Friday, August 26, 2011

Faith, Secular Work and Gay Legislation


If you look at "Laborem Exercens" opening paragraph and #6, you find that only persons work. Work is not mere action, but self given. "Things" don't work. The key is the Christology of Constantinople III: any free action of Christ is the divine "I" obeying the will of the Father. This is not merely an action he performs, but Who He is. The will doesn't will and the body doesn't act. "Actiones sunt suppositorum." Only persons act (freely).
The prototype of all work is the act of faith - which is the whole self given in obedience to God revealing. The work of Adam was the first act of faith as obedience to God to till the garden and name the animals. The immediate result of that action that was self-gift was "the original solitude." This means that man crossed the threshold from being a rational object doing things to being an obedient "I." He therefore felt alone in a created universe of just "things" as objects. He is alone as a subject in a world of objects. As made in the image of the "We," this is "not good." Hence, the creation of the woman to form the "communio" of the two that is the act of imaging.

The act of naming the animals (work) is an act of obedience to God. This is the definition of faith in Dei Verbum #5 ["The obedience of faith" (Rom. 13:26; see 1:5; 2 Cor 10:5-6) "is to be given to God who reveals, an obedience by which man commits his whole self freely to God, offering the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals"]. I take it to be also - as in the pope's example -donning the condom to save the life of the other. Now, if work, done in obedience to God, most rigorously can be defined as living faith, then it would be most appropriate, on the contrary, to bring a lawsuit arguing that work that requires one to photograph gay weddings or deliver cakes or rent honeymoon suites is a violation of religious liberty?

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