensions of the person into a well-balanced being; made in God’s image, so that each dimension can be what it was created to be and assist the person in living an abundant life. As John Henry Newman wrote:

We may indeed love things created with great intenseness, but such affection, when disjointed from the love of the Creator, is like a stream running in a narrow channel, impetuous, vehement, turbid. The heart runs out, as it were, only at one door; it is not an expanding of the whole man. Created nature cannot open us, or elicit the ten thousand mental senses which belong to us, and through which we really live.¹⁶

Conclusion

Seeing the lives and examples of the Christian saints; along with understanding the dignity of the human person and the intentions underlying its practices, Christian asceticism provides a clearer and more holistic view of the human person. The person’s reality as an embodied spirit and the dynamic drama, which occurs within his own existence, is demonstrated as the human being labours to “become” the person he already “is”.

The integrated, fully-alive person is the glory of God, and united with his Creator and Redeemer, breathing as a bridge which harmoniously unites matter and spirit, he can intone the song of existential gratitude and fulfillment: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my being rejoices in God my Saviour”.¹⁷

Notes
1 Baptism Homily, January 8, 2006, L’Osservatore Romano, January 11, 2006 (English Edition).
2 Catechetical Disputations,6.5, as contained in Jean Danielou, The Angels and Their Mission,Trans. David Heimann (Westminster: Newman Press, 1957), pgs. 45-48; cf: Aquinas, Summa, l, q108, a8.
3 On the Nature of Things, Trans. F. Capley (New York; WW Norton and Company, 1985), p75.
4 As contained in Marie Beuzeville Byles, Footprints of Gautama the Buddha (London: Rider and Company, 1957), p. 92.
5 Wealth of Nations, Trans. Edwin Cannan (New York; The Modern Library, 1937).
6 Communist Manifesto, Trans. Robert Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), II. P. 428.
7 Leviathan, Trans. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1968), 15, p. 123-124. This view is also satirically mocked in Book IV of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
8 Emmanuel Mournier, Personalism (Notre Dame: University of notre Dame Press, 1950), 4; cf. Robert Baker, Redemption of Our Bodies (Charleston: Communications Office, 2005), pgs. 3, 8-9.
9 Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers(New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998), 74; 75-76; 77.
10 Ascent of Mount Carmel, Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), 1.3.1-2, pgs. 121-123.
11 Mournier, Personalism, 47.
12 Ibid., 46.
13 Ascent, 1.3.4. pg. 123.
14 Max Scheler, Ressentiment, Trans. Lewis Coser (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), p. 109.
15 The Soul’s Journey to God, Trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), Prologue, 4, pg. 56.
16 ”The Stay of the Soul”, in Parochial and Plain Sermons (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1897), XXII, p. 318.
17 Luke 1:46-47; cf ireneaus, Adversus Haereses, 4, 20, 7: PG 7/I, 1037, as contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, # 294.

By Jeffrey Kirby

Introduction

The world today supports people who seek truth and who explore for answers to their questions; however, it shames those who claim to have found the truth and silences those who want to share the truth they have discovered with others. Further, the world permits lies to be presented as truth and half-truths to be argued as fullness. Truly, we live in an age of self-imposed untouchable truth, of lies and half-truths, of answerable questions left unanswered, and of supposed tolerant people who are viciously intolerant to assertions of truth. Where are we to go from here? Is there a direction beyond the counsel of this world and its fallenness?

Yes, God, who exists as a trinity of Persons, has given the world another direction. Through the deliverance by the Father of the Son, within the distinct yet inseparable ministry of the Holy Spirit, God himself welcomes man to share in his own life and love. God the Son became a man and declared himself the Truth (John 14:6). He invites all people to come to him for the answers to their questions and rest from their labors.

Man, in his act of faith in the Son of God, accepts the invitation and enters into God Himself, and, in this mutual yielding between God and man in the Cristic Mediator, man comes not only to a deeper understanding of God but simultaneously, as if in a single movement, to an ever-spiraling depth of awareness of his own personhood. This occurs principally in his acceptance and surrender to truth, which becomes expressed in the analogy of faith. The analogy of faith is the reality which demonstrates the inter-connectedness and singular expression of all truths in the divine simplicity of God’s One Utterance, Jesus Christ, who is the Word made flesh and the fullness of revelation.

When man surrenders in faith to this Word, he begins the slow process, often marked by tension and pain, of purgation, illumination and deification. The Word, which is alive and active cutting to the marrow (Heb 4:12), gradually transforms the person, allowing him to become more fully himself in Christ. Concurrently, the person grows in wisdom, which is the ever-expanding, widely promiscuous grasp and retreating resignation to the truths of faith, as well as their application in the many aspects- familial, political, moral, social – of his life. These reciprocal actions of the Word and of man rely on one another and neither of them can occur without the other. Man’s act of faith, initiated by grace, begins and permits this development and remains the hinge upon which it all rests.

The Activity of the Triune God

As Being itself, God is not static but there exists a constant activity of transmission between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.¹ The Persons of the Trinity are distinct Persons; however, as divine Persons, their distinctness is one, not of essence, but of relation.² God the Father, therefore, is not merely spoken of as a symbol of fatherhood or as being “like a father,” but as being Father. So with the Son as Son, and with the Spirit as Love. The relation is of the divine essence and inseparable from it. To divide the essence from the relation is to make the relation a creature and to cause confusion in the understanding of the divinity. As a Family, the Godhead’s relationality is central to himself and to the dynamism and veil of mystery that surrounds him.

The dynamism between the Persons should not be seen as an “effect proceeding from a cause” (this could lead to modalism which denies divinity to the Son) or even as the “cause going to the effect,” as moving it or making its own image upon it, in which case the “persons” of god would only be a mask of a truly singular Person. Both of these errors understand the activity of procession as an outward act and so deny such a movement within God

God’s inner Life is Creation’s Exemplar

These views fail to recognize a possible inward action by an agent, such as an act of the intellectual power within man: he proceeds in knowledge to understand an object. God must be understood not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, material bodies, but from the mode of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances. Although even this illustration falls drastically short in representing the activity of divine objects; nevertheless, with this understanding, procession should not be understood from what is in our bodies but rather from what is the movement of an intelligible emanation.³

God, because he is love in his inner life, processes love within himself.⁴ The activity between the Persons is one that is Love and that shares Life. The Father begets the Son and the Love between the two is the Holy Spirit. This co-activity, this inter-subjectivity, is the mark of the movement within God, and the exemplar to all creation of its own nature and final destiny.⁵

The Son’s Deliverance as Invitation

As finite and contingent being, the human person exists within the abyss of existence as a pilgrim on a journey. In his expedition of life, with a hunger for meaning and desire for fulfillment, he has many questions: What is man? What is the meaning of suffering, evil and death, which persist even in the midst of such progress? What can people contribute to society and expect from society? What comes after this earthly life? These questions, without assistance, can lead man to alienation and despair.

God, Creator and Lord of creation, not wishing man to be left in confusion and disorder, freely chose to initiate a personal revelation of Himself to man. Man, therefore, stands as a privileged partner and graced act-or in this self-disclosure of the Divinity. Precisely because God is the almighty and eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite in will, understanding and every perfection,⁶ he chose to approach man progressively in “many and various ways” (Hebrews 1:1).

This revelation of God to man can be divided into the natural and supernatural. In the natural order, God shows himself to man in creation and within man’s own conscience and spiritual yearnings. Man, with the light of reason, has the capacity through these discreet disclosures by God and of Himself, to know of God’s existence and the elementary truths about Him. The supernatural revelation of god is the blatant invitation for man to enter into His intimacy: to know Him, love Him, and to be a trusting friend.

Respecting man’s fallen nature, which is prone to error and sin, God enters and positively yet gradually shares His knowledge of Himself to man through history and then “in, with and under” other experiences. Through these mediums, such as miracles, personal inspirations, and prophetic messages, God presents man with the encouragement of entering into a filial covenant with Him.⁷

The summit of this radically ineffable sharing by God to man came in the person of Jesus Christ. Within the Godhead, the Father asked who could be sent to redeem man and the Son, in loving obedience, answered, “Here I am. Send me” (Isaiah 6:8). From the transmission within the Trinity, therefore, the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, was delivered to man. God entered human history as a friend and as the answer to man’s questions. As the incarnate logos, He is and will be the end and ever-new, Alpha and Omega, of God showing and giving Himself to man. By his life, death and resurrection, Christ has definitively revealed God to man and man to himself, in order to conclusively invite and receive humanity into relationship with Himself.

Man’s Act of Faith

God, the ultimate witness to Himself, resting on His own authority displayed in prophecy, miracles and internal illuminations, extends His hand fully in Jesus Christ and offers man communion. Against the dark backdrop of a world that asserts non-belief and imposes upon man an atheistic model of reality, the human person is presented with the vulnerable and pierced hand of love from the Word Incarnate.

Restless to find answers to his questions and the foundation of his life, man is called to accept the divine hand, marked by the brutality of the Cross, which is offered to him. Called into this intimacy with God, man’s only adequate response is one of adoration.⁸ He begins this existential adoration through an act of faith.

Faith can be defined as a gift from God, a supernatural virtue, which calls for a submission of the intellect and will and which, through the grace of God, allows the person to believe, as true, what God has revealed.⁹ It can further be defined as a total and free self-commitment to God, through the working of the Holy Spirit, which willingly assents to the revelation which He gives to man.¹⁰

Believing in God, Believing God, and believing Within God

To understand the full depth of the act of faith, three distinctions can be made: credere Deum, credere Deo, and the credere in Deum.¹¹ The act of faith which merely “believes God exists,” the Credere Deum, is a “faith” that is not necessarily supernatural but is rather limited only to an acknowledgement of a Being’s existence. Although it can be a first step or initial action of the person towards God, this act of faith, which even the fallen angels cannot deny, does not contain the fullness of the response which God invites man to make.

The act of faith that “believes God”, credere Deo, and acknowledges the propositions of faith as true and trusts that God’s words are without error; even this, although praiseworthy and necessary for salvation, does not contain the fullness of faith that God offers to man. These two acts of faith are insufficient in themselves and are lacking in depth and vitality because they can exist without love.

The act of faith that “believes within God,” credere in Deum, is when the person, conscious of his own weakness, turns to God and seeks to know about God from God Himself. It is when man goes beyond the formal object of propositions and encounters the Reality and believes from that simple intuition.¹² This is the faith that god desires for man, has made possible for him at a tremendous price, and encourages him, by external and internal proofs and illuminations, to enter and integrate within his own being and life in order to become a new creation.¹³ To make this act of faith, this simple yet profound movement of adoration, the human person must respond to grace and work to love God. Only those who truly love God are able to believe in Him.

Faith: Opening Both Mind and Heart To God

The person receives faith only to the extent that he accepts it and is open to it. Faith is the “primordial choice” that man makes as to what degree he will open himself to the divine mystery and, in it, understand and approach life, the world, man and history. When fully lived, faith becomes not only a fact but an occurrence.¹⁴ It embraces the entire person and each of his acts is marked by an understanding of God’s activity, not only always and everywhere but particularly here and now.

The Steps Towards Faith Begun by Wonder

Pursuing the appropriate act of faith, man is ordinarily motivated by his existential questions. While the human person, with the use of his reason, possesses and poses his questions, he is also the recipient of wonder, an experience of awe when in the presence of finite beauty, truth or goodness, which propels him to the Infinite fulfillment of these transcendental experiences. It is God seeking the person in, with and through different occasions, people and objects that inducts the person into this awareness. It is this awareness that allows him to formulate his curiosity and clearly express his questions. Synthesizing the questions and seeking the answers is a serious, lifelong commitment to struggle through the tension of this questioning-and-answering, which, if cooperated with, eventually becomes a part of the person’s very definition by leading him to the full act of faith called for by God.¹⁵

Concentric Circles of Insight

This engagement by man can be seen as a process that consists of three concentric and complementary circles. The first and most universal of these circles is the experiencing by the person of existence itself. God as creator can use anything to instill this wonder and call man to Himself. It would be disastrous to attempt to limit God only to the supernatural or merely to the miraculous. The work of God is as large as creation itself and uses this creation as a sacramental, by which man can recognize, know and praise God. Nature, other persons, poetry, art, music, plays and film, are all avenues of this first circle of wonder calling man to faith in the living God.

This first circle is not enough, however, and needs a second circle to balance it. The second circle would be the special history that has defined the unveiling of God. By desiring to understand history and placing himself, as far as is humanly possible, in the position of those who have gone before him, the person wants to know their viewpoints, hopes and fears.

This action by the person is a reaching out to the long-dead generations and a re-creating of their thoughts and words, allowing them to instruct and enlighten him about God. This is a difficult task but must be made because, as a God of history, the Trinity calls man, especially in the historical person of Jesus Christ, to know Him and to comprehend His movements and self-revelation through the ages. The third and smallest circle in this process of wonder is tradition.¹⁶ It is the circle that the others lead man to and that enlivens the other circles with meaning and value. Tradition serves as an object and the medium of the person in his quest for answers within God.

Tradition, a Living Environment of Faith

Tradition is an offering by which the Father’s gift if communicated to a humanity throughout the world and in successive generations so that, even if separated by time and space, they are nevertheless incorporated into the same, unique, identical reality, the revelation of God especially in his Son, Jesus Christ. It is not only a book of a codex or an anthropology but, by the power of the Holy Spirit, tradition is an environment and atmosphere in which the person sees, smells, hears, tastes and touches the lived faith of a believing community.

This holistic encounter forms man and guides him towards the appropriate act of faith. It allows him to see and adopt himself to what his fathers held and what had been held from generation to generation, since the time of the apostles. It calls him to become a beneficiary of the apostles’ heritage through faith. If he accepts, the person approaches the belief in God, which, while profoundly personal, is never individualistic. Man’s faith always relies on and is grounded upon the faith of the whole Church, which is the fellowship of the faithful of Jesus Christ.

Into God in Christ

Compelled by wonder in desiring answers to his questions, as well as meaning and purpose in his life, man is led through creation, history and tradition to reach the full act of faith, the existence of lived adoration. Jesus Christ, the pre-eminent bearer of revelation, as the Incarnate Logos, is the mediator and benefactor of man, giving human Utterance to the Word of God. Man is summoned into the cloud of unknowing in, with and through the corpus of this Utterance. The truth of God is found primarily in His very being. Christ is not simply one among many material objects of faith, credere Deo, but, in his humanity, is the locus in which the Formal Object- God Himself – is encountered. The whole of revelation converges in Christ and has its definitive truth only in Him.

The man who accepts the life of faith, credere in Deum, re-acts to the action of God in revealing himself, it is his “yes” and “Amen” to God, with all that may or may not come with that action.¹⁷ In undertaking this voyage of faith into God, the person begins a dynamically divine drama of life and love between himself and the Godhead. The person grows in an inward awareness of who God is and becomes gradually more conscious of the nuptial unity between himself and God. He begins to perceive God’s being and discern His mind. The person becomes more alert to his own self and to God’s image within him.

As he freely surrenders more to God and enters into Him, the person becomes more fully himself in Christ by allowing grace to heal his wounds from sin and evil and to actualize his potential in virtue, talents and even personality. The person truly becomes consciously transformed into a new creation. Standing as himself, the person is shown his dignity. He realizes that he holds a privileged place in the cosmos as a child of God by adoption, and therefore is the summit, focal point and crown of god’s creation. He sees how he is a reflection and, in a sense, is the glory of God.¹⁸

An apparent juxtaposition – man entering God and believing in Him and also becoming more fully himself as a person – becomes a paradox that is reconciled in the hypostatic union within the Person of the God-man. In this seemingly single, yet distinct, act by the person, he begins to participate in the very activity of God and to share, through Christ his Mediator, in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). The person begins to see not only how God has entered him, especially in the impression of His image, but also how he can perpetually enter into God, seeking greater Wisdom and Love and being transformed from glory unto glory.

The Eyes of Faith

As a person becomes more conscious of God, himself and the relationship between them, he is called to cast off the spirit of the world and to renounce sin. To the extent that he does this, he will be able to spiritually see, hear, taste and touch God (1 John 1: 1-2). In this growth into God, man begins to see the unity of God extended and reflected in the analogy of faith. The analogy of faith is the coherence of truths among themselves and within the whole plan of revelation.

The analogy of faith, difficult to see by those with carnal eyes and heart, can steadily be given to the mind and heart of the person of faith. The person, in entering God, starts to see, beyond the contingent differences and distinctions in this world, the connection between God and His teachings.

The common divide, the “scales” of finite being, which is a part of time and space, sadly edified by sin and the social errors of the day that deny and kill the spirit, such as hedonism and materialism, is gradually diminished by grace in the person possessing the fullness of faith. The analogy of faith depends upon the credere in Deum in which the person has come through the propositions of faith and is now experiencing the realities of faith themselves. The person no longer sees merely a collection of truths or an organized system of immutable statements in a creed. The Creed ceases to be only a stop-sign, a requirement of belief, and becomes instead a boundlessly fruitful unity, endlessly unfolding to the eyes of faith.¹⁹ The person now sees – in God’s own divine simplicity – the oneness of these truths in the One incarnate Logos.

Seeing With The Eyes Of Faith

The truths of life no longer contain the appearances of incongruity or the façade of discrepancy. They are clarified and ordered in the mind and heart of the believing person. Previous occasions of confusion are corrected, seeming contradictions are shown to co-exist in a beautiful Reality, agonies and former anguish are rewarded in seeing the connections and even dependency of truths on other truths. The former sense of confinement is now replaced by an indefinite sense of freedom. The harmony and homogenous nature of the truths sing out, as they are, to the soul now open and panting for Wisdom and Love. The person ceases to “grasp the faith” and rather begins to be grasped by it.

As the scales drop and man sees the activity of the truths of life in service to the truth, he understands and is enlightened to an even greater and inexhaustible awareness of his own humanity, of God, their relationship and the great circle of being flowing from and returning to God. In this enlightenment, this immeasurable precision of clarity, man, according to his free will, becomes liberated from private fantasies, the peer pressure of popular trends, the pull of the world, and the enticement to sin. In seeing the analogy of faith, the radical indivisibility of truth, the person is called to more profoundly assimilate and integrate himself and his life into this Reality, which is God.

Tension and Pain

While the illumination of the mind and heart and the conformity of the person’s life and desire for transformation are distinct acts; nevertheless, in the act of faith, they must simultaneously occur or else neither will occur at all. If the person begins to see the analogy of faith, it is because he has allowed God to show it to him. If the person ceases to grow in love, the life of wisdom will dry up and bear no fruit. This is the difficult task of the person who wants to believe: credere in Deum. It is an arduous task; however, to the one who makes it, God himself will walk with him and desire to make the yoke easy and the burden light. The person must allow his faults, weaknesses, and sins to be the very path that God uses to transform him. If man steps onto the wrong path, which seeks to convince him that he must work to remove and leave these undesirable elements behind, he does not let God work and seeks to redeem himself (like Pelagius). If he steps onto another misleading path, which convinces him that these are not important or superfluous to the “real” him, and he ignores them and tries to believe in God, he will not be given passage because he does not want redemption at all, except maybe from the hazards of this world (like Confucius or the Buddha).

No, for the human person to enter the right path he must take up his cross and truly follow Christ (Matt. 10:38). He must see his weaknesses, faults and even his sins as the very crosses that will be the source of his own salvation. Not separate entities or unimportant issues, these elements allow the person to recognize his own creature-ness and finitude, and calls him to seek salvation, not from himself or from this world, but from sin and evil.

To begin to face the sorrow of his own fallenness, recognize his own dismerit, acknowledge his own unworthiness and smallness, submit to his existential awkwardness and essential discomfort, the person permits God to work. It is precisely in his areas of sinfulness, embarrassment, shame, confusion, loneliness and even despair, that Christ will ask him to stretch out his hand.

In desiring him alone and following His commands, not worrying about the thoughts of this world or the respect of man, the person will stretch out his hand and allow Christ, exactly in these sensitive areas, to begin the work of redemption.

The Reliance on the Will

This strenuous act of faith entered into by man with questions and awe, is the hinge upon which this entire drama depends. At its source, it is a movement of love because it is love that inspires every action towards goodness. It moves the will to follow God and makes faith possible and allows it to deepen.

It is only love that directs the person to trust and accept communion with a witness and, in the act of faith, the Witness God Himself. The Witness says “it is so” and the person, using his will, makes the statement his own and is able to see something he would never have been able to see through his own abilities. It is this turning of the will that makes the act of faith and allows the person to endure the struggles and trials of living by faith.

Seeing the extended hand of God, the will awakens the intellect to accept the offer. This will and the intellect, inflamed by love, make this affirmation and assist the person in persevering in his act of faith. God’s grace initiates, supports and pervades this entire internal process within the person. Having once made the act of faith, the person chooses to what degree he will let God work. If he adheres to God’s will and walks the correct path, the person can attain and persevere credere in Deum, and the heights of “likeness“ unto God Himself.

Conclusion

Through the act of the will, moved by love, the human person is able to make and sustain an act of faith. This act of faith answers his questions and explains his awe. It places him within a complex struggle with various forces within himself and the world around him. If he stays on course and seeks the face of God, his act of faith will deepen and God will be able to work more profoundly. As the person grows in his faith, a deeper sense of God and of his own personhood is given. This unveiling displays to the person the simplicity of God himself. In his growing awareness, man sees ever more deeply God’s image in his own person, as well as his own capacity to enter into God. If he desires to enter God, he meets his mediator and guide. Christ, God-Man, who initiated the call and assists its completion, encounters the person and allows him to enter the life of the Trinity Himself.

In entering the life of the Trinity by assimilation into Christ, the person becomes capable of seeing the analogy of faith. The analogy shows man the inter-connectedness and unity of truths and allows him to see the harmony of creation and the glory of God’s created cosmos. It shows him the great circle of being that begins with God and rests with Him.

The person who perseveres in love and belief in God, comes to the existential adoration of the Godhead, which celebrates His glory and exalts in His splendor. Such a person, standing on the horizon of existence, is truly free in Christ and lives while singing, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my being rejoices in God my Savior” (Lk 1:46-47).

1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 28 art. 1
2 Ibid, I q. 28, art. 1-2, 151-153.
3 Ibid., I, q. 27, art 1, 147-148.
4 John Paul II, General Audience on January 19, 2002, in The Trinity’s Embrace (boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2002 309.
5 Romano Guardini, The faith and Modern Man, Trans. Charlotte Forsyth (London: Burns Oates, 1952), 100.
6 Vatican Council I, Dei Filius, Chapter I.
7 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, Trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 117.
8 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 149-150, 152-154.
9 Vatican I, Dei Filius, Chapter III.
10 Vatican II, Dei Verbum, 5.
11 Augustine, Sermo de Symbolo, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. XL, 1190-192.
12 Aquinas, Summa, II-II, q. 1, 2, 1169-1170.
13 John Paul II, Redeemer of Man, 10.
14 Kasper, God, 117, 119-120.
15 I will use Aidan Nichol’s distinctions to order my explanation of the movement of wonder within man: The Shape of Catholic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 18-19.
16 I am here changing Nichol’s last circle from “bible” to “tradition”. I believe that Congar’s exposition of tradition warrants and supports such a change: Congar, Meaning, 15-18.
17 Kasper, Jesus, 122.
18 Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, IV.20.7; Vatican Council II Gaudium et Spes, 22.
19 Henri de Lubac, Christian Faith, Trans. J. Saward (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), 130-131.

JULY / AUGUST 2004
PAGES 25-26

By Jeffrey Kirby

The Church As Defender Of Human Dignity

In his anniversary exhortation on the office of the bishop issued this year, Pope John Paul II devotes a complete section to the bishop “before the challenges of the present,” a chapter which upholds the social doctrines of the Church and expounds on the bishop as a “prophet of peace,” “defender of human rights,” and “father of the poor.” This inclusion of the social teachings – from justice and peace and inter-religious dialogue to economic life and respect for the environment to health care and the treatment of migrants – illustrates the intimate place of the social doctrines in the Gospel message, as well as their particular emphasis, in the pontificate of John Paul II.

The history of the social teachings of the Church has always been understood within certain principles: the social good, explicitly taught in the modern era by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891); subsidiarity, elaborated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (1931); and solidarity, developed in Pacem in Terris (1963) by Pope John XXIII. Pope John Paul II, as archbishop of Krakow, helped to write Gaudium et Spes at the Second Vatican Council, which contributed to the social doctrines by adding a greater stress on the subjectivity of the human person, what can be called the “personalist principle.”

The personalist principle insists on placing the human person in the centre of the social order and using his divinely-given dignity to judge and coordinate policy and efforts of and for the community. It sets the full human person, seen not only as a “political animal” and an economic consumer, but as a religious, cultural, familial and moral agent, as the set and standard of the decisions and laws of human life.

The Person And The Community: Interlocking Values

These four basic principles, their complementarity and inter-dynamic, serve as the foundation of the Church’s counsel and guidance to the public forum. Pope John Paul understands that solidarity, understood as fraternal love and civil friendship, must work with subsidiarity, which is a respect for the hierarchical structure of society and the existence of intermediary groups (most especially the family) and the realization that fellowship and affairs are best practiced and handled on the most appropriate level and not by over-arching governing bodies. These two
must seek the social good, the desire to have the basic human and material needs met for each person in the social group. The Pope knows the danger of separating these principles or of making one superior to the others: to have solidarity alone is to fall into communism, or to solely desire the social good is to have soulless philanthropy, or to work for solidarity by itself is to eventually reach an oligarchic tyranny.

As taught by the pope, each of these options is unacceptable to the Gospel because they diminish the human person, making him only a part or a means of a system. John Paul II, countering these misdirections, makes the continual point that the primordial principle and starting place of the public forum must repeatedly be the personalist principle, it must always be the unrepeatable human person. A recognition of the person’s dignity and destiny, rights and responsibilities, must serve as the purpose and initiave of the social order. When it is permitted, this personalist principle unites subsidiarity, solidarity and the social good and the person can grow and express his talents and creativity within his family and in civil groups and associations; he is able to work to shape his local government and express his opinions and desires; he is united with those he loves and feels directly accountable to care for others; he is able to negotiate sound culture and social assistance programs. If grounded upon personalism, the principles of the social doctrine find a greater justification and multiple-possible expressions to the world and its authentic development.

The Gift Of Life

In Jesus Christ, the mediator and fullness of Revelation, Pope John Paul II knows that life is an unmerited and privileged gift. Its sufferings and tragedies, joys and triumphs, each compose a necessary dimension of this always-unfolding, yet never-expired, gift. The pope believes and teaches that life, unlike the many dictates of the modern world, is not a problem to be solved but, rather, it is a mystery to be lived and cherished.

For this reason, the personalist principle particularly rests and resounds in the heart of John Paul II. Not an idealist, nor a believer in fantasies, he knows the heights and hells within the human heart. He was born in a re-established Poland, which preserved its cultural identity when it was removed by super-powers from the maps of Europe. He inherited a sacramental worldview by his Catholic faith, family life and the natural beauty of his homeland. He studied literature and drama at the Jagellonian University, which bore the motto over its major hall: “Reason rather than force,” and he also studied Thomistic and phenomenological philosophy, concentrating on the interiority and ineffable worth of each person. However, he also experienced the death of loved ones – including his mother – at a young age, saw the violent attack and conquest of his country and watched his parish priests and university professors taken to concentration camps. He attended a hidden seminary and suffered a false liberation and occupation of the Polish nation by Soviet communists.

The Depth Of Catholic Humanism

John Paul II has felt the glory of the human person in poetry and seen his spirit soar on stage, he knows of the person’s capacity for civil debate and disagreement and he knows that God whispers into the “place within” of every person. He also, however, has seen the subjection of oppressive regimes, the stripping slavery of soulless politics and the harsh consequences of cold militarism. He knows the degrees of regression and the potential for evil in the person.

With this comprehensive knowledge, he still describes himself , as he did to the United Nations before the Great Jubilee, as a “witness to hope.” The reason for this hope, which he is always ready to give, is the Incarnation of God as a man and his entrance into human history. In the Word made flesh and in his Paschal Mystery, the Church and its Pontiff sees the ground upon which the dignity and rights of the human person and of a just and humane society can be safely born and firmly edified.

The Vision Of God’s Delight In Man

Personalism: the person is incommunicably his own and made in God’s image; social good: the person is to seek his own good and the good of those in his social group; subsidiarity: the person is a member of specific groups in society and in his life he is to work and assist on the most appropriate social level; and, solidarity: the person is a communal being and is to be open to love and giving love, to being helped and to serving others. These are the principles of the Gospel’s social message.

The message which is preached to the social order of the world, if permitted, can give faith to skepticism, hope to cynicism and love to apathy. It exalts the human person as the glory of creation and the cause of divine delight. Pope John Paul II, even in the midst of his anniversary celebration, reminds his Episcopal brothers, the members of the Church and all people of good will, of this tested and enduring truth.

Jeffrey Kirby, of the North American College in Rome, examines the central importance of the Pope’s personalist philosophy in his social teaching.