Workshop (3) - The Main Thesis of Theology of the Body

Waldstein discusses the main thesis of the theology of the body on pages 204-206 of Logos and Glory. The beauty and the sacredness of the human body are deeply appreciated and given their true meaning and foundation in the theology of the body: 
"The communion between man and woman completed by sexual union effectively signifies the union between Christ and the Church and, more deeply, the communion of persons in the Trinity. In accord with the double aspect of a sacrament as an efficacious sign of grace, the body not only signifies supernatural communion in the Holy Spirit, but effectively makes it present.

Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine act of giving, because he bears within himself the inner dimension of the gift. In this dimension, he brings into the world his particular likeness to God with which he transcends and also rules his “visibility” in the world, his bodylines, his masculinity or femininity, his nakedness. A reflection of this likeness is also the primordial awareness of the spousal meaning of the body pervaded by the mystery of original innocence. In this way, in this dimension [that is, the dimension of the gift], this most original sacrament [namely, marriage, as instituted in the creation of man and woman] is constituted. We understand a sacrament as a sign that efficaciously transmits in the visibility of the world the invisible mystery hidden in God from eternity. It is the mystery of Truth and Love [that is, the mystery of the Trinity, cf. Gaudium et spes 24:3], the mystery of divine life, in which man receives a real participation. In the history of man, original innocence realizes the very beginning of this participation and it is also the source of original happiness. The sacrament [marriage as the most original sacrament], as a visible sign, is constituted through man as a “body,” through the body’s “visible” masculinity and femininity. The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it (John Paul II, TOB 19:3-4).

Here is the main thesis statement of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Why did God create the human body? He created it to transfer into the visible world the mystery of the communion of persons in the Trinity in which human beings come to share through sacramental signs. The most original sacrament, which introduces the whole sacramental order, is the marriage instituted in Genesis 2 with the divine words: “they will be one flesh” (Gen 2:24). The total gift implied in spousal love reflects and communicates the eternal total gift in the Trinity."


Comments (JPH):
The main thesis of the theology of the body makes explicit what is contained in the notion of marriage as a sacrament ("For this reason a man shall leave (his) father and (his) mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church." Ephesians 5:32) The human body, constituted as male or female, remains an original and profound sign of divine love. The culture, such as American culture, that encourages a distortion of sexuality -- by obscuring or degrading the beauty of the body, reducing persons to things, abusing the body in its wholesomeness and purity -- defaces and loses the sign character of love. Love disappears from the culture, replaced by a sham or pseudo togetherness that has no endurance (love endures all things). Sexuality is not about self-expression or self-gratification, but sexuality is about, that is, it signifies and enacts, personal self-giving.  The authentic and lasting communion of persons is rooted in marriage. As Blessed John Paul II wrote in his Letter to Families:

Love then is not a utopia: it is given to mankind as a task to be carried out with the help of divine grace. It is entrusted to man and woman, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, as the basic principle of their "duty", and it becomes the foundation of their mutual responsibility: first as spouses, then as father and mother. In the celebration of the Sacrament, the spouses give and receive each other, declaring their willingness to welcome children and to educate them. On this hinges human civilization, which cannot be defined as anything other than a "civilization of love". The family is an expression and source of this love. Through the family passes the primary current of the civilization of love, which finds therein its "social foundations".

Modern eroticized culture is a short circuit. The theology of the body provides the key and the clue to the restoration of human dignity and human flourishing in the modern world.


[The three pages from Logos and Glory may be found here.]

Workshop (2) - On Logos and Glory

Waldstein explained his method and purpose in the second session of the workshop.  The purpose of his work on theology of the body brought to the workshop (and his book) is to help readers enter through the guiding themes of logos and glory more deeply into the marvel of Theology of the Body. He appeals to the light of reason (logos) and the splendor of love (glory). The word became flesh.

"The Logos became body/flesh and dwells among us and we have seen his glory, a glory as of the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of gift and truth (John 1:14)." Waldstein explained how Pope John Paul II uses this passage:

The Polish word for “body” (ciało) also means “flesh.” When the Logos became “flesh,” he also became “body.” Theology of the Body (teologia ciała) is also Theology of the Flesh. Logos became body/flesh and dwells among us and we have seen his glory, a glory as of the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of gift and truth (John 1:14). Accordingly, John Paul II comments, “Through the fact that God (Word) became body/flesh, the body/flesh entered theology—that is, the science about God—through the main door, I would say” (TOB 23:4). The celebration of the Great Jubilee of the Incarnation of the Logos in the year 2000 was “both the focal point and the center of [John Paul II’s] pontificate. Everything aimed at this and everything in a sense revolved around it,” including the Theology of the Body. Logos and glory: these two key terms in John 1:14, will serve as the two guiding concepts of this book. They are the two principal dimensions of John Paul II’s theological method, which is a “hermeneutics of the gift” (TOB 13:2), or a systematic interpretation of the logic of gift that runs from the Trinity through creation and redemption. They also correspond to the two main dimensions of the life of persons, truth and love, as resumed in Gaudium et Spes 24:3, which speaks of a “likeness between the union of divine persons and the union of God’s sons in Truth and Love.”

Dr Waldstein laid out seven reasons why the theme of logos and glory provides a way into the Theology of the Body; it provides

1. a deeper perception of Theology of the Body’s portrayal of the glory of Trinitarian love in the beauty of God’s plan for the human body: “a glory…full of gift and truth” (John 1:14)
2. a greater appreciation of the strength of Theology of the Body’s appeal to Greek philosophical logos (reason) as developed by Plato and Aristotle and furtherunfolded by the Greek and Latin Fathers as well as St. Thomas Aquinas;
3. a fuller realization of Theology of the Body’s ecumenical potential, especially in dialogue with Luther’s Scriptural spousal theology;
4. a firmer grasp of Theology of the Body’s depth in unfolding the teaching of Scripture about the male and female body in the divine plan, a plan in which the light of reason (logos) and the splendor of love (glory) are harmoniously united;
5. a clearer understanding of the rigorous and luminous structure of Theology of the Body’s argument;
6. a stronger conviction of Theology of the Body’s effectiveness in responding to contemporary questions about science, power, progress, the environment, and justice between men and women;
7. a more courageous strength in resisting the Baconian-Cartesian view of the body and of rationality (logos) in the dominant current of contemporary culture, shaped by mechanist natural science.

See the text here.

Workshop (1) - Gaudium et spes 24.3

Throughout the workshop Dr. Waldstein humorously told the audience that he tells his class the answer to any question on the exam is "Gaudium et spes 24.3." Well, it is not an automatic "A" -- one must explain why GS 24.3 answers the question.

Here is the passage:

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (see Luke 17.33)

In this passage  we find two key principles to Wojtyla's personalism and his teaching on Theology of the Body (TOB). Waldstein refers to his kind of personalism as "Trinitarian personalism of self-gift." (See previous post on talk at UST). The first principle is the "personalistic norm" -- the call to treat each person as an end in himself, and not a means. It sounds Kantian, but it is not. Waldstein explains this very well in his text from the manuscript for a new book, Logos and Glory. The pages in the manuscript can be found here. (Please note: this is a working manuscript; it is not complete and it has some gaps; use it for your study but do not distribute it or send it around to people)


Here is Waldstein's explanation of the difference between Wojtyla and Kant:

Wojtyła’s understanding of the personalistic norm is indeed “rather differ ent” from Kant’s. Being an end differs from having an end, being the highest good differs from being the beneficiary of the highest good, being God differs from having God. One is compatible with being a creature, the other is not. The cen- tral disagreement between Kant and Wojtyła lies here. It is closely connected with the question of the common good. According to John Paul II, the creat- ed person’s highest dignity consists in being able to participate in the goodness of God, supremely in the beatific vision. In this participation, the created per- son becomes “a sharer in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Sharing and partici- pation is separated by an infinite gulf from becoming simply identical with God and being able to claim the status of being the final end.

The second principle is the call to love (make a sincere gift of himself), the dynamic of self-donation or the "law of free giving."


Now it is interesting to see that the likeness to God is not the spiritual powers, the intellect and will, but it is the relational aspect, the unity of persons. The divine likeness contains both principles. Man finds himself through a gift of oneself, living in communion with another (spouse) with others (family). And the person as willed by God is not available for the mere use of another. (I add here even John Locke grasped a side of this truth -- we are God's workmanship, and therefore not for the use of another).


Waldstein recommended that we meditate on Luke 17:33-35 -- whosoever will save his life must lose it; and to lose your life is to find it. There is an obvious connection to the cross. Waldstein collected the following scripture passages for us to consider:

Matt 10:39: The one who finds his life will lose it, and the one who loses his life for my sake will find it.

Matt 16:25: For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Mark 8:35: For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

Luke 9:24: For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

Luke 17:33: Whoever seeks to make his life secure will lose it, but whoever loses it will make it live.

John 12:25: The one who loves his life loses it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

The two principles of personal dignity and gift of self extends throughout Wojtyla's writings such as Love and Responsibility and Acting Person. The Theology of the Body will come into focus through an application of the principles to sexuality.

Waldstein's Workshop on Theology of the Body

Last week Dr. Michael Waldstein conducted a workshop on Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. I would like to share a few of the highlights of the workshop.

Waldstein opened the workshop with a personal testimony about the transformation that he and wife experienced when they studied together the texts of the theology of the body. The Pope's writings about marriage touched them deeply. Many people have found his writings a source of personal growth and transformation.

Waldstein explained why this is so. John Paul II wrote from a solid philosophical and theological perspective. He was also guided by a keen sense of beauty and he enriched his writing through an appreciation of "lived experience." One could speak of phenomenological and aesthetic dimensions of his approach to reality, but this makes another abstraction. First of all, John Paul II took much from St John of the Cross, who himself combined a Thomistic education with an attention to experience and to the beauty of divine love.

But in addition, John Paul II, for this topic of marriage and family  showed an appreciation of the beauty of human love and paid special attention to the experience of couples.Weigel reports that John Paul II wrote the Jeweler's Shop from his memory of friends and their relationships.

Waldstein told the audience to remember "1-2-3", that is in Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 123, for the idea of the importance of approaching marriage and love through the appreciation of beauty. John Paul II said:

As a priest I realized this very early. I felt almost an inner call in this direction. It is necessary to prepare young people for marriage, it is necessary to teach them love. Love is not something that is learned, and yet there is nothing else as important to learn! As a young priest I learned to love human love. This has been one of the fundamental themes of my priesthood -- my ministry in the pulpit, in the confessional, and also in my writing. If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of "fair love," because love is fair, it is beautiful. After all, young people are always searching for the beauty in love. They want their love to be beautiful. If they give in to weakness, following models of behavior that can rightly be considered a "scandal in the contemporary world",  in the depths of their hearts they still desire a beautiful and pure love. . . . As a young priest and pastor I came to this way of looking at young people and at youth, and it has remained constant all these years.

 These remarks set a great tone for the workshop and the study of the theology of the body. This great theological work culminates in a defense of Humanae Vitae.  But he perplexed the dissenters because he soars beyond the standard natural law argument and discloses the full human beauty of the teaching and the theological foundations in the mystery of the divine Trinity.

Prayer of Intercession

O Blessed Trinity, we thank You for having graced the Church with Blessed John Paul II and for allowing the tenderness of Your Fatherly care, the glory of the Cross of Christ, and the splendor of the Spirit of love, to shine through him. Trusting fully in Your infinite mercy and in the maternal intercession of Mary, he has given us a living image of Jesus the Good Shepherd, and has shown us that holiness is the necessary measure of ordinary Christian life and is the way of achieving eternal communion with You. Grant us, by his intercession, and according to Your will, the graces we implore, hoping that he will soon be numbered among Your saints. Amen.

With ecclesiastical approval
AGOSTINO CARD. VALLINI
Vicar General of His Holiness
for the Diocese of Rome

For graces received, contact:
Postulazione della Causa di Canonizzazione
del Beato Giovanni Paolo II
Piazza S. Giovanni in Laterano, 6/a - 00184 Rma

Marshall McLuhan on Thomas Aquinas

Marshall McLuhan 1911-1980

This year marks a 100 years since the birth of Marshall McLuhan. See the article recently published in the Walrus, here. There is also a website devoted to a commemoration of his life and work, here.

At a used bookstore in Detroit (the amazing John King Books) I found a journal with a talk he gave at St. Louis University in 1943 on the liberal arts. (He was on the faculty at Saint Louis from 1937 - 1944; he then went to the Basilian, Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario, prior to going to the University of Toronto in 1946 where he was on the faculty until 1979)

In this talk, celebrating the liberal arts during a time of war, he said:

When a triumphant technology croons the sickly boasts of the advertising men, when the great vaults and vistas of the human soul are obscured by images of silken glamor, and when it is plain that men live not by bread alone but by toothpaste also, then we need the answer of St. Thomas. It is the answer of moral and intellectual discipline and ardor.

McLuhan then argues for liberal arts education as based in the trivium, in the acquisition of the habit of mind to read, think and speak well. The barbarians were at the gate, but he feared that we would succumb to the barbarian within -- "the barbarism of comfort and ease and slackness."  And it is St Thomas, he notes, who "defines in himself the answer to the barbarian without and the barbarian within each one of us."

We must cherish eloquence as "the finest expression of man's existence." We need wisdom, prudence and mechanics. In this cry of the heart, McLuhan charges that "technology cannot bring in the century of common man. It can merely reduce man to his lowest common denominator as a consuming animal. If technology is to minister to free men, men must struggle to acquire the practical disciplines related to speech as they have never struggled before. For in acquiring speech men acquire the heritage of our entire civilization." And yet "demagogues rise up to speak the sickly and confused notions of their stunted spirits, and there are few to detect the fraud which they peddle." And of course, they now inhabit and manage the halls of academia, "and there are few to detect the fraud which they peddle."

In the darkness of those war-time years McLuhan arrives at a wise and happy conclusion: "The positive fact of St Thomas makes it possible for us to feel light-hearted about the errors of smaller men. As our age enters its dark night let us take hope from the fact that the luminous wisdom and clarity of St Thomas will shine more brightly for us. The confusion and negation around us may encourage us to a more intimate and lively knowledge of his thought than we could ever have attained in easier circumstances. And for the ultimate cause of civilization we need never despair so long as men anywhere can contemplate the order and clarity of his wisdom." We heartily concur. The Center for Thomistic Studies and the Pope John Paul II Forum aim at acquiring that "intimate and lively knowledge" of Thomas Aquinas.

Find the full text here (the journal was not in the best condition, with the war time paper etc.) An early fascinating talk by a great mind and writer of the century. The author of the Walrus article quotes from a letter in which McLuhan said:  “One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.” This is true in great measure because of the influence of the Angelic Doctor on Catholic intellectual culture.

Reflections on my father (post of October 2010)

From a previous posting on fatherhood, look here.

Wojtyla: Reflections on Fatherhood

From: "Reflections on Fatherhood" (1964), in The Collected Plays and Writings on the Theater (University of California, 1987), pp. 365-368:

Ex quo omnis paternitas in coelis
et in terra nominatur [Eph 3:15]
 [translation from Jerusalem Bible: "This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name."]
. . .

After a long time I came to understand that You do not want me to be a father if I am not also a son. The son is wholly Yours; You always think "mine" about him. And You utter this word with absolute justification, with credibility. Without such credibility the word "mine" is a risk; love is a risk also. Why did you inflict on me the love that in me must be a risk? And now your Son takes on Himself all the risk of fatherly love in relation to everything outside of Himself. How much the word "mine" must hurt when what it describes turns out later not to be mine. I think with awe about the strain and toil of Your Son, about the magnitude of His love. How much did He take on Himself? . . .

How could I become a son? I did not want to be him. I did not want to accept the suffering caused by risking love. I thought I would not be equal to it. My eyes were too fixed on myself, on my ego and its possibilities alone. . . .

To absorb the radiation of fatherhood means not only to become a father but, much more, to become a child (become a son). Being the father of many, many people, I must be a child: the more I am father, the more I become a child.

Waldstein on Wojtyla's Personalism

Dr Waldstein presented a talk at the University of St Thomas, for the John PAul II Forum, on the Personalism of Blessed John Paul II. Find it here. He compares the type of personalism developed by Blessed John Paul II, a "Trinitarian Personalism," with the personalisms of Kant and Scheler.

Waldstein explains that Wojtyla first came upon a notion of subjectivity and personal experience through the mystic, St John of the Cross, and this was a vision of the human person formed by the thought of Thomas Aquinas. In the paper he states: "He first encountered the thought of St. Thomas in the writings of St. John of the Cross rather than in Neo-Thomist manuals. St. John of the Cross offers a profoundly experiential and in this sense Personalist rereading of St. Thomas, focused on the spousal gift of self and its ultimate roots in the Trinity." (see PDF text, pp. 10-11, in link above)

During the week long workshop, and in his magnificent manuscript, Logos and Glory, Waldstein elaborates extensively on the crucial role of St John of the Cross in providing an alternative to Cartesian subjectivity. A major point that he makes is that Wojtyla did not seek to "synthesize" Kant and Thomas, or consciousness and being, as suggested by Buttiglione, in his book on Wojtyla:

What is at stake here is the whole relationship between Christianity and modernity and between the philosophy of being and the philosophy of consciousness…The integration of the philosophy of being and the philosophy of consciousness into a complete anthropology of the person seems to be…the only way to recognize in depth the novelty of the conciliar teaching and at the same time its solid anchor hold in the tradition (which is not the same as traditionalism). . . . [by bringing these two strands of philosophy together, Wojtyła produces] a new synthesis in which modern elements and traditional elements are harmoniously fused…At the same time, the contrast between modernity and Christianity disappears." Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Eerdmans 1997) pp. 180-184)

Waldstein counters -- there is no "synthesis" of modern consciousness and being because Wojtyla already developed a notion of consciousness from within the mysticism of John of the Cross. It is a consciousness of love, a consciousness of relatedness to God and others in love.  Ken Schmitz made a very similar point in his book At the Center of the Human Drama (CUA, 1993):

This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of subject as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character qua consciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.

Wojtyla begins with a different starting point for self-awareness. In a later document on John of the Cross, Blessed John Paul II said:

In it [that is, the dissertation on John of the Cross], I devoted special attention to an analytical discussion of the central affirmation of the Doctor Mysticus: Faith is the only proximate and proportionate means for communion with God. The Doctor Mysticus…through his example and doctrine, helps Christians to make their faith strong with the very basic qualities of an adult faith which the Second Vatican Council asks of us. This faith is to be personal, free and convinced, embraced with one’s entire being, an ecclesial faith, confessed and celebrated in communion with the Church, a praying and adoring faith, matured through the experience of communion with God.

Communion, with God and others, is fundamental to human consciousness and to the life of the person. How different from Kant and Scheler. Wojtyla came to modern philosophy of consciousness, Descartes and Kant, with a fully developed notion of the central role of personal existence and human subjectivity; but he did not leave being or God out of that experience. There was no need for him to "synthesize" two aspects of the life already joined together by way of the experience of love.

John Paul II on Vatican II, the Church and the Holy Spirit

On the Feast of Pentecost we can appreciate the teaching about Vatican II from Pope John Paul II's Dominum et vivificantem: On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World. Pentecost is not a thing of the past, a distant memory, an old story. It is precisely a new story, a story about renewal, the ongoing renewal of the Church. John Paul II constantly urged the faithful to study the documents of Vatican II, because there is where we find "what the Spirit is saying to the Churches."

The Conciliar Constitution Lumen Gentium tell us that the era of the Church began with the coming of the Holy Spirit. They also tell us that this era, the era of the Church, continues. It continues down the centuries and generations. In our own century, when humanity is already close to the end of the second Millennium after Christ, this era of the Church expressed itself in a special way through the Second Vatican Council, as the Council of our century. For we know that it was in a special way an "ecclesiological" Council: a Council on the theme of the Church. At the same time, the teaching of this Council is essentially "pneumatological": it is permeated by the truth about the Holy Spirit, as the soul of the Church. We can say that in its rich variety of teaching the Second Vatican Council contains precisely all that "the Spirit says to the Churches" with regard to the present phase of the history of salvation.

But obviously many of the faithful have claimed a warrent for distortions and exaggerations based on a presumption of "the spirit of the council." We need discernment today to follow the path of authentic renewal. The "prince of the world" comes forward espcially at such times to tempt the faithful to a love of power and false liberation. So Blessed John Paul II warned us and encouraged us to discern the true path:

Following the guidance of the Spirit of truth and bearing witness together with him, the Council has given a special confirmation of the presence of the Holy Spirit -- the Counselor. In a certain sense, the Council has made the Spirit newly "present" in our difficult age. In the light of this conviction one grasps more clearly the great importance of all the initiatives aimed at implementing the Second Vatican Council, its teaching and its pastoral and ecumenical thrust. . . . This work being done by the Church for the testing and bringing together of the salvific fruits of the Spirit bestowed in the Council is something indispensable. For this purpose one must learn how to "discern" them carefully from everything that may instead come originally from the "prince of this world." This discernment in implementing the Council's work is especially necessary in view of the fact that the Council opened itself widely to the contemporary world, as is clearly seen from the important Conciliar Constitutions Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium.

Blessed John Paul II was a man of great hope, urging us to cross the threshold of hope with him, because he had faith in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. He cited these passages from Gaudium et spes:

"For theirs (i.e., of the disciples of Christ) is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly and intimately linked with mankind and its history." (Gaudium et spes §1)

"The Church truly knows that only God, whom she serves, meets the deepest longings of the human heart, which is never fully satisfied by what the world has to offer." (Gaudium et spes §41)

"God 's Spirit. . . with a marvelous providence directs the unfolding of time and renews the face of the earth." (Gaudium et spes §26)

The Holy Spirit as Gift

In his intimate life, God "is love," the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he "searches even the depths of God," as uncreated Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person- Love. He is Person-Gift Here we have an inexhaustible treasure of the reality and an inexpressible deepening of the concept of person in God, which only divine Revelation makes known to us.

At the same time, the Holy Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father and the Son in divinity, is love and uncreated gift from which derives as from its source (fons vivus) all giving of gifts vis-a-vis creatures (created gift): the gift of existence to all things through creation; the gift of grace to human beings through the whole economy of salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us."

Pope John Paul II, 

Dominum et vivificantem: On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World §10

Education and persons

"Education is a creative activity with persons as its only possible object -- only a person can be educated, an animal can only be trained -- and also one which uses entirely human material, all that is by nature present in the human being to be educated is material for the educators, materials which their love must find and mold. This material includes all that which God gives, by supernatural dispensation of his Grace. For he does not leave the work of education, which in a certain sense be called the continuous creation of personality, wholly and entirely to parents but Himself takes part in it, in His own person. For something more than the love of parents was present at the origin of a new person -- they were only co-creators; the love of the Creator decided that a new person would come into existence in the mother's womb. Grace is so to speak the continuation of this work. God himself takes the supreme part in the creation of the human person in the spiritual, moral, strictly supernatural sphere. The parents, though, if they are not to fail in their proper role, that of co-creators, must make their contribution here too." Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, p. 56

The Family and the root of sociability

Maritain on "root generosity" of being

For all of the incisive arguments made by Aristotle for “man as political animal,” he did not quite reach the root cause. He had the notion of a common good and applied the notion of friendship to political life. He did not make explicit the theme of generosity and gift. If we recap the three arguments – the city completes the family, a natural association; the city reveals man as a rational animal, with a capacity for deliberation and justice; the city is a whole that develops the individual as a part. But each of these arguments seems to turn more on the necessity of social and political association and indicates the neediness of human nature. Let’s consider a very insightful paragraph from Jacques Maritain’s Person and the Common Good:

But why is it that the person, as person, seeks to live in society? It does so, first, because of its very perfections, as person, and its inner urge to the communications of knowledge and love, which require relationship with other persons. In its radical generosity, the human person tends to overflow into social communications in response to the law of superabundance inscribed in the depths of being, life, intelligence and love. It does so secondly because of its needs or deficiencies, which derive from its material individuality. In this respect, unless it is integrated in a body of social communications, it cannot attain the fullness of its life and accomplishment. Society appears, therefore, to provide the human person with just those conditions of existence and development which it needs. It is not by itself alone that it reaches its plenitude but by receiving essential goods from society.

The second reason, from “needs or deficiencies,” takes into account the thrust of Aristotle’s argument in Politics. The acquisition of virtue, the maintenance of life and the cultivation of the good life, the role of law and deliberation about common advantage indicate the complex conditions needed for human flourishing. The human being is dependent on his fellows for the conditions of liberty, virtue, and overall development as a human. But did Aristotle, or Plato for that matter, thematize nor make explicit the “radical generosity” of the human person? If they acknowledge radical generosity, why would the slaves, the mechanics, and most of mankind be excluded from community? 

To explain the "root generosity" as a reason for sociability, my teacher at Notre Dame (1972), Joe Evans, expressed Maritain’s insight this way: “inscribed in his very ontological structure man seeks to super-abundance and super-existence.” The common good is rooted in the human capacity for communion with others in knowledge and truth. Maritain begins to make thematic the philosophy of “gift”: “Through love he can give himself freely to beings who are to him, as it were, other selves; and for this relationship no equivalent can be found in the physical world.”  

John Paul II finds the best formulation in Gaudium et spes:

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. §24

The fundamental principle for human dignity is that God created each person for itself, or as an end in itself. This does not provide an endorsement of moral powers for the underwriting of human autonomy. It is rather an affirmation of human dignity in light of the person's eternal destiny. But John Paul provides a more experiential basis for this understanding of human dignity in light of the family and the communion of persons. The family establishes an area of personal affirmation and understanding of the individual in his or her uniqueness and “unrepeatability”: "The family is the place in which each human being appears in his or her own uniqueness and unrepeatability." 

The family therefore defies the intelligible as form and as universal precisely in its very reality as individuals in relation; and so its meaning will escape the philosopher.  The role and importance of the family comes up at the point of birth and death. They are potentially no more than a statistic for all but the family. The reality of the family emerges between a theological proposition (each is willed for his or her own sake) and an everyday or commonplace truth (the family embraces each member in his or her uniqueness and unrepeatability). We touch upon the mystery of the human person in birth and death.  But between dogmatic assertion and what may be taken as no more than sentimental platitude, Wojtyla asks us to delve deeper into the mystery of family life. The dynamic reality of marriage of spouses possesses significance greater than the “pairing of male and female” for the generation of new life in twilight of passion and convenience (a la Aristotle Politics I.2). It reveals the human capacity of personal gift and energizes the root of all human society. Wojtyla says that humans are “like unto God” by reason of their capacity for community with other persons. Yet we have to go deeper than “unit of social life”:

If we were to say that the actualization of this capacity and the confirmation of this truth about human beings is social life, this would be true, but it still would not capture the full depth that is proper and specific to this truth. Likewise, it would also be true to say that the family is a society, the smallest unit, but this would still not tell us much about the family and would fall short of the full ontological depth that we ought to discover and accentuate here.

Wojtyla will state the social is a point of arrival, rather than his point of departure (as it is for Aristotle). His point of departure is the person and the “structure proper to a person.” The structure or dynamism is self-possession and self-giving. “If the gift of oneself characterizes human activity, human conduct, it does so always because of this personal esse, which is capable of a disinterested gift of oneself.” (Karol Wojtyla, Person and community, pp. 318-319) The human “social nature” derives from the capacity for “rational community as communio”: the two “mutually contain and somehow imply one another.” But communio is deeper than social nature, and is “far more indicative of the personal and interpersonal dimension of all social systems.” (319)
 

The communio of persons requires the disinterested gift of self and the reception of the gift. Marriage is the perfect realization of the communio as a mode of being – for the “nature of a community of persons demands that this gift be not only given but also received in the whole of its truth and authenticity.” (322) That is there must be a “genuine reception” of the gift or the “act through which the gift of the person is expressed.” Marriage requires the mutual giving and reception of the gift of self over the course of a lifetime (until death do us part) and the exclusive commitment in totality of the self. Wojtyla thus coins the term a “theology of the body” to account for the significance of the sexually differentiated male and female as being most apt for communio and for the generation of new life, as an expansion of the communio personarum. Marriage as a communio personarum is “by nature open to these new persons, and through them it attains its proper fullness, nit just in the biological or sociological sense, but precisely as a community with a truly communal character, a community that exists and acts on the basis of the bestowal of humanity and the mutual exchange of gifts.”
 

This phenomenological analysis reaches the authentic root of human sociability. It is not reducible to any of the Aristotle’s concepts, and it is capable of solving the Platonic question concerning the guardian. Aristotle would reduce the family to the natural play of passion or the biological -- either the achievement of the species in its endurance (no small thing) or to the neediness of passion and convenience (not at all evil aspects of sexuality and family, but not distinctively or essentially personal). Or Aristotle absorbs the family into the forms and purposes of the city as such with the result that a utilitarian approach overtakes the family in its readiness to serve the city. Wojtyla presents a deeper analysis to underscore the dignity of the person and the dynamic reality of self-giving, the radical generosity as the second aspect of human sociability, complementary to neediness.
 

The family does indeed feed the city primarily through the inner or spiritual formation of the person. John Paul II succinctly explains this in Familiaris consortio: “The family has vital and organic links with society, since it is its foundation and nourishes it continually through its role of service to life: it is from the family that citizens come to birth and it is within the family that they find the first school of the social virtues that are the animating principle of the existence and development of society itself.” §42 The animating principle of society he calls the “law of free-giving.” He explains how vital is the family in embodying and perpetuating the principle of society: “by respecting and fostering personal dignity in each and every one as the only basis for value, this free giving takes the form of heartfelt acceptance, encounter and dialogue, disinterested availability, generous service and deep solidarity.” The higher values of society, such as justice, are rooted in the family communion of persons which continues to serve as an “example and stimulus for the broader community relationships marked by respect, justice, dialogue and love.” 

Maritain recognizes the importance of personal life, as developed through family, as a basis for political life – “it is understandable that society cannot live without the perpetual gifts which come from persons, each one of whom is irreplaceable and incommunicable” even though society may well treat persons as replaceable. It is the "law of free giving." De Koninck, although he is arguing a different point, similarly says "that society is very corrupt which cannot appeal to the love of the arduous common good and to the higher fortitude of the citizen as citizen for the defense of this good." (The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol 2, p. 81) No need for a "noble lie." We need generous families, steeped in the philosophy of the gift.

John Paul II on the Family

Charles Umlauf, Family, Austin TX

Blessed John Paul II would often remark about the aspect of personal existence as something "unrepeatable." This is the core of the Church's defense of the transcendence of the human person. The person is not primarily an instantiation of a species or an individual specimen, an example of an essence -- but a concrete being bearing a significance in its very concrete reality.

Thus in Redeemer of Man John Paul II said that in his discussion of "man" he is not speaking of : "the 'abstract' man, but the real, 'concrete', 'historical' man. We are dealing with 'each' man, for each one is included in the mystery of the Redemption and with each one Christ has united himself for ever through this mystery. Every man comes into the world through being conceived in his mother's womb and being born of his mother, and precisely on account of the mystery of the Redemption is entrusted to the solicitude of the Church. Her solicitude is about the whole man and is focused on him in an altogether special manner. The object of her care is man in his unique unrepeatable human reality, which keeps intact the image and likeness of God himself."

Referring to Gaudium et spes, John Paul II recalls, with the Council, "man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself." Thus "Man as 'willed' by God, as 'chosen' by him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory-this is 'each' man, 'the most concrete' man, 'the most real';  this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of his mother." §13

Christ as the Redeemer of Man relates to "Each man in all the unrepeatable reality of what he is and what he does, of his intellect and will, of his conscience and heart. Man who in his reality has, because he is a 'person', a history of his life that is his own and, most important, a history of his soul that is his own." §14

John Paul II explains that the Church reaches out with the good news to the concrete person. He says the way of the Church is the way of man.  "this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption."

The root of this unrepeatability is the fact that God has willed the person for itself. John Paul II uses this idea and text from Gaudium et spes to explain the importance of the family. For it in the family that this truth is realized:

The contrast between the ordinariness of all the facts of the birth of human beings in human families and the extraordinariness and unrepeatability of each of those facts leads to another contrast, one that highlights the meaning of each concrete family as a communion of persons. It is precisely for such a community that the fact of the birth of a human being is extraordinary and in each instance unique, as well as both personal and communal. Beyond this dimension, beyond the boundaries of the family, it loses this character and becomes a statistical fact, something to be subjected to various sorts of objectifications, up to the point of becoming merely a statistical entry. The family is the place in which each human being appears in his or her own uniqueness and unrepeatability. It is -- and should be -- the kind of special system of forces in which each person is important and needed because that person exists and because of who that person is. It is a profoundly human system, constructed upon the value of the person and concentrated entirely around this value.

From "The Family as a Community of Persons," (written in 1974) found in  in Persons and Community: Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993)