Tomislav Ivančić, Hagiotherapeutic Anthropology
Man is thus created as male and female. Male and female are not two identical men, but two completely different men. What a man does not have, a woman has and what a woman does not have, a man does. They complement each other, each of them thinks differently, knows something differently, loves differently, speaks differently. These are two worlds that fit together perfectly as one.
Interestingly, the Bible says that God created man and created him both male and female and called them “man”. He did not call male and female – people, but “man”. This means that the perfection of man is not in himself, but in himself and in another.
There is no man who has not met a person of the opposite sex. A son is born to a mother and already experiences her as a woman. The daughter is also born to her father, not only from the mother and already sees the man in his father. Brothers and sisters understand, question, conflict, and reconcile with each other. Wherever we go, we will find girls and boys, young boys and girls, husbands and wives, old men and old women. This means that man completes himself, perfects himself in a person of the opposite sex, and that instils confidence among people, among men and women, that love is actually most needed to become whole. If we start thinking that we are afraid of others, that they can harm and injure us, if we only think about how I use others for some pleasure, even if it is sexual, then we endanger the other, then we cannot be with each other, then we cannot complete ourselves, then we create conflicts, aggression, violence.
To love means to let another know that he is never endangered next to you, that he will be able to develop in all ways around you, that you will never hurt or injure him, that he can safely preserve and develop his life next to you. You love another when you provide that to him, to his person.
If a man is willing to sin with a woman, he does not love her and she does not love him. They hurt each other, they became enemies to each other, they wounded their consciences, they alienated from each other, they talked about love, and in fact, they only sought pleasure, selfishness, they committed lawlessness, damaged and wounded each other. Only those man and woman love each other who live in such a way that they would never hurt each other, would never hurt each other’s conscience, would never commit iniquities with each other and would not destroy the laws of body and spirit.
This article is free. If you want to support our work, you can become our supporter. Information on how to become our associate or supporter of the Hagiotherapy Foundation Tomislav Ivančić PhD can be found here and thus contribute to the development of hagiotherapy and the realization of our vision.
He was born in Davor in 1938. After studying philosophy and theology in Zagreb and Rome, he was ordained a priest of the Zagreb Archdiocese in 1966. After achieving a master’s degree in philosophy and a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he returned to Zagreb in 1971, where he became a professor at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb. He is the head of the Chair of Fundamental Theology, and was one of the editors of the Theological Review. Areas of his scientific work are philosophy, theology and literature. He explores the relationship between philosophy and theology, faith and science, atheism and religiosity, revelation and faith, the Church and ecclesial communities, Christianity and religion, the phenomenon of sects and issues of theological epistemology. His special field of interest is the study of man’s existential-spiritual dimension, where he discovers the way of modern evangelization and the necessity of the development of spiritual medicine, which, along with somatic and psychological, is indispensable in the complete healing of man, especially in the healing of spiritual diseases and addictions. For this purpose, he developed the method of hagiotherapy and founded in 1990 in Zagreb the Center for Spiritual Help, of which he is the head. From 1971, in addition to working at the faculty, he was a student religious teacher in Zagreb, the initiator of the prayer movement within the Church of the Croats, the founder of a religious society called the Prayer and Word Community(MiR), and the leader of numerous seminars for spiritual renewal and evangelization at home and abroad. After completing his studies and scientific doctorate in fundamental theology at … (Read more at https://hagio.hr/tomislav-ivancic/).
