Becoming II, Freedom II, Love II: The Later Essays

v BECOMING II, FREEDOM II, LOVE II: THE LATER ESSAYS Despite there being a STh XII, the last significant statement on our topic, except for one essay in STh X, treated in the concluding summary, occurs in STh VI. Since it has been my method to interpret each essay for its maximum light, noting later essays only for their advances and developments, it becomes possible to say that after the second essay on love, in STh VI, no major change occurs in the basic doctrine begun forty years ago with SW. The three headings of this final section, becoming, freedom, and love, refer to four chief sources. Becoming signifies the essay on hominization, in the series Quaestiones Disputatae, and the essay on ·the unity of spirit and matter, in STh VI; other minor essays provide supplementary material and derive from STh V1, STh VI again, STh VIII, IX, and X. The chief source for the discussion of freedom and love is STh VI, with supplementary material from STh X. In addition, the LThK and SM, as well as Rahner and Vorgrimler's KThW, provide brief treatments of matters we have treated more at length. This itinerary reveals my judgment that with STh VI we have, substantially, Rahner's mature positions on the essential facts of his concept of person. STh XI, on the history of the practice of confession, is not useful here. STh VII, IX and X, therefore, contribute refinements and applications rather than new positions . STh VII consists of short articles on the spiritual life. There is another way of organizing this same material, recalling the idea of first and second otherness. Thus under first otherness would fall becoming as treated under hominization, 1 Recall that the English translation began to split the German into two, beginning with STh VII. STh VII thus became Thi VII and VIII; STh VIII became Thi IX and X; etc. 149 150 ANDREW TALLON the essay on spirit and matter,2 and the essay on evolution.8 The rest of the treatment of becoming, e.g., the essay on " expe11iment man " 4 and that on the " new man," 5 plus those (major) essays on freedom and love, would then come under second otherness. Thus, under first otherness we examine the kind of becoming that is more relevant to man as material, as incarnate, than to man as spirit. Man as spirit, on the other hand, is more the concern in the concept of second otherness. Despite possible confusion, we might say that under hominization Rahner is more interested in man's "body," while in the latter (second otherness), he is more interested in man's spirit (even though hominization is the question of the origin of man's soul in the evolutionary context). I am tempted to call the former hominization and the latter personization (except that the person is the whole) because second otherness is primarily the result of freedom. 1. Beooming II. The question of hominization, though broader than that of evolution, is largely the problem of how man, through evolution, came to have the " starting essence " with which he now finds himself. There is, predictably, a certain review of and overlap with SW; but this essay, coming some thirty years later, offers new points worth integrating into that consistent position. In Hominisation 6 we face the difficulty that the problem called hominization, as it turns out in Rahner's treatment, is to explain how spirit can come from matter, the difficulty • STh VI 185-!U4; Th! VI 153-177. • STh V 183-~21; Th! V 157-192. ' STh VIII 260-~85; Th! IX ~05-~24. 5 STh V 159-179; Th! V 125-153. • llominisation is the transliterated German title as well as the English (i.e., British-English) way of spelling what in American-English would take a "z," thus hominization. There are three articles concerned with Hominisation and the essay on the unity of spirit and matter. J. Donceel, "Teilhard de Chardin and the Body-Soul Relation," Thought, 40 (1965), 371-389; J. Donceel, "Causality and Evolution: A Survey of Some Neo-scholastic Theories," The New Scholasticism , 39 (1965), 295-315; H. Falk, " Can Spirit Come from...