Acton Experience 2025: Christian Vision of the Person Long Form Handout

This is the long version of the handout with additional quotes and a reading list for your reference.

Jun 19, 2025

Here is the longer version of the Acton University Handout for Christian Vision of the Person. You can read it here or download the attached PDF

The Christian Vision Of The Person Long Handout

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The Christian Vision of the Person and Society

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

C.S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory

Introduction: The Person at the Center of Society and the Economy

How we understand the nature and destiny of the human person shapes everything else: Politics, Economics, Society, Morality, Family, Marriage, Sexuality, Life and Death

“The primary fault of socialism is anthropological in nature”—John Paul II

· Genesis: Adam and Eve and the nature of the person

· If we are going to live like Christians—we have to think like Christians.

· Secularism is not neutral.

· Prudence vs Doctrine

Christian Vision of the Human Person

Coherent
Reasonable
Recognizes the Complexity of the Person (not reductionist)
Beautiful
Exciting

Approach is to Think:

· Biblically

· Philosophically

· With the Tradition

· Phenomenologically: Lived experience, biologically, sociologically

One of the Key Themes of this lecture: Go back to your experience

Many things we are told about the person are incoherent on their own terms, do not resonate with the way with live, and do not match with common sense.

“But common sense is unable to find itself any more in what the official interpreters of reality want us to believe. They want us to believe that we are not what we think we are. They want us to believe that what we understand truth to be does not exist and likewise what we mean by the world “love.” Robert Spaemann

7 Characteristics of The Human Person

1. Intelligence and Reason

This is an overarching characteristic of the person that impacts everything else

· Discursive Reasoning

· Conceptual Thought

· Self-reflection

· Interiority

· Intellect is Oriented to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

· Speculative Intellect—directed to “what is”

· Practical and Moral Reasoning

Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided.

· Poetic Knowledge – Connatural Knowing – Inarticulate Rationality

Primer on Reason

o Modern Reason limited to the Empirical is incoherent on its own terms

o Serious consequences for Politics

Removes justice and reduces politics to power / efficiency

o Serious consequences for fundamental human questions and how we understand the person

Love, justice, beauty, goodness, truth, compassion etc. all pushed outside the realm of reason

2. Free

Connected to Reason
Moral Agent
Responsible
Capacity for self-donation sacrifice
Human Person vs. Animal
Choices vs Free Decisions
Genesis: Man is designed to protect, teach, serve (sacrifice) for women and children
Requires Freedom

Dominant views of Freedom

Materialism: Deterministic and rejects free will. Determined by genes, biology, neurology, environment

Radical Autonomy: Freedom is exercise of will with no end or limit

“An irrational will is not a free will”- Truth and Tolerance

Christian vision—Freedom is complex and influenced by a number of factors. But freedom has a purpose.
Freedom is for love.

3. Good but Fallen

We are created in the image of God and are good, but because of original sin we are fallen

Capable of heroic goodness and sacrifice, but also capable of profound evil
Concupiscence—St. Paul: Do what I hate….
- There is a need for coercion.
- There must be limits on the rulers:
  - Augustine: “Libido dominandi”
  - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” –Lord Acton

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. –James Madison, Federalist Papers #51

Contrast with Human Perfectibility: Key difference between Christian and most modern visions of the person and society is over the issue of sin and human perfectibility.

4. Social Beings

Persons achieve human flourishing in relationships with others.
Not simply an “individual”
Dominant secular idea of individual in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are myth.
Intentional alternative to Genesis Narrative

The Family is the fundamental unit of society. The family is a natural community and pre-political unit. It is not merely a construct of society but reflects the social nature of the human person and is a reflection of the Holy Trinity.

State redefinition of marriage is totalitarian act.

5. Embodied, Embedded Persons

We are not souls floating around in a body--or a soul driving our body like a person drives a car.

We are embodied persons.
We are made from the dust of earth.
What we do / happens to us in our bodies impacts our soul/spirit/emotions and vice versa.

We are animals—but rational animals with a nature that is both material and spiritual.

Our soul is not a bit in our body--it is the animating principle.

2 Dominant Fallacies

Materialist: We are just our bodies. Matter is all that matters.
Spiritualist: Our Bodies are distinct from our personhood

6. Spiritual Emotions

We have the capacity for spiritual emotions.

Passions are not opposed to reason per se—they must be ordered and integrated by reason.

Anger
Lust
Disordered response to a person
Unreasonable – offense against reason
Purity: Reasonable and proper response to sexual values

Karol Wojtyla/JP II: Spiritual Emotions

C.S. Lewis: “Reasonable Emotions”

Dietrich von Hildebrand “Intelligible Spiritual Affectivity”

Through the intellect and in conjunction with the will we say yes or no
These are things like love, mercy, compassion.
- Love is not blind; it sees clearly and is creative.

7. Everlasting: “Eternal Destiny”

Image and Likeness of God
Theosis—Deiformity

“In the long run we are all dead,” but in the longer run there is what CS Lewis calls a “deeper magic” We have an eternal destiny; we are called to eternal life with God and the resurrection of the body. In our flesh we shall see God.

Our eternal destiny matters right now: All our political, economic, charitable, and social decisions need to be made in the light of our eternal destiny.

You’ve Never Met a Mere Mortal

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” C.S. Lewis The Weight of Glory

Benedict XVI

“…only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.

The Moral Imagination - Michael Matheson Miller

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