Love and responsibility
Love
Man is not only an individual: his inner life expresses spirituality and comes to listening to God.
Already Kant by pure reason considered the human person as an end and not a means, but Wojtyła comes to exclude all exceptions.
In the De Trinitate of St. Augustine, relations between human beings can be a reflection of the Trinitarian relations between the divine Persons, so loneliness makes people cry out against themselves; nihilism and individualism are opposed to the acts of participation and solidarity with which one realizes one’s own person who, in the perfection of living with others and for others, expresses the transcendence of self towards the other and the becoming greater than himself.
In Love and responsibility the concept of person starts from the proposition of a purpose towards good, with choice and use of means above instinct, making morality a recognizable fact.
Love is the most complete realization of man’s possibilities.
It is the maximum demonstration of the intrinsic potential of the person.
One finds in love the greatest fullness of one’s own being [...][1].
Whishing good for others implies the gift of love with a creative impulse that makes loved people happy and it is sublimated by wishing for them the infinite good in God, objective fullness of the good that can fill man.
For Plato, eros never achieve stability and fixity, but it always goes on and grows; even for Wojtyła love is not acquired once and for all, but it affirms and grows with the “donative” commitment and the help of Grace.
The person asserts himself in dignity with an act of morally due love and has a responsibility to witness such dignity both in the other and in himself in the communion of mutual gift; this law of ecstasy makes to come out of oneself to find in others an increase in being, until it shows the divine aspect of love in abandoning to the will of the loved one.
[1] K. Wojtyła, Amore e responsabilità, in Id., Metafisica della persona, Bompiani, Città del Vaticano 20144, 539.
Man is not only an individual: his inner life expresses spirituality and comes to listening to God.
Already Kant by pure reason considered the human person as an end and not a means, but Wojtyła comes to exclude all exceptions.
In the De Trinitate of St. Augustine, relations between human beings can be a reflection of the Trinitarian relations between the divine Persons, so loneliness makes people cry out against themselves; nihilism and individualism are opposed to the acts of participation and solidarity with which one realizes one’s own person who, in the perfection of living with others and for others, expresses the transcendence of self towards the other and the becoming greater than himself.
In Love and responsibility the concept of person starts from the proposition of a purpose towards good, with choice and use of means above instinct, making morality a recognizable fact.
Love is the most complete realization of man’s possibilities.
It is the maximum demonstration of the intrinsic potential of the person.
One finds in love the greatest fullness of one’s own being [...][1].
Whishing good for others implies the gift of love with a creative impulse that makes loved people happy and it is sublimated by wishing for them the infinite good in God, objective fullness of the good that can fill man.
For Plato, eros never achieve stability and fixity, but it always goes on and grows; even for Wojtyła love is not acquired once and for all, but it affirms and grows with the “donative” commitment and the help of Grace.
The person asserts himself in dignity with an act of morally due love and has a responsibility to witness such dignity both in the other and in himself in the communion of mutual gift; this law of ecstasy makes to come out of oneself to find in others an increase in being, until it shows the divine aspect of love in abandoning to the will of the loved one.
[1] K. Wojtyła, Amore e responsabilità, in Id., Metafisica della persona, Bompiani, Città del Vaticano 20144, 539.