It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person- Love. He is Person-Gift. (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantum, Section 10),
One of the most attractive and convicting aspects of Christianity is the principle that God is love. And that love is a relational love between “persons”—beings that have intellect and will. This is a fundamental belief of Christianity, especially when applied to the relationship of the Holy Trinity. This principle is also applied to individual human persons who are created in the image and likeness of God. This paper presents reflections on the understanding of the Holy Trinity presented by Pope John Paul II in his writings and his application of this model of relationship to ethics of the Christian marital union. Five meditations on the concept of “love as gift” are given, three on the love of the Trinity and two on the love in the marital union.
Love as Gift Through Creation
One of the most difficult transitions for contemporary man is from experiencing “love” simply through his subjectivity to truly loving in a relational manner. To experience emotions related to affection and arousal as intense events of subjectivity, that both enliven and energize the individual motivates one to repeat the event, is the norm. The search for “love” becomes addictive, where one looks for the next pleasure “high” after the last “hit” fades away, whether alone through means such as pornography or through using other beings. Love is described through the activity of “self-taking” that benefits an individual, at best combined with the illusion of relationship and care for the other. This is the standard in a worldview that is supported by the paradigm of achieving the power to consume such events to fill one’s self, even if ephemerally.
The offering by Christianity of love as a relationship between persons that requires effort, suffering, and perseverance is alien to such a culture, with the goal not the taking of pleasure but the giving of one’s self to the other and receiving the other person’s self, always with the good of the other person as primary motivation. This definition of love derives from the Christian understanding of God as revealed through Jesus Christ: “In his intimate life, God "is love,” the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he ‘searches even the depths of God,’ as uncreated Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person- Love. He is Person-Gift.” (Ibid.). This love of the Trinity is the perfection of love, of self-gift, and the goal and source of human love.
God desires to give Himself to His creation and to man in a special way though: “God, as Christ has revealed Him, does not merely remain closely linked with the world as the Creator and the ultimate source of existence. He is also Father: He is linked to man, whom He called to existence in the visible world, by a bond still more intimate than that of creation. It is love which not only creates the good but also grants participation in the very life of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For he who loves desires to give himself.” (John Paul II, Dives et Misericordia, Section 7). God as Father grants human persons an invitation to participate in the perfection of Trinitarian love, albeit not perfectly. This is not something man can effect but only receive by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit: “At the same time, the Holy Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father and the Son in divinity, is love and uncreated gift from which derives as from its source (fons vivus) all giving of gifts vis-a-vis creatures (created gift): the gift of existence to all things through creation; the gift of grace to human beings through the whole economy of salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes: ‘God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.’” (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantum, Section 10). Man was created by God to participate in the love of God through bearing His image and likeness: “the context of the Book of Genesis enables us to see in the creation of man the first beginning of God's salvific self-giving commensurate with the ‘image and likeness’ of himself which he has granted to man” (Ibid., Section 12).
While man did receive the Holy Spirit at his creation, allowing him to be in relationship with God “in the garden”, he then chose to reject God as “the Father who gives Himself”, instead seeking the power of the “knowledge of good and evil”: “Original sin attempts, then, to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship [with God]. As a result, the Lord appears jealous of His power over the world and over man; and consequently, man feels goaded to do battle against God.” (John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, p. 228). Man abandons the created reality of God’s image and likeness to pursue the illusion of power from the fruit of “the tree [which] was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6). He rejects the plenitude of God’s gift of Himself and his capability to love is thus corrupted to one of using other beings to gain love rather than receiving what God provides.
Love as a Gift Through Redemption
With the choice of original sin man inherits the enslavement of a “self-taking” that does not satisfy—that is, not receiving the love of God for which he is created. He is left unfulfilled and unable to choose what he requires for happiness. Jesus comes as Messiah, anointed with the Holy Spirit, to free man so that he may choose to receive love once again from the Father, to redeem him from his “captivity” to sin by the way of a “new beginning”, a “new creation”: “Christ links the new beginning of God's salvific self-communication in the Holy Spirit with the mystery of the Redemption. It is a new beginning, first of all because between the first beginning and the whole of human history-from the original fall onwards-sin has intervened, sin which is in contradiction to the presence of the Spirit of God in creation, and which is above all in contradiction to God's salvific self- communication to man.” (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantum, Section 13). The Holy Spirit comes to us in the power released through the passage of Jesus through the Paschal Mystery: “The ‘departure’ of Christ through the Cross has the power of the Redemption-and this also means a new presence of the Spirit of God in creation: the new beginning of God's self-communication to man in the Holy Spirit.“ (Ibid., Section 14). And this new presence enters into man’s subjectivity, providing the “power” that drive the process of the conversion of his heart from “self-taking” to “self-giving”: “With the sending of this Spirit ‘into our hearts," there begins the fulfillment of that for which ‘creation waits with eager longing,’ as we read in the Letter to the Romans” (Ibid.), the longing to receive the love of God.
The love of God enters into our hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit in a way that is to change us—"It is he: the Spirit of truth, the Paraclete sent by the Risen Christ to transform us into his own risen image.” (Ibid., Section 24). Jesus makes available this transformation at great cost, a fact to remember: “There is no sending of the Holy Spirit (after original sin) without the Cross and the Resurrection: ‘If I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you.’ There is also established a close link between the mission of the Holy Spirit and that of the Son in the Redemption. The mission of the Son, in a certain sense, finds its ‘fulfillment’ in the Redemption. The mission of the Holy Spirit ‘draws from’ the Redemption: ‘He will take what is mine and declare it to you.’” (Ibid.). The “going away” of Jesus is a painful and protracted death followed by his Resurrection and Ascension. The disciples of Christ also pass through the Paschal Mystery with Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit whose mission is to bring the Redemption into our hearts: “Redemption is totally carried out by the Son as the Anointed One, who came and acted in the power of the Holy Spirit, offering himself finally in sacrifice on the wood of the Cross. And this Redemption is, at the same time, constantly carried out in human hearts and minds-in the history of the world-by the Holy Spirit, who is the "other Counselor.” (Ibid.). This gift of the Redemption enters into our hearts as we enact our own Paschal Mystery through Baptism and Confirmation as we transform into a new form of creation (the kaine ktisis of Galatians 6:15).
Love as a Gift through the Marital Union
One of the formative experiences of Karol Wojtyla’s priesthood was his participation in ministering to youth, starting with his placement at Saint Florian’s parish in March of 1949, where he engaged the youth and young adults with the challenge of living a Catholic faith in the midst of socialist totalitarianism. The vivacity and challenge of philosophical discussions evolved into the demands and rewards of following Catholic teachings on marriage and family over the course of years, forming a “milieu” or Srodowisko (George Weigel, Witness to Hope, page 98) of hundreds of young adults. During this time Father Wojtyla applied his education in philosophy and moral theology to the problems and opportunities of living the sexual ethics of Catholicism under persecution in a neo-Marxist, materialist culture.\
One result of his experience is his work Love and Responsibility, where he expresses his thought that developed partially as a result of his time in Srodowisko. Specifically, he contrasts the egocentric hedonism of utilitarianism in neo-Marxism with the personal love of Christianity: “It is quite clearly visible that with the presuppositions of utilitarianism, the subjective attitude regarding the understanding of good (good as pleasure) leads on a straight path to egoism, even if this may be not deliberate. The only way out of this inevitable egoism is to recognize besides a purely subjective good, i.e., besides pleasure, an objective good, which can also unite persons—and then it acquires the characteristics of a common good. This objective common good is the foundation of love, and the persons choosing this common good together at the same time subordinate themselves to it. Thanks to this, they bind one another with the true, objective bond of love, the bond that enables them to liberate themselves from subjectivism and from egoism inherently concealed in it. Love is a union of persons” (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (2nd Edition), page 22). Christian marital love is dependent on the objective common good which each spouse chooses as superior to their own subjectivity.
He then develops the idea of the “personalistic norm”, an axiological norm demanding that “the person is a kind of good to which only love constitutes the proper and fully-mature relation.” (Ibid., page 25). He connects this norm to the Gospel of Jesus Christ: “The commandment formulated in the Gospel demands from man love for other people, for neighbors (blizni); in its full reading, however, it demands love for persons. For God, whom the commandment to love names in the first place, is the perfect personal Being. The world of created persons draws its distinctness and natural superiority in relation to the world of things (non-persons) from its particular likeness to God” (Ibid., page 24). Since it is the nature of God that through the Holy Spirit “the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift” (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantum, Section 10), this likeness to God is instantiated through the complete and total self-gift of man and woman in the marital union: “The fact that man ‘created as man and woman’ is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being. It also means that man and woman, created as a ‘unity of the two’ in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love, and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God, through which the Three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the one divine life.” (John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatis, Section 7).
This total gift of self provides the foundation of marriage: “This gift of self lies at the basis of the marriage covenant, bringing to it the special dimension of love that we find in the concept of married love” (Karol Wojtyla, “The Family as a Community of Persons in Person and Community, Section 4) as well as a communio personae in which “the spouses mutually give themselves to and accept each other.” (Ibid.). The marital union through the conjugal act becomes the point of complete self-gift and reception of the other, in body and soul: “Communio as a mutual, interpersonal relationship, together with the bond arising from this relationship, must in marriage promote the kind of confirmation of the person, the kind of mutual affirmation, that is demanded by the very nature of this bond. Consequently, anything that makes one person an object of use for the other is contrary to the nature of the marital bond [emphasis added] as a communio personarum” (Ibid.).
This last is the difficult part of marital union, for the conjugal act lies on the knife’s edge of complete self-giving and reception of the other that is the cornerstone of the sacramentality of marriage: “A man and a woman who are united by such a very intimate community of life and calling, based on the difference of sex, may not in any way violate those profound laws that govern the union of persons and condition their true communion. These are objective laws, deeper than the whole somatic or emotional reality, laws that have their basis and justification in very being and value of the person”. (Ibid.). As such, the gift of love through the marital union is truly “a task” requiring constant sacrifice of subjectivity for the common good of the marriage.
Love as a Gift through Self-Emptying (Love as a Gift through Sacrifice)
Changing from the willing of one’s subjective “pleasure” to choosing the objective “common good” requires transcendence and a self-emptying. But what is this “substance” of which one empties from one’s self? The classic text for this description of self-emptying is from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: “Who, being in very form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8 NRSVCE). This is an answer to the original sin where “you will be like god”, the “sin in its original reality takes place in man's will-and conscience-first of all as ‘disobedience,’ that is, as opposition of the will of man to the will of God. This original disobedience presupposes a rejection, or at least a turning away from the truth contained in the Word of God, who creates the world.” (John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantum, Section 33). One could say that it is the emptying of the illusion of being God and accepting the truth of creaturely obedience in relationship to God.
Jesus provides the pathway out of original sin by taking on human nature and emptying himself of all willfulness, obeying the Father even when it means suffering and death, as incarnation of God’s love. Through His self-emptying, His death on the cross, he brings human nature back into its proper relationship of loving God. This proper relationship includes man’s self-giving to God and receiving God in His Holy Spirit: “It is a new beginning, first of all because between the first beginning and the whole of human history-from the original fall onwards-sin has intervened, sin which is in contradiction to the presence of the Spirit of God in creation, and which is above all in contradiction to God's salvific self- communication to man.” (Ibid.). Man’s reconciling with God includes the receiving of the Holy Spirit, made possible through the unfathomable love show by Jesus through his living through the Paschal Mystery: “God's kenosis, a grand and mysterious truth for the human mind, which finds it inconceivable that suffering and death can express a love which gives itself and seeks nothing in return.” (John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, Section 93). Jesus gave himself and his life seeking nothing in return, a model for choosing the objective good over the subjective good.
While salvation has now become available to man, he is not able to fully receive the Holy Spirit in his relationship with God because of the continuation of original sin in each human person, where love is corrupted by the temptation to seek something in return. Thus we must “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling”—love is a task, an effort on man’s part: “For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (Romans 7:22-25, RSVCE).
I believe that each disciple of Jesus must pass through the Paschal Mystery with Him, the process of emptying himself so that he can enter more and more into the life of the Holy Trinity by becoming more and more like Jesus. Our “Passion” is to suffer the obedience to the Father despite the loss of pleasure and the persecution of the “world”, giving witness to the “new creation” in which we love through the Holy Spirit, and seeking nothing in return—a life of joy and suffering that frees man to love God.
Love as a Gift through Chastity
Karol Wojtlya, following from Max Scheler, speaks of the “rehabilitation of chastity” from the error of the resentment of the virtue of chastity: “not only does [resentment] falsify the image of the good, but also depreciates what should merit the esteem, so that man does not have to take pains to measure up to the true good, but can ‘safely’ acknowledge as the good only what suits him, what is convenient for him. Resentment is contained in the subjectivistic mentality: here pleasure replaces a superior value.” (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility 2nd Edition, page 126). Resentment is generated through a “subjectivistic mentality” which pursues pleasure as its end, an obstacle to marital love and union since at best it seeks a quid pro quo and at worst seeks to use the other simply as a means to sexual pleasure.
Chastity, in the context of sexual ethics, is the practice of choosing the objective “common good” of marriage over the subjective good of pleasure when such a choice is required. It is very difficult to practice since it is too easy to confuse the common good of marriage and the subjective good: “From the mere richness of affections one cannot pass judgment on the value of the reciprocal relation of persons. The very abundance of emotional lived-experiences born on the ground of sensuality can conceal in itself a lack of true love, and even downright egoism. For love is something different from amorous lived-experiences. Love is formed on the basis of a thorough and fully responsible relation of a person to another person, whereas amorous lived-experiences are born spontaneously in reactions to sensuality and affectivity.” (Ibid., page 127). It is easy to fool one’s self by imagining “amorous lived-experiences” are good simply due to the intensity of their pleasure despite a disintegration of the accompanying personal love: “The disintegration [of love] means above all an underdevelopment of the ethical [personal] essence of love. . . .for the good of love, for the sake of realizing love’s true essence both in every person and between persons, it is necessary to be freed from all those “amorous” live-experiences that do not find justification in true love, that is, in the reciprocal relation between a man and a woman based on a mature affirmation of the value of the person.” (Ibid., page 128). Love is a task!
Love as self-gift and reception of the other rests upon this “mature affirmation of the value of the person”, upon the choosing of the good of the other. This requires the suffering that comes from deferring or denying subjective good for the common good of affirming the value of the other since self-taking is a great temptation in “amorous lived-experiences”. The task of chastity is to “liberate love from the attitude to use” (Ibid., page 154) to allow the conjugal act to occur without the attitude of use. This is a redemptive suffering, however, since it frees one to “myself serve the law of God with my mind” as Saint Paul says in the Letter to the Romans. With the virtue of chastity in practice, love is possible: “The mature virtue [of chastity] is a habit that consists in keeping constantly in balance the concupiscent power by the habitual relation to the true good (bonum honestum), which is defined by reason.” (Ibid., page 153).
Conclusion
Karol Wojtyla, and later as John Paul II, focused on the role of self-gift as the action by man which could contribute to his happiness, as was famously incorporated into the council document Gaudium et Spes: “Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself [emphasis added].” (Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, 1964). This gift of self is the base of true relationship between persons, forming his understanding of the Holy Trinity, which is then the model for the marital union. In addition, this self-giving requires kenosis, a self-emptying that is intrinsic to the loving relationship of the Trinity and a requirement for marital sacramentality. The latter is an “emptying” of choosing one’s subjectivity for the purpose of choosing the common good of the marriage. This provides an objective basis for the marriage, although at the cost of suffering deferring or sacrifice of each spouse’s subjective good. This then becomes part of each spouse’s imitation of the Paschal Mystery and part of the working out of their own salvation through the marital union.
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