Resolution of the Paradox of Self-Giving in the Mystery of the Trinity: The Analogy of Revelation

Last updated on: April 19, 2017 at 10:40 pm by voxnovablog

Resolution of the Paradox of Self-Giving in the Mystery of the Trinity: The Analogy of Revelation 2017-04-19T22:40:43-05:00 voxnovablog

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In my last posting I had suggested that I would tie together my previous post regarding Wojtyła and self-giving with my post on personhood and individuality. I know now that was too ambitious, and so presently I shall only bring the former to a conclusion. In my posting about self-giving we saw how one’s being is constituted through his act of self-giving. In turn, I supplied a brief survey of Wojtyła’s philosophical anthropology as a means of offering an account of self-giving, only to come face to face with a paradox: namely, that one can only fully find himself through making a sincere gift of himself. In the present posting I hope to offer a resolution of this paradox, a resolution that can only be had through a suspension of the properly philosophical and turn to the theological.

It is at the point where one confronts the paradoxical that revelation becomes so vitally important for a complete understanding of the human self, for the possibility of answering the question, “Who am I?” An answer cannot be had through a continual turning-in upon and searching of one’s self, but only through an out-turning to a consideration of human selfhood revealed and made manifest through the divine person of Jesus Christ. “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:11), Christ asks Peter and in so doing, shifts the entire horizon by which postlapsarian man could, for the first time, understand himself to an unprecedented degree. For now, Christ, the “New Man,” (cf. Gaudium et Spes, §22), through his re-orienting human consciousness within the framework of, pace Rahner, the economic Trinity’s redemptive activity, simultaneously makes known the love of the Father, restores fallen (human) nature, and reveals to man the depth and fullness of his own humanity. In one particularly pregnant passage to which John Paul II returns time and again, viz., Gaudium et Spes § 24, we find:

“[T]he Lord Jesus, when praying to the Father “that they may all be one… even as we are one” (Jn. 17:21-22), has opened up new horizons closed to human reason by implying that there is a certain parallel between the union existing among the divine persons and the union of the sons of God in truth and love. It follows, then, that if man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake, man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.”

Here, the conciliar text speaks of a “parallel” between God and man, a parallel that Wojtyła later describes in his commentary on this very passage as a “metaphysical analogy” (Sources of Renewal, 62). But, we should note carefully that the “analogy” under consideration here is not one in which the higher or nobler is glimpsed through a consideration of its causal efficacy within the lower. Starting from within one’s own self and penetrating deeper into the phenomena that constitute one’s human experience, the human self lacks an adequate hermeneutic by means of which it can fully disclose and interpret itself. Prior to and without Christ’s revelation of the Trinitarian mystery the deepest truths of the human self and its very being remain only aporatic. The human self requires in order to understand itself a sense of the contours and features of its being as an imitation of, and therefore in an analogical community with, a Trinitarian God.

And so as Gaudium et Spes affirms, with the Incarnation a new horizon opens before man, whereby a new hermeneutic through which man is now capable of understanding himself is provided. This shift in horizon comes about not through a new or deeper philosophical insight, but through revelation’s intervention in the person of Jesus Christ.

In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling (GetS, 22).

Accordingly, those opaque regions within the self, constituting one’s human experience but which remain resistant nonetheless to a full phenomenological disclosure, are suddenly transfigured before the illuminating ray of revelation and brought to light as an icon pointing through and beyond itself to its exemplar, the Trinitarian God. At last the meaning of self-giving unfolds in light of God’s revelation.

And what is the content of this revelation?—none other than the Trinitarian nature of God. God Himself, Christ shows us, is a community of persons, each distinguished and constituted through his relation to the others in eternal and reciprocal acts of self-giving and receiving (Cf., W. Norris Clarke, Person and Being, 86-91). As traditional Christian theology teaches, the Father gives Himself to the Son through an eternal act of begetting or generation; and the Son, in turn, surrenders himself to the Father, assuming the form of a slave (human nature) and being obedient even to the point of death (cf. Philippians 2:5-11) in the consummation of the Paschal mystery.

Through the Father’s revelation of Himself through His Incarnate Son, humanity understands to a greater degree—although, to be sure, far from exhaustively—that its own exemplar, the divine Being, is itself constituted through eternal acts of self-giving and receiving. Made in the image and likeness of God, man is the very reflection of eternal self-giving and receiving. That desire to give and need to receive constituting the heart of the human self has as its metaphysical origin the communal nature of the divine Being, of whom man is the image. Put simply, because the divine Persons are communally constituted through self-giving relations, so too is God’s image, humanity, so-constituted (cf. Wojtyła, “The Family as a Community of Persons,” in Person and Community). Wojtyła explains, “The reality of mankind is both personal and communal, though in a different way from divine reality” (Sources of Renewal, 59). God and man are similar, but in another way dissimilar, which is simply to say that there is dissimilarity in the similarity. This dissimilar similarity is none other than what the medievals understood as “analogy” and what we, here, understand as the analogy of self-giving. Within this analogy, then, we find that the meaning of self-giving ultimately goes hand-in-hand with the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

But, while the trajectory of this analogous community between God and man, one based on imitation, is, as we have thus far described it, theological in nature, that is, proceeding from God’s self-revelation to man, the analogy still remains very much “metaphysical” as Wojtyła himself suggests. The analogy is metaphysical because it pertains to the very ontological structures that underlie the nature of personhood, divine or human. Moreover, though the Trinitarian mystery is made manifest through God’s own self-disclosure in revelation, man understands that very revelation in terms of his own being. That is, even with the aid of revelation humanity does not understand the Trinitarian nature of God as it is in itself, but only according to a human mode of understanding, a mode that has its origin in human experience. Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it well when he writes:

“[I]f a concept that is fundamental to the Bible [i.e., to revelation] has no kind of analogy in the general intellectual sphere, and awoke no familiar echo in the heart of man, it would remain absolutely incomprehensible and thereby a matter of indifference. It is only when there is an analogy (be it only distant) between the human sense of the divine and divine revelation that the height, the difference and the distance of that which the revelation discloses may be measured in God’s grace” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989], 14; emphases mine).

Man’s own experience of self-giving, then, which at first seems impenetrable to his own reasoning, provides a common language with which the divine can communicate itself to humanity and thereby reorient man’s interpretive horizon. Wojtyła writes, “[T]he mission of the Holy Trinity encounters familiar ground, as it were: God comes to save the creature whom he has made like to himself thus preparing the ground for him to accept the divine mission” (Wojtyła, Sources of Renewal, 59).

For Wojtyła, then, as we have seen, analogy in both its aspects or trajectories, theological and philosophical, is vital to a full disclosure of the phenomenon of self-giving and receiving. It provides for the possibility of God’s own self-revelation of His inner being to humanity, but also provides for the possibility of man coming not only to a fuller understanding of God but also of his own self as an image of God. It preserves the identity of creation, but also points to the need for its redemption and supernatural salvation. For, as Wojtyła writes, “Awareness of salvation is, as it were, superimposed on awareness of creation, which it penetrates through and through, and it is the true response to the mystery of the most holy Trinity” (Ibid., 55).

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