Monday, July 06, 2015

Metphysics Comes From Reality, Not Reality From Metaphysics. God Comes to Us; We Do Not Go To God


According to Robert Barron's Reading of Colosians 1, 15 and Jn. 1, 14, the Locus of Metaphysics is Within the Uncreated Divinity and Created Humanity of Christ. Ultimately, Christ Is the Meaning of Reality and All Being.

To Fr. John Wais: How Barron resolves the conundrum of Thomistic metaphysics where a non-existing essence receives (without any ontological positivity) and limits esse to be this esse. Basically the meaning of reality (being) is the Person of Christ Who, as Ipsum Esse, is Creator, and as man is created, and quite specifically is woman. Therefore, the Creator and the created are sustained within the Person of Christ as donation and reception. The humanity of Christ is taken entirely from the Virgin and “assumed” by His divine “I.” The Council of Constantinople III taught that as the flesh of Christ is dynamized by the Esse Personale of the Logos, so also is the will without being destroyed by inclusion in the divine Person. The divine will and the human will are ontologically distinct, the one uncreated as divine Person, the other as created yet assumed by the divine Person as His (human will), but they are one because it is the one Person alone who wills.  And so, the freedom of Christ’s human will achieves its fulfillment as will and free -precisely as the human will of the divine Person. That freedom is now understood as divinized by self-gift to death on the Cross: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (John Paul II, Veritatis splendor #85). And so, human freedom, as everything in the human person made in the image of the Divine “I” of the Son, finds his/her meaning in Christ.
            Since the human and created has all been taken from our Lady, and humanity is the real meaning of being and the created cosmos as receptive of esse, then the very receptivity of created being must be understood as feminine. Our Lady and the feminine receptivity and tenderness is then the very meaning of the created order. Barron suggests that this is the very context of thomistic metaphysics.


I repeat: The huge factor that the woman adds is receptivity and mysticism to the whole created order [which is the humanity of Christ and the cosmos extended from it]. And in the spirit of Robert Barron, there can be no "essence" that receives esse unless esse gives it positivity to receive and limit esse. Barron offers: As Benedict XVI, the ultimate reality (Being) is The Word, the Person of Christ. And so, it is the divine Person of Christ - His Esse Personale - that gives positivity to the entire created order that is an extension of His human nature. That "nature" is the oocyte/DNA received from the Virgin and which perdures in existence created and sustained by His personal Esse.humanity received in DNA from the Virgin and in exitence from Himself as Creator. And that humanity exists with the Esse Personale of the Son As God, He is the Creator of all that is, including His own humanity; as Man, He is the Receptor of everything the Creator gives. As  his human nature is a positive receptivity, the perfection of created humanity that is not Himself will be the woman as sign of that receptivity and sign of tenderness in the formation of the rest of human personhood.The woman is the created personified perfection of that humanity of Christ as ontological receptivity without violating the logic of the Thomistic esse "act of all acts, perfection of all perfection" (S.Th. I, 4, 1 ad 3) which has been considered hitherto as donation only. !Viva la mujer!

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