The ecology of the human is defined by limits and consequences which become the blue lines in the notebook of existence―unerring and constant laws in which the human is defined against reality. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.” He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. “Man is not merely self-creating freedom. The two elements must go together, he declared, if human freedom is fully to be realized: “Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will”, the Pope elaborated. Speaking in September 2011, in the Bundestag in Berlin, Pope Benedict XVI summoned up the concept of “the ecology of man” as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of ecology of the natural world.
