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Recently, I posted a small bit on "how a Catholic must think" and hopefully those who were able to read it were able to let it sink in a little, perhaps reading it more than once. You can reveiw that here.
I know that sort of information is dense, but it is vital for improving ones understanding of theology and how better to defend the Catholic faith. Believe it or not, the Church Fathers didn't just make these things up and they didn't become popular because of their persecutions or their outspoken ways or their great sermons. The early fathers were educated very well. They debated other religious leaders (mohamadans, pagans, etc). They knew properly how to take information and assimilate it, synthesize it, or cast it out. They did it right, not because of their authority in the Church but because their teachings and marks have stood the tests of time. In philosophy we call this the Epistological problem, or the Ontological problem - which is the problem of knowledge. How do we come to know things? THAT, my friends, was the entire point of that blog entry; was to better learn, in 800 words or less, how we as people have come to have our minds formed - how we have come to learn. We now know that our knowledge MUST start with sense knowledge. This doesn't mean we know with our feelings (that would be Romanticism), but that the world can be known through the senses (after abstraction takes place).
This lesson hopefully will futher that piece, and offer some insight into gaining better ways to understand our faith, doctrine, and so-on. We need next to understand what a person and nature is, and how they relate to essence and existence. Here we go.
------ The concepts of nature and person, essence and existence are central to further examining theology. Particularly, we need to understand these in order to understand the theological matter of the Incarnation; we need to understand person, nature, and their relation to each other. First, natures express what the essence of a thing is, but does not exist outside the individual. The thing which has a nature is called a “hypostasis” and this is the thing itself and not the nature of the thing. What something is, is not the same as that it is. Along with this, we can come to understand essence. Essence can be applied to every being with the same nature; a universal. Thus, man has an essence because each individual man has a human nature. This is how nature relates to essence; from our experience with sense-knowledge we have come to understand the universal-human-essence. Essence/nature is the “what” something is.
The definition on “person” came from Boethius (480-524 AD) who said a person is, “an individual substance of rational nature.” The main thing to understand is that the person is set apart from all creation because of its rational nature, the intellect and will. The separation of the nature and person is that a person is not its nature, with the exception of God who is his nature. From here we can understand existence. Existence is the “that it is” of a person, that it is an individual in reality.
The knowledge of a nature, even a universal one, nature does not bring forth existence. For example, one can imagine a beagle they wish for their birthday, but that is from the universal knowledge of one and its does not actually exist. Thus, the individual substance of rational nature (Boethius) is a universal actually existing. Real beings have essence and existence. ------
Okay, that was deep and complicated so let me now put it into example with Mary as the "Mother of God". God is said to be three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I said that no person is their nature with the exception of God because God is his nature (which is existence) because he is always existing. Some people dispute that Mary is not the mother of God, but the mother of Christ's human nature. But philosophy disputes this because mother's give birth to PERSONS, not NATURE. She is not the mother of human nature or any other nature. In other words, because Jesus is a person of the Trinity - God - and Mary gave birth to Jesus, she is rightfully called the Mother of God, theotokos (God -bearer).
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