Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Liebe; F. d. Geschens = Liebe (trinitarisch, interpersonal); Trinität, Zirkuminzession; Liebe als Geschenk: 1) innergöttlich, 2) Schöpfung, 3) Mann u. Frau

Kurzinhalt: This interpenetration of the giving and receiving of human love is, as already noted, an image of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity, by which the Persons exist not only in distinction from one another but also in some fashion within ...

Textausschnitt: FREEDOM AND LOVE

122a In the final analysis, the freedom of the gift, when exercised, is simply love itself, the total giving of oneself to another person. The freedom of choice and the freedom which comes from self-mastery is for the sake of the highest form of freedom—love. Thus does Christ reveal "by his whole life, and not only by his words, that freedom is acquired in love, that is, in the gift of self" (VS 87). Freedom of choice and freedom of self-mastery are God's gifts to us so that we might make a gift of ourselves to another and, in so doing, experience the reality of love. Exercising the freedom of the gift is the one thing necessary that we might love and be loved in return. John Paul II states, "The will loves only when a human being consciously commits his or her freedom in respect of another human being seen as a person, a person whose value is fully recognized and affirmed."1

122b When the man and the woman give themselves to one another, each not only commits himself or herself to the other, each also accepts or "welcomes" the other, and in so doing affirms the dignity and value of the other. This giving and accepting, as the Pope points out, interpenetrate in such a way that "the giving itself becomes accepting, and the acceptance is transformed into giving."2 This interpenetration of the giving and receiving of human love is, as already noted, an image of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity, by which the Persons exist not only in distinction from one another but also in some fashion within one another. (Fs)

123a God is love and man, made in the image of God, is called to love as God loves. Man cannot become in freedom what he already is in truth unless he exercises the freedom of the gift in giving himself to another and in accepting or welcoming the other into himself. For this man has been created and, in the final analysis, without this he can be neither fully free nor fully human. This is true because "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (RH 10). (Fs)

123b Exercising the freedom of the gift in love does entail for man limitations on his freedom of choice. Now he exists not for himself and his own needs and desires, but for the other to whom he has given himself and whose needs and desires he has accepted in some fashion as his own. "Love commits freedom"3 and binds it to the good of the other. But this sacrifice of freedom of choice for the sake of the choice is not something alien to man created to love as God loves. For, as the Pope notes, "man longs for love more than for freedom—freedom is the means and love the end."4

Kommentar (01/12/11): zwei analoge Aussagen über den trinitarischen Gott: a) Thomas, der als analoge Brücke die höchsten Tätigkeiten im Menschen nimmt: Vernunft, Wille/Liebe; b) JPII, der im Sinn von Hingabe darüber spricht. Wie ließen sich beide Aussagen einander genau zuordnen?

123c Man longs for this kind of love precisely because he has been created in the image of God and is therefore capable of and called to realize it, not only here on earth within the order of human persons, but also in heaven within the Trinitarian communion of love. There, man's "full participation in the interior life of God" will be for man not only a participation in that love which defines the inner life of the Trinity, but also "the discovery, in God, of the whole 'world' of relations, constitutive of His perennial order (cosmos)" as well as "man's discovery of himself, not only in the depth of his own person, but also in that union which is proper to the world of persons in their psychosomatic constitution".5

123d The gift of freedom is for the sake of the freedom of the gift, which itself is for the sake of exercising the freedom of the gift in the total giving of oneself to another and, in the final analysis, of course, to God himself Love is giftedness, first and foremost within the Trinity, within which each of the three Persons gives himself unreservedly to the other two; second, with respect to the universe itself, which is God's gift to man; and finally, with respect to the creation of man as male and female in the image of God, in which each is created as gift for the other. We must recover a sense of the givenness of things as the giftedness of things—and of our own freedom as a gift by which we are invited and enabled to participate in the giftedness of the whole of reality. Speaking of the New Covenant given in Christ, John Paul II says,
That new and definitive covenant will restore for ever to the world and to mankind the sense of receiving as gift everything there is: every created being, every material good, all the treasures of heart and mind; and first and foremost the sense of receiving as gift one's humanity, one's dignity as a human person— and something incomparably superior—one's dignity as an adopted child of God himself (cf I John 3:2).6