In the life of the Church, God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life. The personal existence of God is the comprehensive and exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence or energy of God which constitutes being, but His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis of being. . . .
. . . The God of whom the Church has experience is the God who reveals Himself in history as personal existence, as distinctiveness and freedom. . . .
The identification of being with the personal existence of God--an identification with vital consequences for the truth of man and human morality--explains the revelation of the God of the Church, who is one and at the same time trinitarian. The one God is not one divine nature or essence, but primarily one person: the person of God the Father. The personal existence of God (the Father) constitutes His essence or being, making it into "hypostases": freely and from love He begets the Son and causes the Holy Spirit to proceed. Consequently, being stems not from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the freedom of its love which "hypostasizes" being into a personal and trinitarian communion. God the Father's mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal communion. . . .
. . . When the Christian revelation declares that "God is love" (1 Jn 4:16), it is not referring to one among many properties of God's "behavior," but to what God is as the fulness of trinitarian and personal communion. . . .
. . . In the light of the truth about the trinitarian hypostasis of being, the Church is enabled to shed light on the mystery of human existence, and to give an ontological foundation to human morality.
Created "in the image" of God in Trinity, man himself is one in essence according to his nature, and in many hypostases according to his persons. . . . All men have a common nature or essence, but this has no existence except as personal distinctiveness, as freedom and transcendence of their own natural predeterminations and natural necessity. The person is the hypostasis of the human essence or nature. He sums up in his existence the universality of human nature, but at the same time surpasses it, because his mode of existence is freedom and distinctiveness. . . .
. . . Man constitutes an image of God as an ontological hypostasis free from space, time and natural necessity. . . .
. . . This is why the existential hypostasis of man is more than his biological individuality. What man is as a hypostasis of life, of life eternal, is his personal distinctiveness, which is realized and revealed in the existential fact of communion and relationship with God and with his fellow men, in the freedom of love. . . .
. . . Man, however, derives his ontological hypostasis not simply from the will and energy of God, but from the manner in which God gives substance to being. This manner is personal existence, the existential potentiality for loving communion and relationship--the potentiality for true life. . . . This is why man is capable of either accepting or rejecting the ontological precondition for his existence: he can refuse the freedom of love and personal communion, and say "no" to God and cut himself off from being.
--The Freedom of Morality, pp. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Posted by Clifton at July 10, 2003 09:23 PM