In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, the beloved one whom God Himself has chosen and designated to be Mother of all who have been redeemed in Christ. Followed by the Church is the family which, by hallowed and repeated usage, forms the domestic Church, whose actions are meant to model the life of the Holy Family. And, finally, there is the individual.
But this is not the isolated individual, uprooted from the sources that nourish and give life. If it is to be a culture of life, one whose lineaments have been shaped by the event of Jesus Christ, then it will not impede the actions of the true self, averse to all that is best for it; but only the atomized self, the self-determined self, living apart from others in a state of enmity and opposition to anything that tries to thwart its appetites and desires.
Here, then, are the two contrasting styles which currently contend for mastery in the public life, each refusing to settle for anything less than a complete sweep of the culture, however fiercely at variance their views of ultimate reality may be. On the one hand, there is the solipsist, the one who lives for himself alone, whose appetite for pleasure must not be trifled with by appeals to altruism or the common good. While, on the other hand, there is the selfless man, who lives entirely for God and neighbor and whose highest civic ambition is to assist in the creation of a genuinely Christian culture. Now, to be sure, the adherents of each remain rooted in a finite world, anchored therefore to the same contingent state we must all endure, which means neither one can possibly lay claim to being the cause of its own existence.
By that plain and ineluctable fact, therefore, each necessarily stands in relation to an Infinite and Absolute Other. But whereas the solipsist aims to absolutize himself, standing in majestic isolation from God, in defiance of God, while constantly disdaining the company of others, the genuinely selfless man is content to bow down before the true and everlasting Absolute and, thus, to serve others because they bear His image. It is he who, in accepting his creaturely status, his radical dependency upon Another, is free to give himself away and thus find and fulfill himself in doing so. He alone understands that before God or neighbor, the same truth applies: that in order to be at all, one must remain always in relation to another.
Continue reading at Crisis Magazine