In My Father’s House There Are Many Dwelling Places

 I think the genius of John Paul II with respect to marriage is that he realized that the end of marriage, its final cause, is theosis, the participation in the life of the Trinity.  From that vantage point the three ends of marriage as taught by the Church serve the processes of kenosis and henosis as well as metamorphosis.  Procreation, the first end, instantiates the creativity of Trinitarian love.  This must be the first end of marriage since creativity through procreation grounds the marriage in the full exchange of love present in theosis.  The temptation to avoid procreation  is the temptation to mistake pleasure in the conjugal relation as the ultimate good and to avoid the necessary suffering of kenosis that is part of the gift of self, and thus miss the joy of Godly love.

In a similar way, the second end must itself be secondary since the temptation to stay focused on the vivid pleasure of the conjugal union will block the necessary grieving of kenosis.  The attentiveness that John Paul II focuses on the translation of the Latin describing the second (“mutuum adiutorium”) is characteristic of his understanding on this temptation.  This is the temptation to mistranslate the second end as “mutual love” rather than “mutual help”, to focus on the pleasures of the relationship rather than its final cause.  The mutual help of marriage is to aid each other to risk the seemingly endless steps of kenosis and their resultant suffering, to “love the Hell out of each other”, to encourage each other to empty themselves of their selves to make an opening for the love of God.  This emptying of the spouses allows the filling of new life in the couple and the practicing of theosis, of loving each other as the Trinity love.  Thus, the mutuum adiutorium serves the rigors of procreation and its fruits.

Perhaps Karol Wojtyla does not focus much on the third end of marriage (remedium concupiscentiae) in this section because the first chapter is so focused on the explication of the personalistic norm.  Certainly he does deal with the subject later chapters and in the Theology of the Body.  I sense that he wants to stay focused on the “positive” part of sexual ethics, especially initially on the how love is antithetical to utilitarianism, to avoid perhaps getting distracted by the (contemporarily) recent historical negativity of discussions of concupiscence and its remedy.  Certainly a focus on concupiscence would limit the discussion to the subjectivity of sensuality and affection and miss the mystery of Trinitarian love.

Travelling to the Land of Milk and Honey

 One of the most striking parts of Section 3 of “The Family as a Community of Persons”: “Communio in the primary sense refers to community as a mode of being and acting (in common, of course) through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship.” (Karol Wojtyla, “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Person and Community: Select Essays, p. 321).  This description attempts to describe the family “… not merely as from the category of society, or “the smallest social  unit,” as the family is often called.” (Ibid., p. 319) but as “a personal and interpersonal reality” (Ibid., p. 320). 

This description is important because it emphasizes the family members as persons, as persons who exist and act with and for other persons rather than a collection of humans living together: a Communio.  To start, the personalistic norm demands that “the person is a kind of good to which only love constitutes the proper and fully-mature relation” (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (2^nd edition), p. 25).  All actions of the community that is the family are judged according to this norm of not using the other as a means to an end but loving them.  And this is not easy:  “Love in reciprocal relations between people is not something readily available” (Ibid., p. 13).  Choosing the good for another requires the kenosis of subordinating one’s own passions, of emptying oneself of self-centeredness.

Wojtyla describes the practice of love in the community of persons more concretely in “Person and Act”.  Here he presents the “theory of participation”, that in forming and maintaining community, that “by acting together with others, man preserves all that results from the community of action and at the same time—precisely by this means—realizes the personalistic value of his own act.” (Karol Wojtyla, “Person and Act”, The English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyla/ John Paul II, p. 385). 

Participation in type of community that is Communio requires more than simply being a member of a community and socializing together.  It requires the attitudes of solidarity (“a constant readiness to accept and realize the share that falls to each due to the fact that he is a member of a given community” (Ibid., p. 401) and opposition (“a function of one’s vision of the community, of its good, and of the living need to participate in existing together and especially in acting together” (Ibid., p. 402) that generate the acts of a person truly participating in community.  And it requires the eradication of the non-loving attitudes of conformism (“Man in this case does not form the community but in a sense ‘allows himself to be carried by the collective.’” (Ibid., p. 405)) and avoidance (“a lack of participation; it is an absence in the community” (Ibid., p. 406) from which one acts in a way harmful to the community and not meeting the personalistic norm.

In summary, a community of persons requires acts of love through participation by its members in addition to “being together”.  This is at best difficult and often painful, a participation in the redemptive suffering of the Paschal Mystery that leads the individual members closer to the perfection of their telos as a result of their “mutual relationship” of Communio.