THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
CHAPTER V
AN ATTEMPT AT DEFINING PERSONALITY
THE word personality is a word to conjure within our own days. The power of personality is the theme of every good work of fiction as well as of every good biography. A theological writer is of all writers the one who might be seen biting his quill for long moments of embarrassment for lack of the proper word, as society has taken his word from him and given it a different meaning. The term personality holds as great a place in theology as in literature, but the roles it acts are vastly different. It is true that the more modern meaning of personality a powerful individualistic character is not unwelcome to a theologian, as his Christ is the most winsome of all persons ; but he has a much older right to the term personality/ and in his attempt to explain Christ s attractiveness he has to delve down in the hidden mysteries of much more austere concepts, and personality is winsome because it is something so solid ; and it is with this view of personality, as the austere foundation of being, that the theologian is primarily concerned.
Locke s definition, or rather description, of person is as good as any other, outside the Aristotelian and scholastic sphere of thought. This being premised to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for. Which, I think is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times .and places ; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me, essential to it : it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. 1
With Locke, the orthodox theologian says that a person is (essentially) a thinking, intelligent being ; that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places. The scholastic applies a similar definition to Deity itself, to the pure angelic spirit and to man. Yet, to the scholastic mind, Locke s definition of a person is not adequate. The scholastic asks with Locke why is it that a thinking being can think of itself, as itself, and it is his answer to that question that shows in him the deeper metaphysician. The English philosopher says that a thinking being thinks of itself, as itself, by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking.
Locke makes consciousness the reason of self-consciousness, which is evidently a tautology. It is as if I denned my power of running through that movement that makes me run. The scholastic, though denning a person a thinking being, with self-consciousness ( to consider itself as itself is another expression for self -consciousness), has a deeper underlying metaphysical element which saves him from Locke s tautology, and it is that deeper under lying element which is the cause, so to speak, that makes the individual person. Self-consciousness, deep and mysterious as it is, is not so deep and so mysterious as self-being. The first is merely a result of the second. Now, the scholastic maintains that self-being underlies self-consciousness, as the cause underlies its effect, and he says that a person is constituted primarily through self-being, through the fact of having one s being as an exclusive and total property.
We all know Tennyson s immortal verses describing the gradual formation of the individual self-consciousness .
The baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that this is I :
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of I/ and me,
And finds I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.
So rounds he to a separate mind,
From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows denned.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
In Memoriam, XLV.
Yet this very evolution of the thought of the isolated supposes an isolated possession of existence at the start. Now it is that perfect appropriation of being by the I long before there is a conscious distinction of oneself from other beings, the scholastic considers as the thing that makes a person. Scholastics are divided amongst themselves how to explain such an exclusive appropriation of being. Such differences of opinion cannot detract from the metaphysical value of the main principle, that a person is radically and eternally sui juris, a rational being with rights, and responsibilities, and duties that can never be shifted on to someone else s shoulders. Personality means incommunicable appropriation for weal and for woe of one s deeds. The highest manifestation of personality is moral merit and moral demerit, the fact through which a free act of the rational will is so entirely the property of the rational agent that God Himself cannot be held responsible for it, in the last instance, without contradicting Himself. Moral responsibility is well calculated to open out to us a view of the might of personality. Let us think for one moment that both highest bliss in heaven and profoundest misery in hell are states for a spirit which God Himself could not transfer to another spirit without injustice.
Self-consciousness the pet metaphysical reality of modern philosophies is not so deep and so permanent a thing as moral responsibility, that all-important factor of Christian philosophy. A man may be perfectly conscious of his doing a certain act without his being responsible for it, as there is the possibility of his not having been a free agent in the matter.
The fact of moral responsibility is the most immediate result of the element that makes a person. Moral responsibility is not that element itself, but it is its first fruit its direct result. In moral responsibility we show that we have our being in our own hand. How could I ever be made to answer eternally for an act of mine, if that act were not mine with the exclusion of every other moral or ethical partnership ?
Self-consciousness is near the root of our being, but it is not the root yet, and there is even the possibility of the act of which I am conscious not
being all my own act.
Moral responsibility is much nearer that root, for it implies in the last instance an exclusion of every other created will in my act of will. But it is not the root yet, just as will is not the whole man, the whole spirit. It springs from the root, and the root itself is personality. For a person is essentially a rational being that has responsibility, or, anyhow, may acquire it in time.
Moral responsibility is to my mind the natural key to the mystery of personality.
It may be objected that moral responsibility is too theological a fact to be made into a starting-point for the quest of personality, chiefly moral responsibility that stretches into the next world. My answer is that I am writing a theological book, not a philosophical one, for people to whom moral responsibility, implied in the words merit and guilt/ is an intellectual certainty.
Moral responsibility and self -consciousness almost seem to touch in the phenomenon of the consciousness of duty, of the conviction intellectual if there ever was one embodied in the notion : I ought. Yet the two things, though converging, are still different. Moral responsibility is a fact quite independent of inner consciousness, or rather we know that we have the merit as well as the guilt of our practical answers to the I ought as we have followed the voice or have disobeyed it.
There is an old scholastic axiom, Actiones sunt suppositorum Acts belong to the person/ Nothing could be truer, if we bear in mind the mystery of personal responsibility for our deeds.
I should describe personality as that reality within the creature that makes the creature s acts to be entirely his acts, with their full responsibility a responsibility stretching into eternity. It matters comparatively little how we explain that great appropriation of being that underlies responsibility. That it is a wonderful and potent reality is clear to all those who admit moral responsibility. That it is a reality that pervades and dominates our whole being is again manifest from the results of responsibility, which affects our whole life, for weal or for woe. It is necessarily what schoolmen call a substantial reality, a reality that is not merely accidental but one that is co-extensive with the individual being itself.
Before leaving this chapter I must say a few more things in order to remove certain misgivings that might arise in our minds at the hearing of some expressions made use of here as, for instance, appropriation of being, exclusive possession of being, exclusive responsibility of one s moral acts. Is it not the first rudiment of piety to believe firmly that our being is the property of God, from whom we have received it ; that our good acts, chiefly of the higher, the supernatural order, are the doings of the Spirit of God within our own created will ?
The answer to such difficulties will be a further illustration of the greatness of created personality. Nothing is truer than the fact that all our being comes from God, by creation. But God s creative power is, so to speak, at its best in the production of a being that is so complete as to have a responsibility all of its own, just as God has responsibility. Pantheism, which means emanation of things from God, as opposed to creation of things ex nihilo, is warded off most conclusively by that duality of responsibility.
That God should be able to produce outside Himself a being whose very constitution brings about within itself a responsibility that may put it eternally into opposition to the God that created it is the greatest achievement of God s creative power. So likewise with the share of God s grace in our moral acts, both natural and supernatural. No amount of divine influxus will ever take away the fact that it is my own act. St. Thomas would say that the divine influxus is of such a nature as to make my act more mine than ever. Such is his constant answer to objections about the preservation of free will under the divine influxus. Just as God s creative act at its highest results in a personality distinct from Him, so God s elevating act this is a good expression for the supernatural influxus of grace results in a meritorious deed that is the free will s own glory.
I have said already that even amongst school men there are accidental divergences of opinion as to the precise definition of that far-reaching element in the created being that makes for absolute duality between God and His rational creature, even when God fills His creature with the graces of His own Spirit.
The older philosophy takes a personality to be something entitatively static. The modern philosophies make it into something that is practically all dynamic.
The older philosophy has the great advantage over its modern sister that it does the one thing and omits not the other. It allows for all that love of life which is the characteristic of dynamic philosophy. The older philosophy grants all and every one of the transient phenomena of psychic life postulated by modern thought. But behind the phenomena of conscious life there are for the schoolmen the static and stable elements from which life with its endless variations flows, and which give it continuity and oneness.
Personality is one of those static elements ; perhaps it is the principal static element ; it is the centripetal power in our very complex individualities centripetal precisely because it is static. Such stability is not only perfectly reconcilable with the perennial flow of our conscious psychic life ; it is its salvation, just as the deep banks of a river keep the river from becoming a nondescript swamp. Or better still, personality, the static thing in man, is to consciousness, the dynamic thing in man, what the mighty mountain range is to the stream : in its soaring solitude and unbending solidity flows the winding stream with all the charm of its rippling motion and babbling song.
Before concluding the chapter I want to emphasise once more that the thing which I call moral responsibility is not personality itself, but that it is an element of personality, and in its brightest manifestation responsibility allows us a deep plunging peep into the abysmal mystery of personality.
