Lesson 3 - Communio Personarum, “Communion of Persons”

​7th General Audience, October 31, 1979
 
1. The philosophical anthropology is expressed in the Lord God formed man with dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being Gen. 2:7 expressing the relationship between soul and body.
 
This living being is distinguished from all other living beings of the visible world. From the beginning awareness of man’s superiority: only he is able to cultivate the earth and subdue. Only he is able to name the creatures.
 
2. The structure of this body is such that it permits him to be the author of genuinely human activity --  in this activity the body expresses the person -- who man is and ought to be -- as a result of his consciousness and self-determination.
 
The Alternative between Death and Immortality
 
2. Man is placed before thy mystery of the tree of knowledge, You may eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for when you eat of it you shall certainly die Gen. 2:16-17). Man’s existence that he received from the Creator is that of subjectivity and bodyliness.
 
John Paul asks the question whether man could have understood the words “you shall die” since man’s only experience was that of existing in this life.This word “die” must have appeared as a radical antithesis of everything that man had been endowed with.

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