Is truth love? No, when the self is an individual substance,
truth, the conformity of intelligence with the sensibly perceived world,
intelligence being an accident-faculty of that substance, and love the
operation of the accident-faculty of the will.
Can truth and love be one? Yes, 1) when truth is the experience of the self imaging
the Truth as Second Person of the Trinity, and 2) love is the experience of
the self going out of itself to God and others. And so, truth is love only when the self (in the epistemological turn to the "I") experiences itself going out of itself.
The "No" results from the post-Tridentene neo-scholasticism dominated by a conceptual/objectivist epistemology. The "Yes"is the anthropology of Vatican II
as found in Gaudium et spes #24: “man, the only earthly being God has willed
for itself, finds itself by the sincere gift of self.” Only in this second perspective will the meaning of truth
and love be identical, i.e. the self as both truth and love as in Christ, the
prototype of man.
In the concrete, say, in the case of the relation to the homosexual person and gay marriage, one must love the person with same sex inclination, and in truth qualify the same-sex tendency as “objectively disordered” as well as reject its accomplished act as contrary to the meaning of the human person. That is, in the very act of loving the homosexually oriented person, you must help him struggle against the same-sex tendency as counter-personal. It violates the very meaning of an enfleshed person. Only by loving him/her as person can you struggle to help him/her make the gift of self; and vice versa, only by helping them to struggle, do you love them. Love and truth become one reality and one act only by moving into the anthropology of the subject who finds himself by – exercising the self-mastery of the Cross of Christ – making the gift of self. Gift of self is both truth and love. The disorder in the act consists in its self-referentiality since there cannot be donation (male) without reception (female) since the bodies of male and female are the very language of their persons as giftedness. This was the burden of the whole of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (TOB). In fact, this theological epistemology is what is meant by the " new evangelization."
In the concrete, say, in the case of the relation to the homosexual person and gay marriage, one must love the person with same sex inclination, and in truth qualify the same-sex tendency as “objectively disordered” as well as reject its accomplished act as contrary to the meaning of the human person. That is, in the very act of loving the homosexually oriented person, you must help him struggle against the same-sex tendency as counter-personal. It violates the very meaning of an enfleshed person. Only by loving him/her as person can you struggle to help him/her make the gift of self; and vice versa, only by helping them to struggle, do you love them. Love and truth become one reality and one act only by moving into the anthropology of the subject who finds himself by – exercising the self-mastery of the Cross of Christ – making the gift of self. Gift of self is both truth and love. The disorder in the act consists in its self-referentiality since there cannot be donation (male) without reception (female) since the bodies of male and female are the very language of their persons as giftedness. This was the burden of the whole of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (TOB). In fact, this theological epistemology is what is meant by the " new evangelization."
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