John Paul II: Faithful witness to the Presence in the ethics of self gift

Abstract

The pastoral motivation that always encouraged the figure of K. Wojtyla before he was pope, and later as pope John Paul II, led him to delve into ethics science to try to elaborate an ethics corpus whose roots and principles were capable of  giving reason for the dignity of the integrality of the person. To do this, he analyzed in depth the contributions of Kant and Scheler to ethics science, showing their achievements and their deficiencies, and raised the advisability of another ethical proposal based on interpersonal relationships in love, taking fidelity as a contrasting element to prove its solidity. Thus, a new context appears in the study of ethics that combines the best of the philosophical tradition with radically new elements, such as Wojtylian notions of adequate anthropology, theology of the body, personalistic norm, or hermeneutics of the gift, to name just a few. His integrative vision magnificently conjugated the philosophical and theological dimension of anthropology, based on the analogy of love between an original Love —Trinitarian Mystery— and a love shared in the imago Dei which is interpersonal communion. In this analogy, marriage and family constitute a true tropes of intra-Trinitarian love.