Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: In his Theology o f the Body, Pope John Paul II returns again and again to the "solitude" of Adam, a state that he applies equally to the individual woman.This solitude, on the one hand, implies loneliness and incompleteness.But these charac teristics are not simply negative.Indeed, they provide the incentive, the existential urgency for individual human beings to overcome this "frontier of solitude"1 and fulfill their destiny as persons loving other persons.The anguish of this solitude, which bears a "transcendental"* 2 implication, as John Paul states, reminds us that each of us is not meant to remain a solitude but to become a synthesis.This synthe sis takes place through love and is realized in the form of a communion of persons.The experience of solitude sharpens both self-consciousness and self-deter mination, that is, an acute sense of self as well as a strong sense of our need to build our future and to give to others.But we are a synthesis in other ways.We are a unity not only of present and future, self and other, but also of body and soul, the natural and the supernatural, the need to give and the need to receive love.
DOI: 10.5840/ncbq20033179
Author: Donald DeMarco
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2013157997