Politics of the Person As the Politics of Being by Walsh David;

Author:Walsh, David; [Walsh, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 Philosophy / General
ISBN: 978-0-268-09675-5
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2015-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Personhood Revealed Only in God

The mystery of the person deepens. What we thought was familiar, as familiar as the persons we know, turns out to be more profound than we imagined. We do not know what it means to be a person until we have encountered that which is personal through and through. The revelatory encounter with a personal God had made the discovery of a personal source irreversible. It was no longer possible to think of the ground as other than personal. The difficulty was that the language of persons was applied without sufficient awareness of its externalist character. A pattern of assuming persons could be known other than personally began to deform the discourse. The Nicean and Chalcedonian formulations of dogma did little to resist a hardening of terminology that they in principle endorsed.31 It was only in the prayer life of the Church that a very different understanding prevailed. There the interpersonal emphasis initiated by St. Paul endured. It is not possible to pray as if to a third party. Prayer could only occur if we entered into the mind of God and that in turn was not possible unless the Spirit of God prayed within us. It was in prayer that persons discovered the enlargement of the heart by which in being lifted beyond themselves they found themselves.

Momentous as that discovery was in practice it has yet to find appropriate linguistic recognition. A notable beginning was, however, made by Meister Eckhart who not only succeeded in voicing his speculative mysticism but, in preaching to nuns who knew no Latin, also endowed the German vernacular with an astonishing philosophical reach. Perhaps it was no accident that Eckhart furnished one of the strands that fed into the single greatest flowering of personalist philosophy in the modern era. German Idealism marks the point at which the mystic’s self-understanding within God becomes the project of a philosophy of the person articulated in the language of the person. They saw that what Eckhart had glimpsed at the boundary of experience, the self-constitution of the soul through God, was neither rare nor inaccessible. It was rather the very core of what it means to be a person. That is the realization that personhood is not ours but is derivative from the person that God is.32 We participate in a reality we do not possess so that if we want to understand ourselves we must be prepared to reach beyond ourselves to the One who is the ground of possibility. Our inwardness is a possibility because God is inwardness. Yet the penetration with which the Idealists saw what had not been seen so clearly before did not save them from the misunderstandings that had similarly befallen Eckhart’s mystical glimpses. Man had either identified himself with God, or failed to recognize the distinction. Almost inevitably the charge of self-divinization was hurled against them. The irony, that this is precisely the opposite of the aspiration to think of human persons in relation to divine persons, was not permitted to impede the accusation.

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