Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

Passion and love, Rolf Castro

eng

no index present

non fiction

Passion and love

dictionaries

Rolf Castro

The work consists of five chapters; "the person and the sexual urge"; "the person and love"; "the person and chastity"; "justice to the creator"; and "sexology and ethics". It is described as a defense of the traditional church teachings on marriage from a new philosophical standpoint'. In his introduction to the first edition, fry Wojtyla describes his reasons for writing the book as being "born principally of the need to put the norms of catholic sexual morality on a firm basis, a basis as definitive as possible, relying on the most elementary and incontrovertible moral truths and the most fundamental values or goods".fr. Wojtyla writes that marital sexual intercourse is the best image of god who is love, for he sees the human body as the only one capable of making the invisible - the spiritual and the divine - visible. He says that human beings were created by God for a purpose: to be persons who freely choose to love, to give themselves as persons who express their self-giving through their bodies. Thus, sexual intercourse between husband and wife is a symbol of their total mutual self-donation, and further fosters, strengthens, and enriches it not just for the present but also for the future. For fry Wojtyla, "the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine." Wojtyla's conception of gender flows from his philosophy of the human person. He posits a theistic humanism grounded in imago die: mankind in the image and likeness of God. A human being is an integrated body and soul, with a complementary union of two genders, male and female. Wojtyla's philosophy is based on the phenomenological tradition, which deals with the subjective experience of humans and how culture, language, upbringing, and biases all affect the way individuals see the objective world. The ethical system he presents appears heavily centered on actions and deeds. However, he argues that there is a metaphysical reality in which human subjects realize themselves and ground themselves in it by acting in freedom. Specifically, metaphysical realism is God and his creation of man in his image and likeness. Yet, there is not a divide between man's subjectiveness and his metaphysical reality. Wojtyla refers to one's own subjective experience as "lived experience" or "inner life" and argues that an individual's conscious perception of this interior life is the experience of oneself as an acting self-rooted in a metaphysical reality. This interior life of a person rooted in the metaphysical reality of imago died is what shapes john Paul i's conception of gender. He argues that since God is in a triune relation of love if the man is created in his image, then man should also be in a relation of love. The complementarity of the two sexes, then, is rooted in a relationship of love, and the very differences between men and women allow them to exist in this relationship together. Since man is a composite of body and soul, and since the body makes visible the invisible nature of the soul, the very fact that men's and women's bodies physically complement each other is proof of their relationship of love. As men and women are both created in imago dei they are both equal in dignity, although they are different. For Wojtyla, those differences are what allow men and women to exist coherently together in a union of love, reflecting man's deepest identity

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