Being as an Image of Divine Love: A Symposium on Homo Abyssus

“[N]ot only the individual, but precisely the communion between human persons is that for the sake of which being is personally given by God.”

“As a dialogical being, man has always, from the beginning, arrived at himself from the other.”

“Being is the unity of creation and its mobility, its fecundity, and its life.”

“Only from the encounter with another human being can a human being return to himself and grasp himself as being a gift mediated through the ontological difference.”

“[T]here is no more decisive expression of the dominion of the world entrusted to man than the task of saying things in an adequate way that does justice to their essence and gratuitously, mercifully, elevating them to a mode of existence not given in their essence alone.”

“The otherness of the finite as good is consolidated, affirmed in the primal ‘It is very good.’”

“Can one even understand Christianity before being awakened to the mystery of being, and to the question of one’s own existence?”

“It is no embarrassment to respond.”

“Being’s nonsubsistence . . . is precisely what allows it to transform distance into intimacy.”