...on love

Here's an extract from an article I read for my theology and spirituality class. It's by Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. VI, p. 242.

“When we say that a self-understanding of man takes place in the act of loving communication with the Thou, so that everything else is a moment, presupposition, initial stage or result of this, then we also say of course eo ipso and conversely that the whole incalculable mystery of man is contained and exercised in this act of love of neighbour; it means that all anthropological statements must also be read as statements about that love which is not merely a ‘regional’ happening in the life of man but is the whole of himself in which alone he possesses himself completely… It would be necessary to show by a descriptive phenomenology of love, responsibility, loyalty, venture, and of the unfinished and eternal quality inherent in love, what breadths and depths are implied by love of the Thou, how man really experiences in it who he is, how the ‘no’ to it imprisons the whole man within the deadly lonely damnation of self-created absurdity, how the totality of reality, which freely gives itself and is accepted and understood as the blessed incomprehensibility, opens itself only if man opens himself radically in the act of love and entrusts himself to this totality."