JPII's Personalism in the Theo of the Body

Interesting. What's at the link (below) fills in the gaps.

...St Thomas, following Aristotle, saw the soul-body union through the body. From this point of view, the soul exists in the body and is body-based.

In the light of the "image and likeness of God," Pope John Paul II sees the soul-body union from the opposite direction. He sees the body through the soul, which means that the body exists in the soul as the soul's intrinsic self-expression. The result is a definite shift in perspective, but with identical moral conclusions -- to the great disappointment of today's pro-choice personalists.

...Seeing the soul through the body is proper for the philosophy of nature, which approaches the spiritual through the material. But it is not proper for the philosophy of being, which approaches all things as beings -- material and spiritual -- through their relationships within themselves and with all others.

In the light of being (the first intuitive principle of reason recognized by the traditional philosophy), we can see all beings differently than we see them as objects in nature. As an object in the material world, the human being has a body-based immortal soul, and is definable as a rational animal. but nowhere does Scripture say, or even imply, that we are basically animals. Instead, we are like God (Genesis 1:26-27) and a little less than the angels (Psalm 8:5). When this supernatural light shines on our natural intuition of being, we can better see ourselves as persons. In the resultant metaphysical light, we can begin to see that we do not have a biology-based personhood, but a person-based biology.

OK. And there's even a touch of Plato in this essay:

...Our most specific difference from the animals is not our power to reason, as the "rational animal" definition indicates, but our intellectually intuitive power to know the begin of anything as a being: this is what it is. Without an immediate intellectual intuition of the being of a thing we are sensing (through, beyond, and simultaneously with our sensing), we could not wonder what that thing is. Without the intuition of being we could not think and reason about anything; it would be impossible. Thus, we have a person-based rationality.

So much for 'relativism.'

HT: BlackHat