Untitled Homily
For a person should not be merely a means to an end for another person.* This is excluded due to the very nature of the person, due to what every person simply is. For the person is a subject that is thinking and capable of self-determination—these are two properties that first of all we discover in the interiority of the person. Accordingly then, every person is capable by his nature to define his ends himself.14 When someone else treats a person exclusively as a means to an end, then the person is violated in what belongs to his very essence and at the same time constitutes his natural right. It is clear that it must be demanded from the person, as a thinking individual, that those ends be truly good, for striving for evil ends is contrary to the rational nature of the person.†
When different persons consciously choose an end together, this makes them equal to each other, thereby excluding a subordination of one person to another.
Love, as has been said, is conditioned by the common relation of persons to the same good that they choose as an end and to which they subordinate themselves. Marriage is one of the most important areas for realizing this principle. For in marriage, two persons, a woman and a man, unite in such a way that they become in a sense “one flesh” (to use the words of the Book of Genesis), that is, so to speak, one common subject of sexual life. How can it be ensured that a person does not then become for the other—a woman for a man, and a man for a woman—merely a means to an end, that is, an object used to attain only one’s own end? In order to exclude this possibility, both of them must then have a common end. Concerning marriage, this end is procreation, progeny, the family, and at the same time the whole constantly growing maturity of the relationship between both persons in all the spheres brought by the spousal relationship itself.
It is necessary to seek this ground of the commandment to love in a different axiology, in a different system of values than the system of utilitarianism—it must be precisely the personalistic axiology, within which the value of the person is always higher than the value of pleasure (and therefore the person cannot be subordinated to pleasure; he cannot serve as a means to the end which is pleasure). So