Thursday, May 7, 2020

Truth is Person: J. Ratzinger Solution to Relativism

Only in the human person (defined by the Person of Christ) is the problem of relativism with truth solved. It is in the gift of self, in the experience of love, that man and history make sense. Creation and man are a gift from God, and man realizes himself as such in the surrender of his person for love, of which he is capable by the gift of God that he receives. Man realizes himself by giving himself away (giving away the gift received of his being) because he is the image and likeness of the God Love. In love, in the disinterestedly generous commitment (entrega) of self, is where man in the world, and the whole world, take on their definitive and complete meaning.

This seems to me to be Ratzinger's solution to the problem of a relativism that seeks to support and affirm the particularity of human experience and activity without ever defining what it means to be a man, or why, because it is based only on aspects of reality. The whole of reality is only found in the end of reality which is love, relationship between persons, surrender (entrega)

It is in the person, in love, that the particular and the universal come together, the historical and the eternal.

--Plinthos