A profoundly counter-cultural implication of Chalcedonian Christology

     "Second, in personal realities all nature terms must be interpreted in a way that is in conformity with, but also not in opposition to, personal identity, and vice versa.  There’s never a dialectic or a distinction of co-extensivity between personhood and nature.  Negatively speaking—what am I excluding here?—negatively speaking, it’s a great mistake to oppose natural identity, for example being human by nature or being a biological animal, for example, with personal identity, as if one must either advocate for an ontology of persons or an ontology of natures.  One way to make this error is to claim that a serious study of human nature does away with personhood and [that] personal dignity is a mere folklore concept from pre-modern culture.  Another way to do so is to claim that the acknowledgement of human personhood and of personal freedom requires that we delimit or deny the reality of nature as a normative concept for free human action or thought, as if the personal agent could or even must determine or mutate his nature in a plastic fashion in the service of his personal freedom or will to power.  In reality, all personal acts of knowledge and love are also intrinsically natural acts stemming from the natural principles of human knowledge and free will."

     Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., "Chalcedonian Christology and the concept of pure nature," 21:30 and following, a lecture delivered on Friday, 3 December 2021, at the Inaugural Pinckaers Chair Conference "Grace and nature:  contemporary controversies," The Angelicum Thomistic Institute, Rome, underscoring mine.