Abstract

This dissertation is about the philosophical models used by two Christian thinkers to support their theological claims for understanding the whole of reality as personal. This is a theological claim because central to each thinker's understanding of reality as personal is the idea of the specifically personal God of Christianity. The two thinkers are the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. ;I argue that Teilhard de Chardin uses an organic model of unity as the foundation for understanding the whole of reality as personal. Most important to his organic account is the resulting vision of the normative form of personal relations as following the pattern of an organic unity in which the elements making up the organic whole are all in complementary, functional relationship to one another. The thesis of the dissertation is this is a flawed way of understanding the relationality of persons. It is flawed first in that it logically does not explicate a number of the insights into the nature of personal existence which Teilhard rightly discerned. But it is also flawed in that it results in a hierarchical account of human relationships which stands in conflict with the kind of personal relations witnessed to in the Christian Gospels. ;John Macmurray's alternative model of unity, the "form of the personal", is offered as a corrective to the inadequacies of Teilhard's organic model. The form of the personal is derived by Macmurray from a consideration of the nature and activity of persons. Insisting that persons must be understood first as agents, and not primarily or exclusively as subjects, Macmurray arrived at this alternative model of unity which he defined as a unity in which the positive includes and is constituted by its own negative. This alternative form of unity is considered in contrast to Teilhard's organic form. I argue that its resulting vision of personal relations based on mutuality, equality and love is more consistent with and supportive of a Christian understanding of the kind of relations with others to which we are called by God in Christ