Note: To hear an audio recording of Fr. Bob Connor's talk on the “Betrothed Love: The Gift of Self,” along with the discussion that ensued, click here to listen to the first part of his talk (about one hour long), then click here to hear the remaining hour and a half of the discussion. You must have RealPlayer installed to hear the recording. Click here to download a copy of RealPlayer, if necessary.

Introduction

Father Bob Connor begins with a short introduction reflecting on a variety of quotations all around the theme of "Gift of Self" and the question of "What is the 'I'?" He first remarks on a photograph of small boy kissing the Pope -- an emblem for the Radiation of Fatherhood, which is the Gift of Self.

The second quote is from the Holy Father as told to papal biographer George Weigel, "They try to understand me from the outside. But I can only be understood from inside." -- in other words, you have to experience what I experience.

Next is a quote from The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater of Karol Wojtyla, where Wojtyla explains that the Gift of Self is the only thing that is going to last: "And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential, except for this: father, child and love." The only realities, he is saying, are father, child, love.

From the introduction to Fides et Ratio, Wojtyla's admonition is to know yourself: Who am I ? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?

The question is "What is the 'I'?" Sources of Renewal is the study Wojtylamade for the Archdiocese of Krakow in 1966-1968, including his personal notes on the Second Vatican Council. What was the Second Vatican Council about? It strove to answer the more complex question - what does it mean to be a believer, an 'I' believing, an acting person? The Council raised the question of "What does it mean to be subject, not object?"

Walker Percy: The Bored Self -- why the self is the only object in the cosmos which gets bored?

John Lukacs: Words referring to 'self' appeared in English and French in their modern sense only two or three hundred years ago.

Percy also says that the self is literally unspeakable to itself. There is no concept or category in which we can subsume the 'I'. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

Finally, we have the symbol of the birdwatcher, an icon of the epistemology we are discussing. The telescope represents the only experience we consent to. We are looking for the 'I' through the telescope, but the bird is sitting on your head, so you do not see it. There is another tier of experience besides the experience you can capture through the telescope, which is the experience of the acting person. That experience yields a being which is called 'I' and which is discovered only in the act of the gift. Is there an experience in the moral moment, the moment of freedom and morality, in which we discover a being which until Descartes (17th c.) has never become explicit? Descartes isolated the being as res cositas, a thinking thing, i.e., consciousness. And the whole of modern thought has given us an understanding of the self as consciousness. Excellent, says the Pope, but something has been missed: specifically, the experience of the self.

Gift of Self

Page 96 of Love and Responsibility says that betrothed love has as its decisive and unique character the giving of one's own person to another. Here, Wojtyla is talking about a giving which is radical; he is talking about the 'I' not as consciousness or some sort of thought, but about the 'I' as being.

He continues to explain that in a marriage a woman experiences, in a psychological sense, a surrender -- that her role in marriage is to give herself, whereas the man's role is possession. But objectively and ontologically, there is a mutual gift of self on behalf of both the woman and the man; else there is a danger that one treats the other as an object to be used.

The Recovery of the 'I' Before Sin

Wojtyla is trying to recover an experience of the 'I' gift, an experience which we had prior to sin; yet we're in sin. We lost our primordial humanity through sin, and he's trying to recover it. God was revealed to be a triple 'I' -- Yahweh, a revelation of subjectivity (Yahweh means "I am who am with you.") John Paul II takes Christ's invitation to cross the threshold of sin to the pristine, primordial experience of what it means to be man, from the beginning, before he said 'no.' He does this by using the blend of a phenomenology of experience as a metaphysics of being and the first two chapters of Genesis. The goal is to disclose the underlying anthropology (meaning of man) and thereby disclose the non-reductive anthropology of the human 'I' and its dynamic as self-gift. Wojtyla discloses all of this through the series of Wednesday addresses (The Original Unity of Man and Woman) that follow.

The Discovery of the 'I'

Wojtyla explores the meaning of the experience of solitude in the first man: God had man name the animals, and in so doing, man experienced solitude and being alone. God put him to sleep and recreated man as male and female, and he then brought them together. The man knew the woman was different from the animals (man is not an animal...)

Meaning of Man's Original Solitude (10 October 1979)

God gives three commands to the primordial man: 1) subdue the earth (i.e., work) 2) procreate and 3) moral command -- don't eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God brings the animals (Genesis 2) to man to see what man is going to call them -- naming, not abstract knowing. When man names the animals, he suddenly has an experience of being alone. Wojtyla says that man now has the experience of being an 'I' -- he has exercised himself, since he is deciding for himself the names of the animals. In the act of naming, he differentiates himself. Naming is a way of subduing -- by naming them, he owns the animals. In so doing, he actualizes his 'I' and exercises his subjectivity. This is self-determination.

Helen Keller: Corroborating Experience from Walker Percy

At the well-house, Helen became an 'I' through the experience of revelation of the mystery of language -- in realizing the word/symbol for water. There has never been a philosophy of the 'I' as being prior to this discovery of the experience of self. The Pope wanted to show this through this text. All of this is in line with the Greek tradition: with no external stimuli, one cannot know God -- all knowledge starts with the senses. There is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses. Yet this goes further.

Priesthood

The subduing of the animals --as well as the tilling of the earth -- is a priestly act. Priesthood means "mediation." Christ is the supreme priest because he is perfect God and man. He exercises his priesthood as God and man by subduing himself and relating to the Father, making a gift to the Father through the human will of Christ. Also, man is the priest of the universe. Our mission is to subdue ourselves and to turn it all into gift to God and to one another -- and that act is the priestly act.

What is involved in this topic is the transformation of the world, a new civilization, the third millennium, loving being laymen, becoming another Christ.... The subduing of self, experience of solitude, the gift of oneself to another is the basic anthropology, the basic meaning of man and woman... and it involves everything.

The Body as 'I' is not 'Thing'

It is not good for man to be alone. As soon as God sees that man has named the animals, and man has started to feel bad because he is alone, God said "it is not good to be alone." There is something wrong with the state of being of man alone.

"In this way, the second narrative could also be a preparation for understanding the Trinitarian concept of the "image of God," even if the latter appears only in the first narrative. Obviously, that is not without significance for the theology of the body. Perhaps it even constitutes the deepest theological aspect of all that can be said about man." Aristotle and Plato are incomplete, working with an experience which is post-lapsarian, post sinful, not with the full experience of what it means to be man. No one can cross that threshold unless he crosses it through Genesis.

Notice that the talk is not body / soul -- the body is the whole person. "In this way, we find ourselves almost at the heart of the anthropological reality that has the name "body." Man says to woman: Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. The man uttered these words as if it were only at the sight of the woman's body he sees an 'I' -- whereas with the animals he did not see an 'I.' The body reveals man. Your body is your 'I.' Your body is a language of 'gift.' "Right from the beginning, the theology of the body is bound up with the creation of man in the image of God (triple gift). It becomes, in a way, also the theology of sex, or rather the theology of masculinity and femininity, which has its starting point here in Genesis."

"Consciousness of solitude might have been shattered precisely because of his body itself. The man, 'adam, might have reached the conclusion, on the basis of the experience of his own body, that he was substantially similar to the living beings (animalia). On the contrary, as we read, he did not arrive at this conclusion; he reached the conviction that he was "alone." He has a consciousness of himself by naming the animals, a consciousness of being an 'I.' He experiences his body by naming. Then he looks at the animals and says "I'm alone." The woman is given to him, and he looks at the woman and says "I am not alone. Hi!" He sees in her body the experience he has of his own. She is an 'I' as I am an 'I.' She is a subject, rather than an object like the other animals. Catholicism is a religion of incarnation: Jesus Christ is a body, and always will be a body. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father.

"The body, then, is not an object, nor a "thing" understood in the modern sense of a machine or reducible to machinery." From Monday's paper, an article on the Genome project says that worms have 19,000 genes and we have 29,000. Yet, we are infinitely more complex than a worm. If the Pope is correct, if Genesis is correct, that means that the understanding the body is not a "thing" The human body is the person. The key to complexity is not more genes but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code. Organisms must be explained as organisms and not summations of genes -- a huge refusal to be deterministic. It means that in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They can't explain the totality of a person. The Pope's approach is that reality is experienced in its profundity not only through sensation which has given us a conceptualism of grasping reality, but there is another level of experience which is the 'I.' Being is encountered most profoundly on the level of the 'I,' the totality.

Since the experience of solitude is bad for a being made in the image and likeness of a Three, the gift of the 'I' is its achievement as Image.

We are, with this notion, at the very grounding of reality. Here is where the metaphysics of reality is; to be evil is to be alone. This reflects the natural law from an Aristotelian understanding of nature... natural law is the law of the person. Where do we get the notion of good and evil from? From an experience of ourselves from being. But we are now going back before sin. Evil is rectified by the completion of creation.

By the Communion of Persons Man Becomes the Image of God 14 November 1979

The climax of our discussion is here: "If we wish to draw also from the narrative of the Yahwist text the concept of the "image of God," we can then deduce that man became the "image and likeness" of God not only through his own humanity (by being an individual, by being alone, by having intellect and will), but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning. The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion (man and woman). Right "from the beginning," he is not only an image in which the solitude of a Person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of Persons."

This means that the human person is never fully a person alone. God is gift so man is gift. God reveals who he is, the very nature of God, and we are discovering that man is made in the image of God, so if God is gift, we have to be gift. To be alone, to turn back on yourself, to think about yourself, to worry about yourself, not to think about others -- is death. To reflect the prototype, man must be in union with another. Jesus Christ recreates us into this relation by subduing the will of the man Jesus which carries all of the sin of all time, and he obeys the Father -- in other words man becomes relational in the crucifixion. And that is how He recreates the human person -- that's what redemption is and what the new millennium has to be about: the self-giving. Self-giving is the recreation of man as imaging the trinity.

This anthropology was not explained in Humanae Vitae, yet this is the reason why there can't be contraception. Since the Body is the 'I' and the 'I' is relation, you can't have sex and withhold egg and sperm, because they are you. Sex always has to be gift. With in vitro you are furthering life, but you don't have love, you don't have self-giving. It has to be self-giving, and it has to be physical, because you are the body. [The ramifications of this anthropology are immense. In politics, you can't have socialism without subsidiarity. See Gaudium et Spes 24.]

The Methodology of Wojtyla Enabling This Disclosure of the 'I' as Gift: The Experience of Self-Determination

The self was always considered thinking, yet Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. He has always "been here" on this -- as a Pole, as a member of the Rhapsodic Theatre, as a Christian, the understanding of faith through his thesis of St. John of the Cross -- his 'I' is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing; it is discovered as the cause (freedom) of an experience of self-determination, as a free act. Our text is taken from the essay "Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being" from Person and Community.

What does he mean by irreducible? In philosophy, to reduce is to abstract and to put in a category. In other words, you talk about the nitrogen atom or the genome or the gene -- that's a reduction: a concept, a universal. Science reduces. Human thinking reduces. We're always creating a symbol of reality. To know is to "be identified with". In sex, the man "knows" the woman. In Genesis, the word for the act of sex is "to know." And knowing is a direct experience of -- to know is to "be one with." To know the pen, I have to create a symbol, to form a concept of the pen, an abstraction. The irreducible is that which can be expresses without need of concepts... the irreducible is the 'I.'

The Pope is trying to get at the root of knowing -- to "become one with." I can experience through sensation, I know through sensation, but he puts forth another way, which has not been explored in 3000 years of philosophic thought. Experts in the field of phenomenology claim that Karol Wojtyla has done what no other philosopher has done. He has transcended Plato and Aristotle, by the recovery of the being of the self, the 'I,' not by a concept but by a new understanding of experience:

"But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being -- in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being -- the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity." So lived experience is going to reveal to me my 'I.'

The 'I' is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the 'I' as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes consciousness from thought which abstracts and reduces relation to categories. In its non-abstractive function, consciousness captures the subject in two moments, grasping the subject which has been objectified by reflective thought, and then actualized by itself. Wojtyla distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things, and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine and in the act of moving itself. This capturing of both states (of pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself) constitutes the experience of the 'I' as 'I.' John Paul II uses this phenomenology, connected to a metaphysics of potency and act which he takes from Aristotle and St. Thomas, to fashion this experience of the 'I' as being, which becomes gift. Through this, you have the whole of sexual morality, the whole understanding of faith, etc.

The Acting Person

In The Acting Person, Wojtyla says: "The consequence of the reflexive turn of consciousness is that this object, just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject -- while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation 'reflexiveness' is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment because apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and still a different thing to experience one's self as the subject of one's own acts and experiences..." What's the difference between being a subject, reflecting on a subject as an object, and experiencing the subject as the efficient cause of its own action?

Notice how important the word experience is for him. See page 34 of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, where Wojtyla says that there is an experience of the external world, and there is another level of experience, an experience of God. Ratzinger, in his review of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, said that Karol Wojtyla insists that we have an experience of God. How do you experience God if God is other than the world -- the world didn't have to exist? Wojtyla's point is that in the experience of the 'I,' which is the imaging of the three persons, I am experiencing God by experiencing myself. He says that this is the answer to the atheism of the 20th century. The point is not to prove that God exists by the five ways of St. Thomas, or by thought or induction or deduction. They way to overcome the atheism of today is to experience self-gift.

He writes: "...it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and still a different thing to experience one's self as the subject of one's own acts and experiences." This experience is to enter into the prayer of Christ, it is the experience of giving oneself, it is non-contraceptive sex, it is to live for others, to have a preferential option for the poor, this is to be celebate as a priest or layman -- another way of making the gift of self. "This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience." The grasping of the subject of potency and act in self-determination constitutes the experience.

Novo Millennio Inuente

On October 22, 1978 in Wojytla's first address as Pope, Urbi et Orbi, to the world and the city of Rome, he began with the words "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." By this he meant that he is Peter. He explains this in the new document Novo Millennio Inuente, the blueprint of the new millennium [-- on www.zenit.org under Documents]. How had Peter come to this faith? And what is asked of us if we wish to follow in his footsteps with ever greater conviction? Matthew gives us an enlightening insight: "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven." Wojtyla says that "flesh and blood" is a reference to man and the common way of understanding things (by abstraction.) Luke 9:18 gives us an indication when Jesus was praying alone -- Jesus' prayer to the Father is self-gift. Who do men (who aren't praying) say who I am? The answer, using flesh and blood/abstraction/reason was wrong: in the case of Jesus, this common way of understanding was not enough. A grace of revelation is needed which comes from the Father. Jesus was praying alone -- Jesus' prayer to the Father is self-gift. Jesus says "You (who are praying), who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter says "You are Christ, Son of the Living God." Only the Father knows the Son and only the Son knows the Father. How could Simon know who Christ was unless he had the experience of being Christ while praying?

This is the faith in it's most profound experience, before sin, and we can do that because Jesus Christ is God, pre-lapsarian. He who is man and God can tell us what it was like from the beginning. What it means to be man is to be Gift, so come pray with me to the Father, Jesus says. And in that prayer, experience what it means to be God.

Gaudium et Spes 24 and the "Definition" of the Human Person

Karol Wojtyla was one of the critical architects of Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World. Number 24 of that document is a "definition" of the human person. "The human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself (i.e., is self-determining), the person cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself."

Dominum et Vivificantem #59 and the Recovery of the 'I'

"As the year 2000 since the birth of Christ draws near, it is a question of ensuring that an ever greater number of people "may fully find themselves through a sincere gift of self,'... Through the action of the Spirit-Paraclete, may there be accomplished in our world a process of true growth in humanity, in both individual and community life. In this regard, Jesus himself when he prayed to the Father that "all may be one as we are one' implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine persons and the union of the children of God in truth and charity."

"For if man is the way of the Church, this way passes through the whole mystery of Christ, as man's divine model. Along this way the Holy Spirit, strengthening in each of us "the inner man," enables man ever more "fully to find himself through a sincere gift of self." These words of the Pastoral Constitution of the Council can be said to sum up the whole of Christian anthropology." And the whole of Christian anthropology is the foundation of ethics, politics, sex, art, everything... He has taken Gaudium et Spes 24 and lifted it out as the blueprint for the 21st century.

Who am I, where am I going, what's important? All, in the end, crumbles, and the only thing that is going to last is gift of self: Father, Child and Love.

Closing Thoughts

Christ is the Way for us now. We are not locked into a post-sinful state; we can be liberated from sin. Find the face of Christ, deal with Christ, love Christ, stay with Christ, go to Communion, go to Confession, start again, pray, change work into prayer, change fun into prayer... The bottom line is we all have to be saints -- if we are not saints, we are not human. If we have Christ, we have everything.