THE HUMAN PERSON

"Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can ‘give himself to the other’."
- Pope John Paul II


I. INTRODUCTION


In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Vittorio Messori asks the Holy Father what exactly he meant by his oft repeated emphasis on "human dignity". In his answer, John Paul II recalled his "involvement with young people who asked me questions." And what did they ask this remarkable Polish priest? He was surprised that they did not ask him "about the existence of God." Rather they wanted to know "about how to live, how to face and resolve problems of love and marriage, not to mention problems related to work." As he recalled these conversations with young men and women in his homeland, just after the German occupation, Karol Wojtyla realized that their doubts and questions indicated to him "the way," the inspiration for the major themes of his own intellectual life. Out of these encounters his book Love and Responsibility was born and later, the more theoretical work of Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person. His living background is something that shines through in almost everything he writes, in his addresses, lectures, encyclicals, and letters.

This humble work is a fruit of a series of reflection on the dignity of human person. What is a human person? Who is he?


II. REFLECTION


As we all know in our studies, the notion of "person" had a long and complicated history going back through Augustine and Aquinas and to early controversies over Trinitarian theology in which the inner life of God was explained in terms of differing Persons in one God. We knew that the Incarnation was likewise explained in terms of person, that Christ was the Second Person of the Trinity made Man. We had learned the philosophical definition of person from the late Roman philosopher Boethius, that a person is an "individual substance of a rational nature." With these explanations precisely of the dignity of the human person, we could say that his dignity is something irreducible, unique, unrepeatable, the source of action and volition.

The world is composed of incarnate persons. Each has an inner life in which he fashions his own awareness of what he knows and what he is. He is also to relate himself to other persons, ultimately including the divine Persons, in all their human and spiritual dimensions. Person, with its Trinitarian origins, already implies otherness. We are not solitary beings. It is not without accident that the Holy Spirit is spoken of as "Gift." The Holy Spirit is likewise the point at which a God, Who is complete in Himself, can look outward, but with no inner necessity, to create freely what is not Himself, yet something that is intended to return to Himself.

The man of today often lacks the sense of the transcendental, of supernatural realities, of something that is beyond him. Man cannot live without something that goes further, that is beyond him. Man lives his life if he is aware of this; if he must always go beyond himself, transcend himself. This transcendence is deeply inscribed in the human constitution of the person.

This sense of what transcends the person also indicates the person's own dignity. An accurate understanding of the human person is the central point of every relationship that he will encounter, be it in family or society. Consequently, he has seen the need to explain the person, as someone who is capable of loving and for whom love constitutes the purpose of his existence.

But the reason why this purpose constitutes the core of human existence, the full revelation of man to himself, is because he is initially created in the image and likeness of God. Man is not God, but as the being he is, is called to live in God's very love. The early historical reflections about person did not usually attribute personality to man, only to God. What seems to be the fruit and core of the Christian belief is that the word person is the best one also to describe what man is. Once a man knows himself, knows that he has a transcendent destiny, what remains is for him to become what he is. Our understanding of the human person leads naturally to that same unique person's deciding in his freedom whether he will accept the gift of his own reality and its destiny.



III. CONCLUSION


Human beings not only determine their own activities but also determine themselves in terms of a most essential quality. Through self-determination, the human being becomes increasingly more of a "someone" in the ethical sense, although in the ontological sense the human being is a "someone" from the very beginning. Therefore, we need to preserve and protect the dignity and the rights of every person beginning from the time of his conception until the time when he breathes his last.