Perichoresis - Human Body As Icon of The communio Personarum

Human Body As Icon of The communio Personarum

Further information: Catholic theology of the body

"The crucial point, in a word, is that the relation to God, and to others in God, that establishes the individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be. This “letting be” implies a kind of primordial, ontological “circumincession,” or “perichoresis,” of giving and receiving between the other and myself. What I am in my original constitution as a person has always already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God’s gift to me of myself ― indeed, has also, in some significant sense, been given to me by other creatures and received by me in and as my response to their gift to me."

― David L. Schindler, Communio 35 (Fall 2008)

Pope John Paul II taught a series of catecheses on the mystery of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the sacramental life of the faithful Christian. The anthropological aspects of the agency of the human heart—its capacity for the gift of love and to give love in return—lived out in moral acts of social justice has since become known as his Theology of the Body. Seen more specifically as a development in perennial wisdom of Church dogma, the Natural Law, the indwelling of God in the human heart is, as taught by St. Augustine a gift of grace, perfecting nature. This philosophical approach to a deeper theological truth of the human person's need for God was developed into a systematic metaphysics by St. Thomas Aquinas, Man as the image of God.

Interpretations of the incarnational mystery of the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God were frequently executed by artisans in relational form, most recognisably as Madonna, some works depicting three generations as in Metterza. The mutual reciprocity contained in a personalist phenomological approach to the philosophy of being draws attention to man's need for trancendence, that a duality between good and evil is not sufficient to explain the mystery of human social relations in community. John Henry Newman popularised the Latin aphorism "cor ad cor loquitur" or heart speaks unto heart (first coined two centuries prior by the Doctor of the Church Frances de Sales "cor cordi loquitur")to describe adequately communicating the graced intimicy of man's conformity to Jesus's loving obedience to his Father's divine will unto death. St. Augustine had grasped this profound truth a millennia prior, "Sonus verborum nostrorum aures percutit; magister intus est." that when a teacher speaks worthily of divine things, as the sound of the words strike our ears, it is no longer mere words but God himself who enters.

"... these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being"

― Pope John Paul II in "Memory and identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium"

This existential, social aspect of divine grace indwelling in human action is what heals the divisions of a society rent by the irrational dictats of reductionist relativism of mind over matter that equates the physical impulse with vice and cerebral indifference with virtue:

"Were this... to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life."

― Pope Benedict XVI on the nature of love in "Deus Caritas Est" (God is love)