Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS
SECTION ONE: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY
CHAPTER ONE: THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN
§ 1 Personality as the Foundation and the Presupposition of the Social Nature of
Man
1. The thought that there could somewhere exist a being who would be our second self seems
uncanny to us. This involuntary start before a ghostlike double is grounded in deep levels of
our being. No creature on this earth is so much a world unto itself as man. He is a person, and
it is only in terms of personhood that his social nature can be comprehended. Therefore, in
order to gain access to an understanding of the state or quality of being social, or sociality as
this is termed, the characteristic features of human personhood shall be defined more closely
through ten statements.
a) Personhood means participation „in the light of the divine mind.“ Through his understanding,
which must of course be perfected through wisdom, man towers above „the material
world.“ He is „capable of knowing and loving his Creator“; he was „appointed by Him as
master of all creatures“ (Gaudium et spes, 12, 15).
b) Personhood means uniqueness. Man is in himself, with this body and this soul, distinct and
set off from every other being, never repeated, never repeatable. He is born as an original,
even if he often ends as a copy.
c) Personhood means self-subsistence. We are not a part of another as, for instance, the hand
is part of our body. We subsist in ourselves, although different realms are found in us: the
bodily vital as well as the spiritual. But we really do not have a body and a soul as one possesses
a foreign thing, rather we are the bodily and spiritual whole.
d) The human person is the bearer of its thinking, acting, and failure to act. All our deeds are
our acts, even if they are spread over many decades of our lives. We can indeed regret and
inwardly overcome false decisions and sins; but we can never obliterate the fact that they
were and remain our acts. Through our personhood they receive an ego-character that can
never be abolished.
e) Personhood means freedom. The freedom of the will arising from the spiritual core of the
human person is the ability to decide for this or that in self-mastery in the face of different
possibilities, without being driven in a particular direction through psychic determinism.
Through the creative power of free will man is „master of himself“ 1 . Without personal freedom
of will, moral responsibility is impossible, so that gilt and atonement, reward and punishment,
contrition and satisfaction lose their meaning. This does not deny the fact that man is
influenced consciously and unconsciously in many ways (hereditarily, psychically, socially)
and - especially in the age of mass media - exposed to manipulation. Today uncertainty and
the fear of decision-making are spreading more and more. Although, or rather, because mod-
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II. 64,5, ad 3.
20