About our motto: tua res agitur
It comes originally from Horace, Book I, epistle xviii, line 84: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet. (It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.)
Its meaning for the Personalist Project is best explained by a passage from Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Das Wesen der Liebe (The Nature of Love). Here it is in John F. Crosby’s forthcoming translation:
A moral call is addressed to someone to intervene in a certain situation; perhaps another is in danger, or perhaps he has to refuse to do some evil which is asked of him. He grasps the morally relevant value, he understands its call, he is aware of the moral obligation, which appeals to his conscience. On the one hand, we have here a high-point of transcendence, in the pure commitment to the morally relevant good. But on the other hand, this call, insofar as it is morally obligatory, pre-eminently contains the element of ‘tua res agitur’ (the thing concerns you’). In a certain sense this call is my most intimate and personal concern, in which I experience the uniqueness of my self. Supreme objectivity and supreme subjectivity interpenetrate here. One can even say we have the dramatic high-point of the ‘tua res agitur’ in our earthly existence...It is not just the ‘issue’ which is at stake; I and my salvation are just as much at stake.
Two aspects in particular resonate with us:
First, the interests and inquiries of the personalist project are not academic in the negative sense, but profoundly existential. The truth we are investigating is of intimate and ultimate concern to us personally.
Secondly, that at this height or depth of truth and value “supreme objectivity and supreme subjectivity interpenetrate”.