To Fr. John Wais: How
Barron resolves the conundrum of Thomistic metaphysics where a non-existing
essence receives (without any ontological positivity) and limits esse to
be this esse: Basically the meaning of reality (Being) is the Person of Christ
Who, as Ipsum Esse, is Creator, and
as man is created, and quite
specifically is woman. Therefore, the Creator and the created are
sustained within the Person of Christ as donation and reception. The humanity
of Christ is taken entirely from the Virgin and “assumed” by His divine “I.”
The Council of Constantinople III taught that as the flesh of Christ is
dynamized by the Esse Personale of the Logos, so also is the will without
being destroyed by inclusion in the divine Person. The divine will and the
human will are ontologically distinct, the one uncreated as divine Person, the
other as created yet assumed by the divine Person as His (human will), but they
are one
because it is the one Person alone who wills. And so, the freedom of Christ’s human will
achieves its fulfillment as will and free -precisely as the human will of the
divine Person. That freedom is now
understood as divinized by self-gift to death on the Cross: “The Crucified
Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his
disciples to share in his freedom” (John Paul II, Veritatis splendor #85). And so, human freedom, as everything in
the human person made in the image of the Divine “I” of the Son, finds his/her
meaning in Christ.
Since the human and created has all been taken
from our Lady, and humanity is the real meaning of being and the created cosmos
as receptive of esse, then the very
receptivity of created being must be understood as feminine. Our Lady and the
feminine receptivity and tenderness is then the very meaning of the created
order. Barron suggests that this is the very context of thomistic metaphysics.
Keep in mind, that for Thomas, in God there is nothing but Esse. Therefore, each of the Persons is Esse (not as an abstraction): "I and the Father are one" [Jn. 10, 30]; and yet, "the Father is greater than I" [Jn. 14, 28]. In S. th. III, 17, 2, Thomas replies: "Since in Christ there are two natures and one subsisting subject, it necessarily follows that what pertains to nature is in Christ two-fold, while what pertains to the subsisting subject is one only. Now the act of existence [Esse] pertains both to nature and to the subsisting subject. It pertains to the subject as to that which possesses existence [Thomas is speaking analogically from created esse, because God does not have esse, but
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