Foreword

FOREWORD By KARL RAHNER My Dear Colleague, You have written a book-length study: Personal Becoming: The Concept of Person in Karl Rahner's Transcendental Anthropology . This is naturally a great honor for me and I thank you sincerely and warmly for it. You have asked me to write a brief Foreword to your study. This Foreword can certainly not be the occasion of summarizing it in a kind of review and of judging it from my own standpoint. To do so would be to exceed the possibilities and the limits of such a Foreword, which can only be the sign of my thanks for the attention you have paid my work, a work theological and to a certain extent also philosophical. You have, however, in our correspondence, proposed three questions to me and suggested that in this Foreword I say something briefly in response to these three questions. Such answers can also perhaps be of some small service to the readers of your study and facilitate for them, in some small way, their understanding of your work. I will therefore try to answer your questions insofar as I can do so briefly. I. You ask me whether it is also my own view that personal becoming [das personale Werden], becoming a person [Personwerden ], is the central idea of my philosophico-theological anthropology . Before I try to answer this question, may I point out to the readers of this Foreword that you ask about the central idea of my anthropology? As a theologian, of course, I ask also about God, Christ, and the Church, thus about themes in which becoming a person can naturally not be simply the key concept, the central idea, even though I myself have always striven to show that in Christianity theology and anthropology mutually interpenetrate and condition one another more than is evident in the Church and in theology as it wa.s 1 KARL RAHNER usually taught. Your question thus refers-and your readers must keep this clearly in mind right from the start-to my anthropology. But once this is clear, and I may then come to my reply to your question, I become unsure. I could give a straightforward answer " Yes " to the question, on the condition that it is presupposed that one always keeps clear that the concept of becoming a person, on the one hand, does not exclude but rather includes the concept of an original constituting of the person through the creative act of God, by which act the person already is, and, on the other hand, that the fact that person is constituted originally means right from the start precisely a becoming in which this person must first become in the history of his freedom, until he is definitively perfected in freedom in the presence of God. But if I thus answer your first question with a " Yes," then I must come back and ask myself whether such a concept of becoming a person is not selfevident for a Christian theologian (and philosopher), and whether it ought not be a central idea for everyonei even if perhaps expressed .in other words. If that were the case then it could hardly be so " original " a concept as to be made the central idea precisely of my anthropology. But perhaps your question does not intend a special particularity and originality of my anthropology (which I am not claiming) but rather inquires only about a principle of organization according to which the membra disi,ecta of an anthropology can be gathered, an anthropology which I have never written as a structured whole. If, under these conditions, one makes becoming a person the key concept, the central idea of my anthropology (which is possible, as I have said), then of course everything comes down to the exact content one gives this concept, thereby doing justice to my anthropology or, better yet, to the things themselves. In this context it is decisive, as you emphasize in your letter, that one notice that the transcendence of man as finite spirit toward God, the absolute being in person, toward mystery in the fullest sense, is necessarily mediated through the (finite) other (das (en