II. Man as a Structured Unit

12. Man is an ordered unit and whole, a microcosm, a sort of state whose charter, determined by the end of the whole, subordinates to this end the activity of the parts according to the true order of their value and function. This charter is, in the final analysis, of an ontological and metaphysical origin, not a psychological and personal one. There are those who have thought it necessary to accentuate the opposition between the metaphysical and the psychological. A completely wrong approach! The psychic itself belongs to the domain of the ontological and metaphysical.

13. We have recalled this truth to you in order to base on it a remark about man in the concrete, whose internal order is being here examined. Indeed, the effort has been made to establish the contradiction between traditional psychology and ethics relative to modern psychotherapy and clinical psychology.

14. Traditional psychology and ethics, it is affirmed, have for their object the abstract being of man, homo ut sic (man as such), who assuredly exists nowhere. The clarity and logical connection of these disciplines merits admiration, but they suffer from a basic fault. They are inapplicable to real man as he exists. Clinical psychology, on the contrary, deals with real man, with homo at hic. And the conclusion is: Between the two conceptions there opens an abyss impossible to surmount as long as traditional psychology and ethics do not change their position.

15. The study of the constitution of real man, ought, in fact, to take as object "existential" man, such as he is, such as his natural dispositions, the influences of his milieu, education, his personal development, his intimate experiences and external events have made him. It is only man in the concrete that exists. And yet, the structure of this personal ego obeys in the smallest detail the ontological and metaphysical laws of human nature of which We have spoken above. They have formed it and thus should govern and judge it. The reason behind this is that "existential" man identifies himself in his intimate structure with "essential" man.

16. The essential structure of man does not disappear when individual notes are added to it. It is not further transformed in another human nature. But the charter, of which We spoke just now, rests precisely in its principal terms on the essential structure of real man, man in the concrete.

17. Consequently, it would be erroneous to establish for real life norms which would deviate from natural and Christian morality, and which, for want of a better word, could be called "personalist" ethics. The latter would without doubt receive a certain "orientation" from the former, but this would not admit of any strict obligation. The law of the structure of man in the concrete is not to be invented but applied.