Ethics, Telos, and Theosis

One of things I learned from Karol Wojtyla’s habilitation thesis the need in Christian ethics to address anthropology, agency, and telos.  The last is intriguing, since it makes explicit the formal cause of the Christian—deification and theosis.  In Person and Act he makes this developmental frame clearer in that a loving act causes the person to become more good (and, thus, to “become” more), more like God.

I found this frame in The Ethics of Beauty in a different way:

Our [the Orthodox] anthropology of soul-healing is inseparable from our account of creation.  Since so few know the second, the first can easily go astray without our noticing.

    Creation results from God’s self-emptying over the face of non-being.  God appears, He shines out, as Beauty.  This Beauty is so compelling that not even non-being can resist falling in love with it.  Overcome with eros, non-being renounces itself, repents of its chaos and self-absorption, and arises into being.  As it does so, it “learns” to behave as the one it loves behaves—full of self-emptying Goodness for everything around it.  Thus, everything that exists is marked by a cruciform love—for God, as eros, and for all creation, as agape.  In these two movements, rocks, stones, stars, planets, animals, electrons—all of it—becomes what it is, becomes true. (Ethics of Beauty, page 78)

While there is much to think about here, my point is that the telos of ethics is inseparable from “becoming”—that is, deification and theosis.  And this increase in “being”, if that is possible, is paradoxically dependent upon the cruciform kenosis that is an essential part of love, of each act of love.  Each act of love reveals, increases our being as well as our acts of love.

This reminds me of the sacramentality of marriage (Part II of Catechism of Human Love) in the Theology of the Body.  John Paul II subdivides this sacramentality into the mystery (sacrament) of creation and the mystery (sacrament) of redemption.  The acts of spousal love in marriage furthers creation (yes, not as a static concept) for both the spouses as well as overflowing into the creation of children.  I write this because I think it is simplistic yet easy to understand the mystery of creation of marriage as only procreation.  This has implications for those who wish to marry yet deny themselves to their spouse through the use of contraception, in that such a practice blocks or diminishes their own deification as well as that of their spouse.