Applications and Development: The Middle Period

IV APPLICATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT: THE MIDDLE PERIOD 1. Guilt: The Emerging Interpersonal. The present essay is for our purposes a study of person as social becoming (personal becoming as interpersonal becoming). Until we study Rahner's essays on love, this is his most important contribution to an interpersonal theory of free, ethical self-enactment. It is among his more philosophically challenging essays (along with the Quaestio Disputata on hominization and the similar study of the unity of spirit and matter) .1 It is important, and easy by now, I hope, to recognize that to know that personal becoming is Rahner's central doctrine is to unify and make understandable his multitudinous essays. That this is basically a philosophical position,2 its roots going 1 STh VI 185-215; Th! VI 153-177. 2 The following is a good summary of that position, emphasizing Rahner's commitment to a doctrine of person. " Man is that strange being who attains selfconsciousness only by being conscious of something other than himself,. who deals with himself by occupying himself with something else (even if this be merely the perception or thought of himself), who catches sight of himself only by perceiving an object. Man always requires some material distinct from himself which will act as the Archimedean point, so to speak, from which alone he can attain himself. He must be in-the-world in order to be capable of being personal; he must diffuse himself in order to concentrate himself on himself; he must· ' go out' (as the German mystics used to say) in order to be able to enter into himself and into the very core of his person. Thus we may quite rightly say that in the case of man, who is a creature and essentially in-the-world and who is at home with himself only by being-with-others, the act of freedom springing from the core of his person, where man is ultimately concerned with himself and his relationship to God (both indissolubly bound up with one another), is necessarily achieved in a material which, although different from the real spiritual core of the person, is nevertheless the prerequired object on which the act of freedom is exercised. Man's relationship to himself, and his action on himself and before God, is inevitably mediate, i.e., by means of objects " (STh U ~84; Th! II ~Qg. 270). In other words, personization is self-personization, hut it is not for that reason possible in isolation: it is self-personization through and in and with the 119 120 ANDREW TALLON back to SW, is also evident; it is also, of course, theological.3 There is one long text containing Rahner's profound formulations of the interpersonal. There is no way round it; nothing will do but to work it out. Therefore I will first quote it, then analyze it. (Because of its length I'm dropping the text, the longest quoted in this study, into a note,4 to save space.) world, the world of things (objects) and especially the world of other persons. (Though this "especially" may not be obvious in the text, it will be soon.) Raimer goes on to present "... an ontological conception of man's nature . . ." (STh II 286; Th! II 272) . •"Indeed, the culminating point of the process of becoming a person [Peraonwerdung : personal becoming, personization], which takes place through the grace of a most direct relationship to God, signifies the highest form of communion of persons who have become in this way most personal in the one eternal kingdom of God-the highest form of the eternal communion of all saints. ' In· dividual and community ' . . . are two sides of the one reality of achieved and redeemed persons which can only increase or decrease together and to the same degree" (STh II 129; Th! II 122). • " Man is a being constructed, as it were, from the interior towards the outside. H~ has, on the one hand, a spiritual-personal nucleus giving him an 'intentional' transcendental relation to 'Being as such and in its totality,' and hence to God, and rendering him capable of hearing the word of God as such. Man's transcendent orientation and...