Paying Attention To The Sky

“We are not our own. . . Belonging to ourselves at its root is always anteriorly a belonging to God and to others, to the entire community of being.” I am always reminded of Michael Novak’s comment on those who view themselves as “atheists:”

“Gathering force over many years, one discovery has hit me with the force of a law: If you make mistakes about your own nature, you will make as many mistakes about God, and quite properly then, reject what your inquiries put before you. The god you fantasize will appear to you not very great, a delusion, a snare from which others ought to be freed. You will despise this god.”

I can think of nothing more fundamental to the understanding of who we are (from a Christian anthropological point of view) than the idea that we are Embodied Persons. When speaking with an atheist, I often try to enquire as to who they think they are, what their essential nature is. Do you have a soul?

John Paul II Theology of the Body is a remarkable vision. Schindler begins an essay by defining six characteristics of it which I have separated out and present here:

Seeing In The Body A Theology
The body in its physical structure as such bears a vision of reality: it is an anticipatory sign, and already an expression, of the order of love or gift that most deeply characterizes the meaning of the person and indeed, via an adequately conceived analogy, the meaning of all creaturely being. This is the burden of John Paul II’s seeing in the body a theology, which indeed implies an anthropology or, better, a metaphysics rooted in the personal.

An Original Memory Of The Good And True
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in his God and the World, says that

Man is constructed from within, in the image of God, to be loved and to love. In the Trinity, Love’s own essence portrays itself Man is in God’s image and thereby he is a being whose innermost dynamic is likewise directed toward the receiving and giving of love.
from “God and the World”

Elsewhere Ratzinger, referring to the scholastic understanding of conscience in terms of the two levels indicated in “synderesis” and “conscientia,” suggests that synderesis be replaced with the Platonic concept of anamnesis (recollection), which, he says, “harmonizes with the key motifs of biblical thought and the anthropology derived from it.” He says this term “should be taken to mean exactly that which Paul expressed in… his letter to the Romans” regarding the law written on the hearts of the Gentiles and on their conscience that also bears witness. Ratzinger says that the same idea is also “strikingly amplified in the great monastic rule of Saint Basil. Here we read: “The love of God is not founded on a discipline imposed on us from outside, but is constitutively established in us as the capacity and necessity of our rational nature.”

Ratzinger goes on:
This means that the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon of conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (they are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine…This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself hears its echo from within.

The Ground For Mission:
The possibility for and right to mission rest on this anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical to the ground of our existence. The gospel may, indeed must, be proclaimed to the pagans, because they themselves are yearning for it in the hidden recesses of their souls (see Isaiah 42:4)

In this sense Paul can say that the gentiles are a law to themselves — not in the sense of the modern liberal notions of autonomy, which preclude transcendence of the subject, but in the much deeper sense that nothing belongs less to me than I myself. My own “I” is the site of the profoundest surpassing of self and contact with him from whom I came and toward whom I am going.

Ratzinger says that Paul’s proclamation thus “encountered an antecedent basic knowledge of the essential components of God’s will, which came to be written down in the commandments, which can be found in all cultures, and which can be all the more clearly elucidated the less an overbearing cultural bias distorts this primordial knowledge.”

My presentation first (I-VI) shows the sense in which this love and anamnesis of God is reflected in the embodied person and implies a metaphysical anthropology of being as gift.

First principle
The soul is “the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole — corpore et anima minus — as a person” ( Veritatis splendor, 48). “It is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his…acts” (VS, 48). “The human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure” (VS. 48). 

These statements, first of all, affirm the unity of the human being as a dual, or differentiated, unity of body and soul.

But, secondly, in light of the teaching of St. Thomas (following Aristotle), this unity, rightly understood, presupposes the primacy of the soul within the mutual relation of body and soul The soul gives the body its first meaning as a body, although, given the unity of soul and body, the causal relationship between them is always mutually internal, albeit asymmetrical.

The body accordingly is never, after the manner of Descartes, simply physicalist “stuff’ that somehow has its own “organization” prior to and independent of the order provided by the sou1. Thus the body, in its very bodyliness, can participate in the imago Dei. The body in its distinctness as a body indicates a new way of being in the world, a distinct way of imaging God and love.

In sum: the soul as it were lends its spiritual meaning to the body as body, even as the body simultaneously contributes to what now becomes, in man, a distinct kind of spirit: a spirit whose nature it is to be embodied.

Second Principle
In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church [CSDC] we read: “The likeness with God shows that the essence and existence of man are constitutively related to God in the most profound manner. This…relationship…is therefore not something that comes afterwards and is not added from the outside” (109, emphasis original; see CCC, 356, 358). And further: “The relationship between God and man is reflected in the relational and social dimension of human nature. Man . . is not a solitary being but ‘a social being . . . “ [cf. Gs, 12j (110, emphasis original).

Six Elaborations on the Second Principle

1. Thus the social dimension of human nature, or again the communion of persons toward which each person is ordained, is a matter of constitutive order. It is an order that is first given to the creature, and enacted by the creature only and always qua [vocab: In the capacity or character of; as] anteriorly given.
   What the constitutive relatedness among human beings implies, in sum, is that I am in my original and deepest meaning as such a substantial individual who is ordered at once front and toward God and others.
2. My being thus bears the character of gift: of a “what” that is given and received. Indeed, my reception is a response to the gift, a response that, in its very character as receptive-responsive, already participates in the generosity proper to gift-giving. I bear a constitutive order toward generosity that always-anteriorly participates in the generosity I have received and am always-already receiving — from God and other creatures in God.
   Note that this constitutive order of generosity bears a dual meaning, characterizing both what is proper to man in his being qua natural and his call to share in the Trinitarian life of God himself in Jesus Christ. The constitutive creaturely order of generosity, in other words, bears a properly natural meaning even as it also always is open, however unconsciously, to participation in God’s own generosity. Although sin weighs down and profoundly skews the constitutively generous order of being, sin can never destroy the integrity of this order as naturally given. The upshot, in sum, is that I cannot but always, in some significant sense, implicitly and from my depths, tend toward and desire generosity, and this tending is already a participation in a natural generosity that is in search of participation in God’s own generosity as revealed in Jesus Christ.
3. It is important to see, thirdly, that constitutive relatedness does not undermine the traditional notion of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature. For it is the very relation to God, which relation always already includes relation to all other creatures, that establishes each person in. his individual substantiality.
   The crucial point, in a word, is that the relation to God, and to others in God, that establishes the individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be. This “letting be” implies a kind of primordial, ontological “circum-incession,” or “perichoresis,” of giving and receiving between the other and myself. What I am in my original constitution as a person has always-already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God’s gift to me of myself — indeed, has also, in some significant sense, been given to me by other creatures and received by me in and as my response to their gift to me.
   The substantial unity characteristic of the traditional notion of the person, therefore, while reaffirmed, is nevertheless now conceived from within the order of love. Each individual substance possesses a substantial unity (esse in) while bearing from its beginning and in its depths a dynamic reference from (esse ab) and toward (esse ad). This dynamic reference, given already with the being (ens: esse habens) of the person, indicates the ontological beginning of the receiving-giving that characterizes the primitive meaning of human action and is (thereby) meant to be realized in every human action. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger cited above: man “is a being whose innermost dynamic is… directed toward the receiving and giving of love.”
4. The logic of gift characteristic of creaturely being is best described as filial. My being in its substantial unity is constitutively dependent on God and on others in God. It is for this reason that Cardinal Ratzinger has stated that the child in the womb provides the basic figure for what it means to be a human being. And indeed it is important to recall in this connection what is perhaps the central emphasis in his Christology, summed up in the claim that “Son” is the highest title of Jesus Christ. Thus the basic logic of our being as creatures is disclosed in the child: the obedience, humility, and dependence characteristic of the child disclose creaturely being’s deepest and most proper symbolic nature.
   In a word, each of us as originally constituted is a sign and expression of the relation to God that is always first granted to us by God in and through the order of being: a sign and expression, in other words, of God’s relation to (in difference from) the world that is mediated through the “ontological difference” indicated in the distinction between esse and ens (essentia). What this means concretely is that I am always first granted entry into the generosity of God and of the order of being in relation to God. I am never the origin or source of generosity but always a participant in generosity: I am the origin of generosity only-always qua recipient of generosity, a generous giver but only-always qua receiver of generous giving.
   In sum: the relationality of the human person introduced by love is first the relationality characteristic of the child as the one who is absolutely from the Other — God — and from other beings in God, even as he is thereby simultaneously also for the Other, and for other beings in God. For this reason, worship and service most basically characterize the order of creaturely being, with worship of God providing the anterior form of what is meant by service, to God and to others.
5. It is important to take note of the structure of human-creaturely being implied in the foregoing: a unity that is differentiated, a dual unity. Each substantial being at once possesses its own substantial unity and does so coincident with relationality to God and to other creaturely beings, and this constitutive relationality at once presupposes and always already “causes” a reference within each person to God and others.
   The relationality characteristic of each person in his substantial unity as a creature, in other words, signifies and expresses what is the triplex unity-in-duality of the person already, as it were, in his “original solitude,” his filiality, before God. In his original substantial “aloneness” as one, the human person bears a double reference from and toward God.
   See here the statement by John Paul II: “The account of Genesis 1 does not mention the problem of man’s original solitude: in fact, man is ‘male and female’ from the beginning. The Yahwist text of Genesis 2, by contrast, authorizes us in some way to think first only about man inasmuch as, through the body, he belongs to the visible world while going beyond it; it then lets us think about the same man, but through the duality of sex. Bodyliness and sexuality are not simply identical. Although in its normal constitution, the human body carries within itself the signs of sex and is by nature male or female, the fact that man is a ‘body’ belongs more deeply to the structure of the personal subject than the fact that in his somatic constitution he is also male or female. For this reason, the meaning of original solitude, which can be referred simply to ‘man,’ is substantially prior to the meaning of original unity; the latter is based on masculinity and femininity, which are, as it were, two different ‘incarnations,’ that is, two ways in which the same human being, created ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:27), ‘is a body” (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 157).
   My colleague, Father José Granados, first drew my attention to the link of original solitude, as understood by John Paul II, with the absolute priority of the whole man’s being ordered to God in a relation of prayer and adoration. It is in just this priority of the whole man as originally made for God alone that forms the priority of virginity already in the order of creation. It is important to see that this original “virginal” relation to God must he recuperated in all relations between spouses — even as the spousal relation can then deepen the meaning of virginity itself. On this ‘‘circum-incession’’ of the inner meaning of the two states of life (consecrated virginity and marriage), see David Crawford, “Christian Community and the States of Life: A Reflection on the Anthropological Significance of Virginity and Marriage,” Communio: International Catholic Review 29, no. 2 (2002):337-65.
6. Further then, as already suggested, this substantial unity cum double dynamic reference to God is at once, albeit consequently, a substantial unity cum double reference also to other beings. As Genesis makes clear, the relationality implied in this double reference to other beings is first relationality with another being who is fully human while at once embodying a different way of being human. Thus the text cited from the CSDC [Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church ]states that “the relationship between God and man is reflected in the relational and social dimension of human nature.” And, as Joseph Ratzinger points out in his commentary on Gaudium et spes,“the sexual differentiation of mankind into man and woman is much more than a purely biological fact for the purpose of procreation but unconnected with what is truly human in mankind. In it there is accomplished that intrinsic relation of the human being to a Thou, which inherently constitutes him or her as human. . . The likeness to God in sexuality is prior to sexuality, not identical with it. It is because the human being is capable of the absolute Thou that he is an I who can become a Thou for another I. The capacity for the absolute Thou is the ground of the possibility and necessity of the human partner. Here too, therefore, it is most important to pay attention to the difference between content [inhalt] and consequence [Folge]“The point is that the content of the doctrine of the imago Dei is, in the first place, that man is capax Dei [vocab: a yearning for that which human nature cannot by itself attain]: it is the relation to God that originally constitutes each person, and this relation immediately expresses itself in and as relation also to others, which is realized in a privileged way through relation to another who is the same kind of being as myself, differently: through the relation of two beings who share a common humanity in the different ways termed male/masculine and female/feminine.
   Thus there is in the structure of the human person a second dual unity latent within the person as he stands in his original “solitary” unity before God, and that is the one expressed in the ordering of each person toward a unity between persons, between a one and an other. In the substantial (differentiated-)unity of my own person, I am ordered simultaneously toward unity with an other, toward what may be called a communion of persons. I am ordered toward a unity of two — a dual unity. But a unity of two implies transcendence into a “we” that is more than simply the sum of parts; this differentiated unity indicates in some significant sense a new “third” beyond myself and the other. This unity of two that transcends itself into a “third” is, according to Genesis and the text from Ratzinger cited above, expressed in the spousal relation that presupposes the common filial relation of the partners to God and that is fruitful, most concretely in the procreation of the child.

Third principle
The constitutive order of human being as gift or love, according to John Paul II, is signified and expressed in the body. “Human nature and the body [are not merely] presuppositions or preambles, materially necessary for freedom to make its choice, yet extrinsic to the person, the subject and the human act. [On the contrary,] their functions . . . constitute reference points for moral decisions, because the finalities of these inclinations [are not] merely ‘physical’ goods, called by some pre-moral” (VS. 48). The body bears “the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator” (VS, 48). It exhibits a “primordial sacrament[ality] … understood as a sign that efficaciously transmits in the visible world the invisible mystery hidden in God from eternity.” The body, always-already informed by soul or spirit and actualized by esse, thus exhibits an order of love. But what is crucial to see here is that this sign of the creature’s constitutive relation to God and others takes a new form qua body. The body, in other words, indicates a distinctive way of imaging God and love, in its very order as a body, as personal — creaturely flesh.

Fourth principle
As the CSDC says, “the fact that God created human beings as man and woman is significant” (110). “Man and woman have the same dignity and are of equal value, not only because they are both, in their differences, created in the image of God, but even more profoundly because the dynamic of reciprocity that gives life to the ‘we’ in the human couple is an image of God” (111). The human body, marked with the sign of masculinity or femininity, “contains ‘from the beginning’ the ‘spousal’ attribute, that is, the power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and — through this gift — fulfills the very meaning of his being and his existence. In this, its own distinctive character, the body is the expression of the spirit…“Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions.”

By the nuptial or spousal attribute of the body, then, John Paul II refers to the body’s capacity for expressing love, as realized especially in the body’s sexual difference.

But let me emphasize: the importance accorded by John Paul II to the sexual-gender difference, and thus to what he terms the “nuptial” or “spousal” body, does not overturn the traditional emphasis on the human spirit as the primary locus of the image of God in the human being. The human person is, qua embodied, a new image of what it means to be a person conceived in terms of God’s creational love: an image which, as at once new and of the person, enriches and deepens in its very difference as a body what is in some significant sense already, and indeed more basically and properly analogically, inherent in the reality of person-spirit as such.

John Paul II’s theology of the body, in a word, is about God and being as love, and about the body and the sexual difference insofar as these are a sign and expression of this theologically ontologically-anthropologically prior love, even as the body precisely in its sexual difference provides a new and just so far enriched and deepened understanding of this prior love.

Aptness for fatherhood and motherhood thus are not “accidental” to the human person conceived as a substantial unity constitutively related to others. On the contrary, fatherhood and motherhood specify in a unique way the aptness for receiving and giving characteristic of the human, embodied person’s relationality; they are a realization in the flesh of the imago Dei that originates and abides in the person’s filial relation to God.

Fifth Principle
It is important to note that man and woman each contain the whole meaning of the person, but in a different order. It is from within the substantial wholeness of each as human that the man and woman bear differently a dual reference from and toward others that is ordered differently in each. Needless to say, even with its rejection of a fragmentary understanding of the sexual-gender difference, the unified polarity of man and woman indicated here, along with the filial meaning of both indicated earlier, meet with strong resistance in the current cultural situation. It is important to take note of the assumptions that drive this resistance. These seem to me above all three, involving, first, the role of the biological in interpreting the meaning of the personal; second, the nature of unity and distinction and hence equality and difference; and, third, the idea of receptivity, with its related ideas of obedience and dependence.

(1)  Following John Paul II, I have proposed that the physical-sexual difference, precisely in and as physical-sexual, symbolizes an ontological-spiritual and also psychological difference. The language of giving and receiving and fruitfulness, for example, in their physical meaning as applied to the body — in the consummatum, conception, and the like — signify and express qua body what is characteristic of a spiritual act or activity in its most basic meaning as an order of love. This language, in other words, symbolizes in bodily form what is termed the giving and receiving, and indeed just so far what may be termed the “transcendence” and “immanence,” necessary for personal love in its full and proper meaning. A common contemporary objection is that this use of terms characteristic of the sexual-physical weights the latter with a human-spiritual and indeed ontological significance all out of proportion to what is typically today viewed as simply biological. It suffices here simply to note that this objection presupposes, however unwittingly, a Cartesian idea of the body.

(2)  Regarding the second: using language that indicates a unity within difference creates difficulties because the dominant culture is accustomed, again, to making distinctions in an unwittingly Cartesian manner: if x is truly distinct from y, x must just so far share nothing in common with y.

It seems to me difficult to exaggerate the significance of this modern-“Enlightened” idea of unity and distinctness. Such an idea precludes a priori any unity between x and y that is inclusive, precisely qua unity, of real difference between x and y, and hence of any asymmetry in the mutual relation of x and y. And it precludes any difference between x and y that is inclusive, precisely qua difference, of any real unity hence equality between x and y. In a word: insofar as x andy are equal, they are necessarily the same; and insofar as they are different, they are necessarily unequal, lacking the unity that would render them equal.

(3)  Regarding the third assumption: human agency as typically conceived in modern culture, after the manner, say, of Francis Bacon (and Descartes), is characterized by a primacy of originary power. This idea of human agency, in other words, precludes the possibility of any kind of power in which the agent is essentially a participant, and thus is anteriorly receptive and dependent and indeed obedient, in his original power. On this dominant post- Enlightenment understanding, an original receptivity in the agent would indicate a passivity that is eo ipso defective.

The understanding of the human person-body developed in this article in the light of creation and the “ontological distinction” demands receptivity and dependence for its integrity. A person who is constitutively from God is “rich” in the very “poverty” of the receptiveness that enables his full and substantial being as a creature; and his obedient dependence is itself always already a creaturely participation in God’s generosity and thus at once an image of that generosity. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI deepens the point here in Christological terms, stressing repeatedly in his work that Christ’s unconditionally obedient fidelity to the will of God is an integral sign and expression of his being united with God — his being Son of God. Obedience and receptivity at their root are thus “perfections” of what it means to be human, indeed of what it means to be in a filial sense. And unity and equality, while affirmed, are nevertheless now differentiated into an order of service and just so far “subordination” to an other. This “subordination” is not dehumanizing, but on the contrary humanizing in the fullest sense, given the constitutive reality of human being as created in love and for love. In a word, unity on a Christian understanding is never the mono-unity required by Descartes’s logic of the machine, but always the dual unity (which, as fruitful, is in fact a tri-unity) required by the constitutively creaturely logic of love.

The errors carried in above “Enlightened”-liberal assumptions can be given names: for example,

• gnosticism, which fails to recognize the giftedness proper to creation and its penetration down through the order of the body, such that the body is good already qua ens (being) (intrinsically good) and not only quia factum (qua being [re-]made by humans) (good qua instrument of humans), and that the body thus participates in the “transcendental” meaning of being as at once true, good, and beautiful.
• Deism and Pelagianism, both of which fail to recuperate divine-fatherly origin as an immanent presence informing the original-constitutive meaning of human being and acting.
• Nominalism, which denies the singular being, in its very singularity, any inherent symbolic reference to another; or again which permits no complex or differentiated unity and thereby reduces the singular always and everywhere to a “mono-unity” exclusive of a dual unity that is fruitful. And so on.

Such errors, again, entail denial of the distinctly ontological meaning of the human being as a creature. Having abstracted from the concrete, filial-spousal, order of love established by God in the act of creation, the dominant “Enlightened” vision of reality eliminates adoration and service as the fundamental order of man’s being — an order that is inclusive of his body — even as it tends of its inner logic to reduce the body to a merely “empirical” reality, freedom to a purely formal exercise of choice, sexual-gender difference to a more or less inconsequential physical difference, and receptivity and obedience to dehumanizing passivity. It is important, in light of the foregoing argument, to see that, though the fullness of what is meant by adoration and service as the fundamental order of man’s being can be understood finally only in light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, this order is manifest in principle, in some significant sense, in the creature already in his being as a thing of “nature,” and is just so far accessible in principle to reason (anamnesis).

Sixth Principle
My argument, in sum, is that being, viewed at once in light of creation and of the “ontological,” or “real,” distinction between esse and ens (essentia) that gives creation its first and basic “natural” meaning is gift, and that this giftedness is signified and expressed in a uniquely privileged way in the body: in the filial and spousal fruitful relations that constitute marriage and family. The suggestion that being is gift or love does not indicate the invention of a new “transcendental” called love, in addition to unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. On the contrary, it affirms these latter anew, understanding them now analogically (analogatum princeps) in terms of the filial-spousal-fruitful relationality constitutive of human persons vis-à-vis God and others. It is the love proper to persons in this sense, in other words, that properly realizes the depth and breadth of being as such in its “transcendental” truth and goodness: realizes fully, in a truly analogical way, what it means for cosmic entities to be and to act and indeed to interact. In a word, it is in persons so understood that meta-physics takes its proper form as at once meta- anthropology.

What all this implies for our cultural-“worldly” task can be put in terms of Maximus the Confessor’s understanding of the order of creaturely being as a “cosmic liturgy” — which we might amplify, in light of our argument, as a cosmic liturgy unfolding at once into “cosmic service.” Every creaturely being is a gift from and toward God and other creatures in God, a gift that is as such ordered constitutively to worship and service of God, and service of others. Every cosmic entity is a gift that participates, via its creaturely receptivity and each in its own (analogical) way, in the gift-giving of God and in the generosity of being itself. According to Maximus, the human being is the mid-point, as it were, of the order of creation. In the human being, physics and biology become personalized, even as the person takes the shape of a body. Thus the human person — after Christ and in Christ — becomes the mediator (analogatum princeps) for the whole of creation. In and through the human being, the cosmos itself properly realizes its destined participation in worship of God and fruitful service to God and others.