Contenu du sommaire : La singularité de la personne : entre liberté et humilité

If a metaphysics of personhood wishes to avoid following a purely empirical approach, or falling into a pure formalism, it will have to restore a new meaning to the term person. By going back to medieval philosophy, it becomes possible to conceive of a type of personhood without a self, and so to understand persons as moral agents whose dignity lies in their uniqueness and their being chosen to fulfil a vocation.

From the moment it first appears in the Monologion (i.e. in trinitarian theology), the concept of person, which Anselm borrowed from Boetius, is reworked by him : the emphasis now lies on the idea of the individual. The present article contemplates taking up this concept in trinitarian theology and applying it to a conception of the human person and human action.

Bonaventure examines the School's definition of the person as an “individuated substance distinguished by a property”, and demonstrates its significance for theology, angelology and anthropology. He reminds Latin theology that, although they refer to relations, divine persons are nevertheless individuals. And, in typically Franciscan style, he finds that the lower rank occupied by human beings, as compared with angels, is a property that marks their eminence, qualifying them as specifically human persons.

In the theological tradition, the notion of acceptio personarum is opposed to that of merit: respect of persons is referred to when, in the conferring of a benefit, the beneficiary is singled out, not on the basis of any so to speak objective merits, but on the basis of the subjective disposition of the benefactor. The article considers the way in which the notion is used in the Scholastic debate over the relation between divine grace and human merit, focusing mainly on the different positions of Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent. In order to preserve God from the allegation of acceptio personarum, while at the same time maintaining the principle of the absolute gratuity of grace, Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent adopt different strategies. Aquinas, who seems to be more faithful to Augustine's mature position, affirms that, without causing offense to distributive justice, God can indeed treat individuals unequally when dispensing grace, since grace, being something that is not earned, has nothing whatever to do with distributive justice. Henry, on the other hand, proposes that even if there is no merit which as such could make a person worthy of receiving grace, and so bring grace within the bounds of distributive justice, human beings nevertheless have a certain “congruence” that God cannot just set aside. Rather than acting arbitrarily, God takes into account (although without being obliged to do so) not just persons as such, but the particular conditions in which they find themselves (their congruence).

If the concept of “person” initially seems alien to the work of Franz Rosenzweig, it would nevertheless appear that what he means by the word “soul” in the Star of Redemption, and his descriptions of its successive conversions, questions the very status of a “concept” of person. Thus, the soul, which is the feminine expression of an insurmountable tension between Eros and Thanatos, allows us to apprehend the person as a fleeting concept, or one that is always in the process of becoming. This is akin to the biblical paradigm of the amorous exile of the Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs, which serves as a counterpoint to Revelation in the Star of Redemption.