The Human Person as/is A Gift

            In his book entitled A Theology of the Body: Man and Woman He Created Them Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) states that the human person is a gift. Man does not simply receive a gift, he is a gift. And how does man know this gift? Wojtyla clarifies that the person realizes that he himself is a gift within the gift of creation and “is able to understand the very meaning of the gift in the call from nothing to existence.” He is a gift in the creation. He realizes this the moment he is aware that he came into existence from nothing.

            For Wojtyla, the gift can never be limited to one dimension. In the “gift-of-self giving and accepting the gift interpenetrates in such a way that the very act of giving becomes acceptance, and acceptance transforms itself into giving.” The human person is meant to “exist in a relation of reciprocal gift.” The gift is the help, of which God spoke when he said “It is not good that the man should be alone; I want to make a helper similar to himself.”

            The gift relieves man’s ‘aloneness,’ because he is given a helper. It reveals the essence of personhood that both need to become the gift for each other. For Wojtyla says, “These expressions, that is the adjective “alone” and the noun “help” seem to be the key for understanding the essence of the gift on the level of man, as the existential content inscribed in the truth of the “Image of God.” In fact the concept of gift reveals a particular characteristic of human existence and of the very essence of the person who needs to become a gift.

(An extract from the MPh dissertation on The Human Person according to Karol Josef Wojtyla)