Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality today talking about the human person.
The last time we talked about how we share in a certain participation in God's being.
Today we'll look at man as a distinct and incommunicable substance, so these reflections on the human person are a bit philosophical, just be aware of that, bear with us.
Man is a person, and in a nutshell that is the synthesis of Christian anthropology, man is a person.
The old pagan philosophies had never really fully addressed the question of man.
The truth regarding who we are is a product of Christianity, born from the light of the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
The mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation helped the Church Fathers to make distinctions between nature and person, and they offered scholastic philosophers the occasion to elaborate a rich doctrine on the human person.
First of all, the human person is an individual.
With our individuality we have something in common with the plants, the animals.
We're conditioned by the laws that govern space and time, we're like a node of contacts and reactions with the other created realities.
Still, individuality from the material point of view does not equal personality.
When God infuses the soul into the individual, enkindling in them the fire of the Spirit as it were, that's how the individual becomes a spiritual, reasonable being, capable of understanding, of loving, of perfectioning himself or herself.
In short, the individual then becomes a person when they receive a soul.
So the designation of person is reserved to beings which possess this almost divine gift that we call the soul or the spirit.
Bl. John Duns Scotus says that the person is a whole, which constitutes nature and the individualizing principles that spring from the form and from the ultimate perfective reality, what Scotus calls the haecceitas.
Haecceitas, he says, constitutes the being in its individuality and its real existence, an existence radically different from that of other beings.
The haecceitas is what makes you you and not someone else, essentially.
And the philosopher Jacques Martin says that a person is a universe of spiritual nature gifted with the liberty of choice and therefore constituting an independent whole vis-a-vis the world.
So the life of a person, even though it's rooted in the sensible world, the things that are sensible material, the life of the person transcends those things.
Our life extends past time and space.
Why?
Because we were made for eternity.
The person is a rational nature that exists in a very singular way, in the most perfect and differentiated form.
As a side note, St. Bonaventure accepts the definition of Boethius who said that a person is an individual substance of a rational nature.
Bonaventure says yes.
Scotus says that definition is fine for a human person but not for a divine person because there can't be three individuals in God but only one through consubstantiality.
So Scotus embraces the definition of person of Richard of St. Victor and Alexander of Hales who said a person is the incommunicable existence of an intellectual nature.
A pebble, a plant, an animal exist but their existence, Father Ciccarelli calls their existence precarious.
The human person, on the other hand, has their own subsistence, meaning that they have their own vital principle inside of themselves as the source of their actions.
They possess their own being, are aware of themselves, return to themselves, realize themselves with their internal energies which are always active and alive.
This sovereign mode of existence belongs only to the spirit because the spirit is simple, always identical to itself and complete in itself.
The spiritual subsistence which constitutes the person implies a force of possession, meaning the spirit possesses itself.
There's also a force of incommunicability for which every person is like a being that's absolutely distinct and inviolable and in its interior independence.
In his intimacy and proper mastery, each person remains sovereignly autonomous and unbreakable in the stronghold of their freedom but that doesn't mean that we have an absolute independence.
God's still over us and our independence is relative to the other beings created by God.
The submission of one man to another is an act of his free will because external coercion doesn't touch us on the inside, as it were.
Our internal life can't be violated by anyone.
And even God himself, though he acts inside of us, God works with such divine delicacy so as to respect the interior liberty, the freedom that we have, a freedom of which he is the source, the model, and the goal.
The incommunicability and independence, which characterize the person may sound like negative qualities, but they're more positive than negative.
Ultimately, they resolve themselves in that being which is holy in himself that's proper to a single, singular, rational nature made to communicate with other people, which is what we are.
We're made to communicate with others and the values, rights, and responsibilities of each person are founded on their subsistence, distinction, and the incommunicability of their person.
I told you it would be pretty philosophical, so if it went over your head, don't worry, hopefully, it'll hit the person behind you, as we like to say, right?
Hopefully, someone else will get something from it.
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to appreciate the human person as he was created by God, and maybe some of these reflections will help us to understand more of the respect towards others that we need to have, and maybe even the respect toward ourselves in some cases.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.