Author’s Preface

AUTHOR'S PREFACE AOREWORD is usually an afterword, written when the work is done, an occasion to do things the work itself couldn't do-such as thank those who helped it happen-and things it perhaps should have done, but £ailed to do. Both of these needs become clear after the £act, though it often helps the reader, as he eases his way into the book proper, to find the kinds of statements one remembers to put into forewords. I will divide these remarks into two sections, the first to preview this study, the second to introduce Rahner's approach to Thomas. 1. Approaching This Study. In 1969 I presented my dissertation at Louvain entitled Personization: Person as Becoming in Karl Rahner's Philosophical Anthropology. In that study I limited myself to Rahner's four purely philosophical works: GW, HW, "Introduction au concept de philosophie existentiale chez Heidegger," and "A Verdade em S. Tomas de Aquino." I described it as the first of two studies, the second of which, inappropriate for a purely philosophical dissertation, would continue the investigation into Rahner's theological works, still continuing. Since Rahner's relevant theological writings have in general been .short, being mostly articles, in journals and lexicons, and contributions to the series Quaestiones Disputatae, and since I am not a professional theologian, the study of the concept of person as found in his theowgical anthropology has taken the form of an exposition of the development , in selected essays in STh, of that concept as already found and metaphysically grounded in his philosophical anthropology . The word development is not idly chosen. Rahner's Personbeg1iff underwent changes between 1937, when he was at work on GW, and (at least) 1965, the date of STh VI.* *Editor's Note---This present work includes only two parts, completely r.eworked , from an earlier Louvain dissertation. The third, fourth, and fifth sec7 8 ANDREW TALLON To search for a metaphysics of person as becoming is obviously not to view person as a static, fixed, or ready-made essence, but rather as dynamic, open, and self-enacting. Person is thus understood as personization-as person-becoming (Personwerdung )-i. e., as a potentiality to be en-acted. Ethics, however, is the chief locus of personal becoming, and thus we must remain open to the question of free ethical activity, since it is in such activity that man is most self-appropriative and self-creative, most metaphysically himself because most metaphysically becoming. Beyond this, our search must remain open without reservation, i.e., must not exclude the realm of the transcendent, of the "meta-physical" in the most traditional and classical sense of this term, i.e., God. In the context of a philosophical anthropology becoming a theological anthropology, openness to the transcendent or metaphysical means facing the fact that for man to identify himself, i.e., to talk about himself as he is, he must talk about God. Rahner's anthropology is open to a religious event that happens in history , an epiphany the human incarnate spirit can encounter, the face of the other who can make a difference to his personal becoRl.ing. To study Rahner's theological writings is to become aware of a gradual evolution in his thinking on personal becoming. What was hardly mentioned in GW and barely sketched in HW was nevertheless grounded there implicitly; the principles were worked out, but it was left to later applications to bring out the implications, to make them explicit, and also to show some real development. Because of this developmental nature of Rahner's understanding of person, an historical approach to his writings is indicated. By taking Rahner's relevant works in their approximately original order of publication, which initially does not necessarily correspond to the order of their republication as STh or QD, we can follow that evolution. My tions of this study pick up where the dissertation left off and trace the development of the ideas of the first two sections through Rahner's STh and other theological works. For reasons of space, some sections have been shortened, others dropped completely. AUTHOR'S PREFACE 9 method will be to interpret each article as strongly as...