Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 153
it prove so, he is still the man who was guilty of those earlier
deeds. The issue here, however, is a much more troubling one
in some respects. It is not simply that our identities are consti-
tuted by our memories-though, of course, they are, and this
is crucially important- but also that the personhood of any of
us, in its entirety, is created by and sustained within the loves
and associations and affinities that shape us. There is no such
thing as a person in separation. Personhood as such, in fact,
is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an
act, not a thing, and it is achieved only in and through a his-
tory of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of
becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not action, dyna-
mism, an emergence into a fuller (or a retreat into a more im-
poverished) existence. And so, as I said in my First Medita-
tion, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is
not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely
accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances. A person is
first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all
shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as "the place of
the other," to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Surely
this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection.
That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not
simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn
out to be, but more crucially about the fully restored existence
of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted.
For Paul, flesh (aapg, sarx) and blood (aiμa, haima), the mor-
tal life of the "psychical body" (awμa i/;vxiKov, soma psychi-
kon), passes away, but not embodiment as such, not the "spiri-
tual body" (awμa 1rvwμariKov, soma pnevmatikon), which is
surely not merely a local, but a communal condition: Each per-
son is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its
proper nature only as the body of Christ.