Our Own Heart, Beating Higher and Higher: On the Possibility of Genuine Encounter Among Human Beings

Because of the necessarily interwoven nature of existence and the human person’s formation in the image and likeness of God, one inherently has enough in common with any other in order to behold him/her properly. Such an interaction increases the beholder's proximity to both the beheld and God simultaneously; it enables one to briefly glimpse these pieces of reality as God Himself does. Such a claim falls primarily under Saint Thomas Aquinas’s foundation of creation (especially his fusion of Plato’s idea of participation and Aristotle’s concept of act and potency, resulting in his own contribution of esse and essence) and Saint Augustine’s concept of the human person. This remains true even under the pressing weight of liberalistic divisiveness and such potent objects as those raised by Muriel Rukeyser’s “Effort at Speech Between Two People,” Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.”