Folia Theologica et Canonica 3. 25/17 (2014)

IUS CANONICUM - Michael Carragher, O.P., The sacrament of confirmation and personal development

THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT 181

Scripture says quite simply that humans were made in the image and likeness of God. Finnis writes that “a peculiarly significant sign of the human person’s status as an imago Dei is our freedom of choice (Gaudium et spes 17). Free choice is a reality almost universally misunderstood and denied outside the peoples formed by the Old and New Covenants”.21

But this is an issue that keeps cropping up under different guises. In the case at hand one could postulate that a human being as already constituted could not be anything other than what one actually and presently sees. But the power of God can in no way be coerced or constrained. Even in the sacramental arena God can communicate help and the effects (reconciliation, healing) of the sacraments independently of the sacraments, as happened on the day of Pentecost. As Finnis summarizes: “the diversity of goods God richly creates for his glory - including the many-sided good of persons whose fulfillment depends in part upon their free and self-shaping choices - renders incoherent the notion of a ‘best of all possible worlds’, yet leaves intact the biblically and philosophically appropriate judgment that the created outcome of a wisdom which guides without determining the divine generosity is an outcome valde bon[um]\ God saw that it was very good (Genesis 1:31 )”.22 It is idle speculation to wonder if a human being could be created differently. As God makes decisions, so do humans. We work with what we have. Wisdom is the operative word in this context. A particular decision was made otherwise nothing would have taken place. In the quotation cited from Finnis the notion of ‘the many-sided goods” calls for further elaboration as well as the reality of freedom-of-choice. How these realities interact and influence one another will now be addressed.

Following St. Thomas, perhaps one can describe a human person by embracing his methodology.23

But there is another type of intellect, viz., the human intellect, which (a) is not its own act of understanding and which (b) is such that the primary object of its act of understanding is not its own essence but instead something extrinsic, viz., the nature of a material thing. And so what is understood in the first place by the human intellect is an object of this latter sort, and what is understood in the second place is the very act by which the (primary) object is understood. Furthermore, by this act

21 Finnis supra 9 page 183.

22 Ibid. 184.

23 I. q. 87, a. 3: “Est autem alius intellectus, scilicet humánus, qui nec est suum intellegere, nec sui intelligere est obiectum primum ipsa eius essentia, sed aliquid extrinsecum scilicet natura materiális rei. Et ideo id quod primo cognoscitur ab intellectu humano, est huiusmodi obiectum, et secondario cognoscitur ipse actus quo cognoscitur obiectum; et per actum cognoscitur ipse intellectus , cuius est perfectioo ipsum intelligere. Et ideo Philiosophus (de Anima 11. C 4 n. 1 Bk 1050a36) 415al6-21 dich quod obiecta praecognoscuntur actibus, et actus potentiis.”