Person in the Earliest Essays in Theological Anthropology

PART TWO: THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY III Person in the Earliest Essays in Theological Anthropology. I. Concupiscence: Finitude as Inertia. The first important theological study we consider is the article on concupiscence, the very title of which, " The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia " (1941, the same year HW was published), makes worth remarking that often what may first seem an unlikely source for a metaphysics of person actually turns out to be essential. In it Rahner advances from a dialectic of spirit and matter to one of person and nature. He is actually making clear the effects of man's being spirit in the world, i.e., the meaning of finitude: man is an incarnate spirit who is an incarnate spirit. He insists on the unity of man, and on the duality of the principles constituting that unity.1 Because Rahner is here bringing his metaphysics of the human person to a theological question, his use of the term concupiscentia identifies that question, and a certain context, for theologians. But let's not be misled by this technical term. Man in his very metaphysical essence is the subject of this essay, i.e., man in his free, ethical activity, by which he becomes, determines, and enacts himself. It was to be expected that Rahner would have turned his attention to this question soon after SW and HW, since it follows as a direct application of his anthropology worked out there. I have spoken of two "gaps," the second resulting from the first. Man's distance from the ultimate term of his total becoming as a person is the first gap. Human materiality is spirit's way of trying to close that gap. But materiality, while man's sole way of being and becoming, introduces a duality within his very essence, thus effecting a second gap, between 1 S'J'h II 254; Thl 11 'Ml 96 ANDREW TALLON spirit and matter: concupiscentia names experience of the second gap. Pure spirit, conceived as a limit-idea, would exist without this second gap (though still with the first). Now it would be unnecessary repetition to state the main notions of an essay available in English for so long-and presented substantially (almost ten years before translation) by John Kenny; 2 furthermore, presupposing the philosophical part of the present study, I can be brief and direct. Let us, therefore , move immediately to the point: ... man's free decision is an act by means of which he disposes of himself as a whole. For originally and ultimately moral freedom is not so much a decision with regard to an objectively presented value-object as a decision with regard to the freely operative subject himself.... the free decision tends of itself to dispose of man as a whole. For the spiritually knowing and willing subject necessarily brings to completion [vollzieht: enacts] in every objective act of knowledge and decision a return upon himself as well (reditio completa subjecti in seipsum: St. Thomas, IV Cont. Gent., c. 11), and in this way is present to himself and himself acts as someone so present to himself. In this way the free operation, as a genuine operation, and not just a passive experience, arises from the inmost core of the subject and exercises a determining influence upon this subject. For otherwise the operative subject, insofar as he is identical with this personal center, would merely undergo the free decision passively and not actively posit it. But that is in contradiction to the inmost essence of the free operation, inasmuch as the operative subject is really responsible for it. Now the operative subject himself can only be and remain responsible for the free decision if he posits this decision in such a way that the decision becomes a qualification of the operative subject himself. Thus the free decision is essentially a disposal of himself made by man, and one which proceeds from the inmost center of his being. Now if man's free decision is the shaping (or in the terms of contemporary existential philosophy, the 'self-comprehension') of his own being proceeding from its inmost core-from that core, i. e., from which man's whole metaphysical essence arises and derives...