Introduction

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What does the freedom, and so the dignity, of the human person consist in? With the fall of communism, the globalization of liberalism, and the rise of terrorism, this question—always an urgent one—comes into particularly sharp focus for our times. Might not the Gospel carry a distinctive message about the freedom and dignity of the person that transcends, and so exposes, the narrowness of the above-named ideologies?

The articles gathered here under the title of “Freedom, Transcendence, and the Good” suggest, each in its own way, an affirmative answer to this question. The freedom of the person is (self-)transcendence towards the Good for its own sake. This transcendence, however, is not first a matter of voluntaristic decision, but of the generous initiative of the Good itself.

In “Freedom Beyond Our Choosing: Augustine on the Will and Its Objects,” D.C. Schindler develops this understanding of freedom in dialogue with Saint Augustine and with an eye to its political implications. According to Schindler, the common equation of freedom with abstract self-determination is ultimately nihilistic. Freedom makes sense only within an already existing, concrete relation to the Good, in whose establishment the activity of the Good enjoys a certain primacy. And yet, Schindler demonstrates, the same initiative of the Good that constitutes freedom as relation to the Good is also a generous bestowal of participation in the Good—that, therefore, includes freedom and makes it possible as a playful, abundant spontaneity. Jörg Splett’s “A Self-Determined Life? The Art of Living and Response to the Holy” also develops an account of the complex interplay of self- and other-determination that structures the human person’s relation to the Good. For Splett, this complexity serves to shed light on the link between ethical obligation and freedom. Ethics is “selfless” response to the glorious irradiation of the Good, to the holy—as is, it turns out, any meaningful self-determination.

David L. Schindler, writing in “Toward a Culture of Life: The Eucharist, the ‘Restoration’ of Creation, and the ‘Worldly’ Task of the Laity in Liberal Societies,” adds a further dimension to the present issue’s reflection on the bond between freedom and self-transcendence in critical dialogue with the liberal tradition. Freedom, like the identity of the person itself, is originally constituted within communion. Failure to recognize this constitutive communionality of freedom leaves liberalism vulnerable to what John Paul II has called “the culture of death.” If, then, the mission of the laity is the recapitulation of the cosmos in God and, therein, the fulfillment of the cosmos as such, engagement with liberalism’s dilution of constitutive communion becomes a sine qua non of the lay task in today’s world.

The next two articles contribute a final dimension to our reflection on Freedom, Transcendence, and the Good by guiding us to one of the central loci of the discovery of personhood: philosophical inquiry as participation in the Good. In “Extra Communionem Personarum Nulla Philosophia,” Stanislaw Grygiel presents philosophical thinking as an act of transcendence aroused and sustained by the Transcendent—by being in its transcendentals and, through that, by God. Philosophy is the awakening of the person in response to this call of being, which, Grygiel shows, always occurs within and as the communion of persons. Roberto Graziotto, in “What Does It Mean to Philosophize?,” highlights the essentially religious nature of the philosophical act: philosophy is engagement with “ultimate questions”—with the Whole present in the fragment—and, for that reason, is a way of life bearing the inner form of the three evangelical counsels (even for married philosophers!).

Spirit and History, a regular feature in these pages, comes with a subtitle in the present issue: Christ and the Unity of the Two Testaments: Responses to the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.” In “The Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Document on Jews and Christians and Their Scriptures: Attempt at an Evaluation,” Denis Farkasfalvy contends that the Biblical Commission, according an unacceptable primacy to the historical-critical method, wrongly treats the “Jewish Scriptures” as a finished whole to which the Church then adds the “Christian Scriptures”—overlooking the christological basis and meaning of the unity of the two Testaments. The very concept of the Old Testament as Scripture changes, Farkasfalvy argues, with one’s acceptance or not of the claim that Christ is its fulfillment.

Roch Kereszty’s “The Jewish-Christian Dialogue and the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Document on ‘The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible’” argues for an integration of the historical-critical method into faith in Christ as the eschatological fulfillment of Israel, which, Kereszty argues, is able to do full justice to, indeed, to point towards a reconciliation of, the abiding uniqueness of the Jewish people and the universality of the Christian Gospel to be preached to Jews and Gentiles alike.

Retrieving the Tradition features two pieces that, each in its own way, display concretely the connection between Freedom, Transcendence, and the Good explored above. The first, “Remembering Jerzy Ciesielski,” written in 1970 by then-Archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, is a moving tribute to Ciesielski, a married layman and friend of Wojtyla, who had recently died in a tragic accident at the age of 41. Wojtyla conveys the unity of exquisite humanity and “supernatural orientation” that characterized his friend—and that made him, so writes Wojtyla, an exemplar of the true spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

The second piece, by Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1968), the 100th anniversary of whose birth falls in 2002, forcefully illustrates the meaning of the phrase “supernatural orientation.” Her “Holiness in the Everyday” highlights, in fact, the absoluteness of God and of his call in Christ—and the joy that pervades those who unreservedly follow it.

Notes and Comments also observes an anniversary, the 150th of the birth of Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). Maria Antonietta Crippa, in “A Cathedral for the Twentieth Century: Antoni Gaudí’s Project for the Sagrada Familia” documents the deep Catholic inspiration that animates Gaudí’s conception of the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Barcelona. Finally, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “The Presence of the Child” brings us back once more to the theme of Freedom, Transcendence, and the Good: the absoluteness of eternal life, Balthasar says, is the perennial newness of God in and for himself—a newness in which, thanks to the presence of the “divine Child,” we are all called to share.

AJW