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    Person Vs Individual - Yannaras

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    antoniocaraffa
    This document discusses the difference between the terms "person" and "individual". It states that in everyday speech, these terms are often used interchangeably but they actually have opposite meanings. An "individual" refers to defining a human by their common natural characteristics, while a "person" emphasizes their unique distinctiveness. It argues that true knowledge of another's distinctiveness as a person can only be achieved through direct personal relationships, communion, and love, which accepts the whole person rather than projecting individual preferences onto them. Loving relationships, especially sexual love between partners, can provide the fullest revelation and knowledge of one another as unique persons.

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    Person Vs Individual - Yannaras

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    antoniocaraffa
    84 views2 pages
    This document discusses the difference between the terms "person" and "individual". It states that in everyday speech, these terms are often used interchangeably but they actually have opposite meanings. An "individual" refers to defining a human by their common natural characteristics, while a "person" emphasizes their unique distinctiveness. It argues that true knowledge of another's distinctiveness as a person can only be achieved through direct personal relationships, communion, and love, which accepts the whole person rather than projecting individual preferences onto them. Loving relationships, especially sexual love between partners, can provide the fullest revelation and knowledge of one another as unique persons.

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    Person vs Individual_Yannaras

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    This document discusses the difference between the terms "person" and "individual". It states that in everyday speech, these terms are often used interchangeably but they actually have opposite meanings. An "individual" refers to defining a human by their common natural characteristics, while a "person" emphasizes their unique distinctiveness. It argues that true knowledge of another's distinctiveness as a person can only be achieved through direct personal relationships, communion, and love, which accepts the whole person rather than projecting individual preferences onto them. Loving relationships, especially sexual love between partners, can provide the fullest revelation and knowledge of one another as unique persons.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    84 views2 pages

    Person Vs Individual - Yannaras

    Uploaded by

    antoniocaraffa
    This document discusses the difference between the terms "person" and "individual". It states that in everyday speech, these terms are often used interchangeably but they actually have opposite meanings. An "individual" refers to defining a human by their common natural characteristics, while a "person" emphasizes their unique distinctiveness. It argues that true knowledge of another's distinctiveness as a person can only be achieved through direct personal relationships, communion, and love, which accepts the whole person rather than projecting individual preferences onto them. Loving relationships, especially sexual love between partners, can provide the fullest revelation and knowledge of one another as unique persons.

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    of 2

    Christos Yannaras

    Person and individual


    Chapter 1, Section 6 of The Freedom of Morality (St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1984), pp. 22-23.

    In everyday speech, we tend to distort the meaning of the word person. What we call person or personal designates rather more the individual. We have grown accustomed to regarding the terms person and individual as virtually synonymous, and we use the two indifferently to express the same thing. From one point of view, however, person and individual are opposite in meaning (see V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), p. 121f.) The individual is the denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person, the attempt to define human existence using the objective properties of mans common nature, and quantitative comparisons and analogies. Chiefly in the field of sociology and politics, the human being is frequently identified with the idea of numerical individuality. Sometimes this rationalistic process of leveling people out is considered progress, since it helps to make the organization of society more efficient. We neutralize the human being into a social unit, bearing the characteristics, the needs and desires, which are common to all. We try to achieve some rationalistic arrangement for the rights of the individual, or an objective implementation of social justice which makes all individual beings alike and denies them personal distinctiveness. In everyday life, too, we generally distinguish persons by applying to individuals the characteristics and attributes common to human nature, with merely quantitative differentiations. When we want to designate a person, we make a collection of individual attributes and natural characteristics which are never personal in the sense of being unique and unrepeatable, however fine the quantitative nuances we achieve for designating individuals. We say, for instance, that so-and-so is a man of such-and-such height, with such-and-such a facial appearance, character, emotional make-up and so on. But however many detailed descriptions we give, they are bound to fit more than one person, for the existential uniqueness and distinctiveness of the personal manifestation is impossible to define objectively, in the words and formulae of our common speech. Personal distinctiveness is revealed and known only within the framework of direct personal relationship and communion, only by participation in the principle of personal immediacy, or of the loving and creative force which distinguishes the person from the

    common nature, And this revelation and knowledge of personal distinctiveness becomes ever more full as the fact of communion and relationship achieves its wholeness in love. Love is the supreme road to knowledge of the person, because it is an acceptance of the other person as a whole, It does not project onto the other person individual preferences, demands or desires, but accepts him as he is, in the fulness, of his personal uniqueness. This is why knowledge of the distinctiveness of the person achieves its ultimate fulness in the self-transcendence and offering of self that is sexual love, and why, in the language of the Bible, sexual intercourse is identified with knowledge of a person (cf. Gn 4:1, 4:17, 4:25; Mt 1:25; Lk 1:34; R. Bultmann, in Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. G. Kittel, vol. I (Bonn, 1950), P. 199). Personal distinctiveness forms the image of God in man. It is the mode of existence shared by God and man, the ethos of trinitarian life imprinted upon the human being. In the Orthodox Church and its theology, we study man as an image of God, and not God as an image of man exalted into an absolute. The revelation of the personal God in history manifests to us the truth about man, his ethos and the nobility of his descent. This does not mean that we apply some authoritatively given theoretical principle to the interpretation of human existence. In the historical revelation of God, we study true personal existence free from any constraint from the constraint imposed on man by his own nature after his fall, which was the free subjection of his personal distinctiveness to the necessities and dictates of natural individuality....

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