Responsibility Again III

Extract

Responsibility implies in the responsible person a nature to be served : our own human nature and that of our fellow men in all its kinship with other creatures and all its dependence on God. The service of nature in this sense involves service in and with our bodies : and it involves the service of bodily nature in others—not only in other persons but in all the bodily creation. For bodily nature, although indeed it is fashioned in accordance with the divine intellect, is answerable to God in man and not elsewhere. And this service of bodily nature is not any kind of task imposed from without, but is implied in the norm of our humanity and thus in the law of our understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in.

Thus the norm of our bodily life implies no bondage to material nature although it implies service in and of the body. Such service is responsible precisely to the extent that it is in obedience to our understanding, free to the extent the understanding we obey is our own. A distinction is noted here between the precise bearing of freedom and of responsibility, although in the integrity of human nature they inseparably imply each other.

‘Outside’ the integrity of human nature is the domain of sin, considered—precisely from the point of view we have adopted—as contra naturam. Thus, in the shattered and scattered consciousness which belongs to sin, freedom—obedience to the law of our own understanding so far as it is ours—may be held as a political or quasi-ethical ideal, even though the understanding be false and its law, absolutely speaking, no law.