John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism
by George Weigel
As Time and other premillennial makers–of–lists
have discovered in recent months, there is no
lack of candidates for the position of
emblematic figure of the twentieth century.
In
the world of politics alone, there are several
plausible nominees on a slate that includes the
admirable and the odious in fairly equal
proportion: Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, Mao,
Roosevelt, Reagan. Widening the search beyond
the world of organized political power, a
powerful case can be made for James Watson and
Francis Crick, unravelers of the DNA
"double–helix," the key to biotechnology and
what will almost certainly be the most urgent
set of issues on the twenty–first century’s
public agenda. In a historical period
dramatically shaped by the application, for good
or ill, of new scientific knowledge, some might
also argue for Fermi, Heisenberg, or another of
the great mid–century nuclear physicists as the
man who made the most enduring impact on our
times. And while his status as a scientist and a
student of the human condition has been badly
shaken in recent decades, there is no doubt that
Sigmund Freud had an enormous impact on the
twentieth century.
There is an element of the arbitrary in all such
list–making, of course. And indeed here is an
instance where the postmodern passion for
hermeneutics makes eminent sense. In choosing
the emblematic figure of the century now drawing
rapidly to a close, it really is a matter of how
one looks at things—in this instance, the
dynamics of history.
If one believes that politics is not an
independent variable in human affairs—if (as so
many have argued in these pages) politics is a
function of culture, and at the heart of culture
is cultus, religion, what we cherish and what we
worship—then a serious case can be made for Pope
John Paul II as the man who most singularly
embodies humanity’s trials and triumphs in the
twentieth century.
One facet of the "culture first" case for John
Paul II’s preeminence is institutional. The
Roman Catholic Church has arguably been the most
influential religious community of the past ten
decades in shaping the world the twenty–first
century will inherit; the Catholic Church has
been decisively formed for the next century by
John Paul’s authoritative interpretation of the
Second Vatican Council, the most important
religious event of this century; therefore John
Paul II can be considered the twentieth
century’s seminal figure. Moreover, his
teachings will be institutionally developed and
carried into the future, unlike another great
Slavic moral witness with a plausible claim to
being the man of the century, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. In making that case, of course, it
has to be remembered that a great reforming Pope
and his accomplishments are not an individual
achievement. John Paul II emerged from the heart
of the Church and the priesthood, and he cannot
be understood apart from that.
But a deeper argument can and should be explored
here. John Paul II is not the emblematic figure
of the twentieth century simply because his
teachings and witness, which have had such a
demonstrable impact on the history of our times,
will be institutionally extended into the
future, unlike the teachings of Churchill,
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, FDR, or Reagan. No, John
Paul II is arguably the iconic figure of the
twentieth century because his life has embodied,
personally and spiritually, the human crises
with which Churchill, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, FDR,
and Reagan (not to mention Watson and Crick,
Heisenberg, Fermi, and Freud) were all engaged
in their distinctive ways. And his teaching,
which has emerged from a profound philosophical
and theological reflection on those crises, has
demonstrated the resilience, indeed the
indispensability, of religious conviction in
addressing the crisis of contemporary humanism.
The twentieth century, which began with the
confident assertion that a maturing humanity had
outgrown its "need" for religion, proved that
men could indeed organize the world without God.
It also proved that, in doing so, men could only
organize the world against each other, bringing
humanity to the brink of catastrophe on more
than one occasion.
Finally, if one believes that the Christian
movement bears the truth of the world’s story,
then John Paul II looms very large indeed. So,
of course, do others: Billy Graham, who gave a
new dynamism and unprecedented worldwide reach
to evangelical Protestantism; Karl Barth,
embodiment of the last great effort within the
sixteenth–century Reformation traditions to
reconstitute Christian orthodoxy apart from Rome
or the Christian East. But neither Graham nor
Barth became the kind of global moral witness
that John Paul II has become. And in that sense
(for the Pope insists that his public moral
witness is, semper et ubique, a function of his
Christian faith), neither was the kind of
evangelist that John Paul II has been,
throughout the worlds–within–worlds of humanity.
Nineteen sixty–eight was a bad year in a century
replete with bad years. In February of the year
in which the West seemed to come apart at the
seams and Red Army tanks crushed the reform
communism of the Prague Spring, Cardinal Karol
Wojtyla of Krakow wrote his friend, the Jesuit
theologian Henri de Lubac, about the large–scale
philosophical project on which he was engaged in
the midst of his pastoral responsibilities:
I devote my very rare free moments to a work
that is close to my heart and devoted to the
metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It
seems to me that the debate today is being
played out on that level. The evil of our times
consists in the first place in a kind of
degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the
fundamental uniqueness of each human person.
This evil is even more of the metaphysical order
than of the moral order. To this disintegration
planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must
oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of
"recapitulation" of the inviolable mystery of
the person.
That radical humanism—that life–forming
commitment to "the inviolable mystery of the
person"—was, and is, Karol Wojtyla’s response to
a century in which false humanisms had created
mountains of corpses and an ocean of blood,
Auschwitz and the Gulag, abortion as a
widespread means of fertility regulation, and
the prospect of the biotechnical remanufacture
of the humanum. In thinking through, preaching,
writing about, and acting upon the implications
of a radical humanism worthy of the human
person, John Paul II addressed three of the most
pressing issues on the human agenda in a way
that seems likely to shape the debate on those
issues long into the future: the priority of
culture, the nature of sexual love, and the
anthropology of freedom.
In the first instance, he boldly challenged the
notion, rampant throughout the century, that
either politics or economics was the engine of
world–historical change.
The twentieth century experienced the lethal
consequences of the political madnesses set
loose in the world by the French Revolution. And
this made it all the more striking (and perhaps
indicative of the divine sense of irony) that
the collapse of totalitarianism as a plausible
political model came in 1989, two hundred years
after the Jacobin fire had first melted men’s
minds and consciences in the name of a false
idea of freedom. Marxist economics would have
engineered its own failure in due course, given
its evident incapacity to compete in a world
dominated by the microchip and digital
revolutions. But even after communism was on the
wane—indeed, even after its collapse—a kind of
Marxist hangover continued in the West, where
too many continued to believe that economics
rules reality.
John Paul II’s role in the collapse of European
communism rid his Slavic brethren of that
particular political plague, challenged the
assumed preeminence of politics and economics in
our understanding of history, and taught the
world a lesson about the real engine of change:
culture.
The Pope’s pilgrimages to Poland in June 1979
and to Cuba in January 1998 were the two
bookends, so to speak, of his "culture first"
strategy of change, which is the public
dimension of his longstanding commitment to
resist the "pulverization" of the human person
(as he put it to de Lubac). In both Poland and
Cuba, Communist regimes had held a historically
Christian nation in their grip for forty years.
In both Poland and Cuba, John Paul addressed
that particular political form of human
pulverization by restoring to a people its
authentic history and cultural memory. His
message said, in various ways and without ever
making reference to the regime then in power,
"You are not who they say you are. Here is who
you are. You [Poles, Cubans] are ‘Polish’ [or
‘Cuban’] because Christianity was the crucial
factor in creating a human reality called
‘Poles’ [or ‘Cubans’]. Reclaim that source of
your identity, deepen your commitment to it, and
you will be free in a way that no worldly power
can ever take from you." The results were
evident in Poland within fourteen months: a
revolution of conscience, launched by John Paul
II in June 1979, gave birth in Gdansk to the
Solidarity movement, and ten years of nonviolent
struggle later, communism was finished. The
results have not been as rapid or dramatic in
Cuba, but Fidel Castro and those who would
continue his style of governance cannot be
optimistic about the ultimate outcome.
The crack–up of communism was, like all epic
historical moments, the product of the
convergence of many things: Marxism’s economic
inadequacies; the dynamics let loose in east
central Europe by the 1975 Helsinki Final Act;
the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher; generational change in the Soviet
leadership. But if one wants to understand why
communism collapsed when it did (in 1989, rather
than in 1999, or 2009, or 2019) and how it did
(without bloodshed, in the main), then one
simply must factor into this complex equation
John Paul II’s revolution of conscience. And in
taking account of that, one is inoculated
against both the Jacobin–political and
Marxist–economic delusions about the dynamics of
history. For that epic achievement alone, John
Paul II has a serious claim to being considered
the emblematic figure of his, and our, times.
Then there was, and is, the sexual revolution,
another attempt to redefine the humanum in the
name of a certain concept of freedom: in this
instance, the freedom to pursue the pleasure
principle so long as "no one else" (or no one
else in whom the state asserts a "compelling
interest") gets hurt. World Christianity’s early
response to the sexual revolution was not
impressive. Much of liberal Protestantism simply
surrendered to it. And the 1968 encyclical
Humanae Vitae, the first major papal attempt to
address the implications of the sexual
revolution after it had broken out into
mainstream Western culture, was a pastoral
failure. When John Paul II was elected ten years
later, the Humanae Vitae episode had contributed
to a serious credibility problem for the Church
on a host of other, related issues; and, just at
the moment when the human wreckage caused by the
sexual revolution had begun to cause some second
thoughts among its former enthusiasts
(especially among women), the Catholic Church,
it seemed, had little to contribute to
restructuring the argument.
John Paul II’s "theology of the body," which he
laid out in 130 general audience addresses
between 1979 and 1984, is arguably the most
creative Christian response to the sexual
revolution and its "pulverization" of the human
person to be articulated in the twentieth
century. Its philosophical core is Wojtyla’s
claim that what we might call a "Law of the
Gift" is built into the very structure of human
being–in–the–world. Because of that,
self–giving, not self–assertion, is the royal
road to human flourishing.
This depth truth of the human condition, which
John Paul believed could be demonstrated by a
careful analysis of human moral agency, had
enormous implications for meeting the challenge
of the sexual revolution. Sex, as often
experienced in today’s sexual free–fire zone, is
instinctive and impersonal. But that kind of sex
does not rise above the level of animal
sexuality, which is also instinctive and
impersonal. Sex that is an expression of
self–giving love, not a use of the other for
temporary gratification, is the only sex worthy
of human beings.
Chastity, on this analysis, is what John Paul
called the "integrity of love," the virtue that
makes it possible for one to love another as a
person. We are made free, Wojtyla argues, so
that we can make a free gift of ourselves to
others; we are free so that we can love freely,
and thus love truly. Genuine freedom—the freedom
that disposes of itself in self–giving—is the
context of a genuinely humanistic sexual ethic.
The theological core of John Paul’s "theology of
the body" is his profoundly sacramental
apprehension of reality. Our embodiedness as
male and female is not an accident of
evolutionary biology, he insists. Rather, that
embodiedness and the mutuality built into it
express some of the deepest truths of the world,
and teach us something about the world’s
Creator. John Paul even goes so far as to
propose that sexual love within the bond of
marital fidelity is an icon of the interior life
of God the Holy Trinity, a community of mutual
self–donation and mutual receptivity. Thus
sexual love, within the bond of Christian
marriage, is an act of worship.
It will be well into the twenty–first century
before the Catholic Church, much less the wider
culture, even begins to assimilate the contents
of John Paul II’s theology of the body. A
secondary literature capable of unpacking these
dense, compact audience addresses is badly
needed. But for the moment, it is worth noting
that the Bishop of Rome, often assumed to be the
custodian of a tradition deeply scarred by a
Manichean deprecation of human sexuality, has
articulated a deeply humanistic response to the
sexual revolution that says to the readers of
Playboy and Cosmopolitan alike, "Human sexuality
is far greater than you imagine."
In the third place, John Paul’s II’s radical
humanism has helped recast the debate about the
future of public life in free societies for the
twenty–first century. After a century in which
monarchy had collapsed and totalitarianism in
its Fascist and Communist forms had been
defeated, it seemed at the opening of the 1990s
as if democracy and the market were triumphant.
If you wanted a society that protected basic
human rights while advancing the common good,
you chose the participatory politics of
democracy; if you wanted economic growth, a
higher material standard of living for all, and
the widest possible inclusion in what the
Editor–in–Chief of this journal has called the
"circle of productivity and exchange," you chose
a market–oriented, not state–directed, economy.
John Paul II shared both of those convictions,
as he made clear in the 1991 encyclical
Centesimus Annus. But he quickly decoded the new
threats to the "mystery of the human person" in
the post–Cold War world, and he spent much of
the decade of the 1990s trying to explain that
freedom detached from moral truth—the "freedom
of indifference" that dominated the high culture
of the triumphant West—was, inevitably,
self–cannibalizing.
Freedom untethered from truth is freedom’s worst
enemy. For if there is only your truth and my
truth, and neither one of us recognizes a
transcendent moral standard (call it "the
truth") by which to adjudicate our differences,
then the only way to settle the argument is for
you to impose your power on me, or for me to
impose my power on you. Freedom untethered from
truth leads to chaos; chaos leads to anarchy;
and since human beings cannot tolerate anarchy,
tyranny as the answer to the human imperative of
order is just around the corner. The false
humanism of the freedom of indifference leads
first to freedom’s decay, and then to freedom’s
demise.
Similarly, on the economic front, unless a
vibrant public moral culture disciplines and
directs the explosive human energies let loose
by the free market, the market ends up
destroying the culture that makes it possible.
In what Zbigniew Brzezinski nicely described as
the "permissive cornucopia" of the future, a
society of unprecedented material wealth and
equally unprecedented license, the virtues
necessary for the market to work—self–command,
the willingness to defer gratification, the
talent for teamwork, the skill of prudent
risk–taking—atrophy. MTV, not the Federal Trade
Commission or the International Monetary Fund,
is the true enemy of the free economy.
This vision of the free, prosperous, and
virtuous society, itself a product of the
radical humanism of Karol Wojtyla, has not won
the day in the developed world. But the proposal
is out there. And that proposal is part of the
intellectual and moral patrimony of over a
billion Roman Catholics, as well as many, many
others who find in it the most comprehensive,
and compelling vision of public life on offer at
the threshold of a new century and a new
millennium. That proposal, too, buttresses the
claim that Pope John Paul II is the emblematic
man of our times.
"Be not afraid!", the antiphon of John Paul’s
inaugural homily on October 22, 1978, quickly
became a kind of motto for the pontificate. That
this clarion call to a recovery of courage at
the end of the twentieth century was never
regarded, even by the Pope’s adversaries, as an
impossible dream or a sentimental piety tells us
a lot about Karol Wojtyla. Milovan Djilas (then
a dissident in what was then Yugoslavia) was
right when he said that the most impressive
thing about the Pope was that he was a man
utterly without fear. Courage of that sort
explains a good part of the attraction of Karol
Wojtyla’s radical humanism as a response to the
crises of the twentieth century.
It is just as important, however, to underline
that this fearlessness is neither Stoic in
character nor the by–product of Karol Wojtyla’s
personal "autonomy." Rather, it is a
specifically Christian fearlessness. It was
first exemplified for young Karol Wojtyla by his
widower–father and by the bishop who ordained
him, the man he calls the "unbroken prince,"
Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, who led the Church
of Krakow through the dark night of the Nazi
Occupation. Those experiences of fearlessness
have been deepened by Wojtyla’s lifelong
meditation on the mystery of the Cross, for the
Pope is, in his heart, a Carmelite, and St. John
of the Cross remains his spiritual master. His
Cross–centered gaze on the world and its history
precludes any hint of the Panglossian in the
Pope’s Christian humanism. In it, fear is not
displaced, but rather transformed: transformed
through a deep personal encounter with the
crucified and abandoned Christ, which sets those
who experience it free from fear.
That the universality of one’s interests,
compassion, and concerns is in inverse
proportion to the depth of one’s particular
convictions is one of the truisms of the late
twentieth century. By the general reckoning of
many of his contemporaries, the intensity of
Karol Wojtyla’s conviction that the Cross is the
truth of the world, and not simply another
option in a supermarket of "spiritualities,"
ought to have made him an impossibly narrow,
even dangerous, sectarian. But here, too, Pope
John Paul II has been an important, perhaps even
decisive, sign of contradiction.
Judged by externals, John Paul II has a claim to
papal greatness and to world attention because
of the exceptional range of his outreach to
those who do not share his deepest convictions:
to secular scientists, to Jews, to Muslims, to
Christians of other confessions. Yet Wojtyla
insists that these encounters (which, in the
case of the dialogue with Judaism, are of a sort
not seen for more than nineteen hundred years)
have come about not despite his Christian faith
but because of it. Respectful dialogue with all
who are "other" is not in tension with Christian
orthodoxy or the papal task of safeguarding the
deposit of faith. Respectful encounter and
dialogue are what Christian orthodoxy demands.
The Pope himself was eager to make this point at
the United Nations in 1995. In a passage that
surprised some observers because it invoked what
one official in the Vatican Secretariat of State
called the "J–word" before an audience of world
political leaders, John Paul made sure that
everyone present in the General Assembly hall
knew that his defense of universal human rights
and a genuine humanism for the post–Cold War
world was not the result of some generic
"spirituality." Defining himself as a "witness
to hope," the Pope had this to say about the
sources of that hope and its public
implications:
As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered
on Jesus Christ, the two thousandth anniversary
of whose birth will be celebrated at the coming
of the new millennium. . . . Jesus Christ is for
us God made man, and made part of the history of
humanity. Precisely for this reason, Christian
hope for the world and its future extends to
every human person. Because of the radiant
humanity of Christ, nothing genuinely human
fails to touch the hearts of Christians. Faith
in Christ does not impel us to intolerance. On
the contrary, it obliges us to engage in a
respectful dialogue. Love of Christ does not
distract us from interest in others, but rather
invites us to responsibility for them, to the
exclusion of no one. . . . Thus as we approach
the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of
Christ, the Church asks only to be able to
propose respectfully this message of salvation,
and to be able to promote, in charity and
service, the solidarity of the entire human
family.
He was standing at the marble rostrum of the UN
General Assembly, but he was teaching a basic
lesson in Christology. And in doing so, the Pope
was calling both Christians and those for whom
Christianity is ineluctably "sectarian" because
of its insistence on the universal salvific
mission of Christ to take seriously the central
Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.
It was not the first time John Paul had
addressed this issue or suggested that it had
important public implications. In Redemptoris
Missio, his 1990 encyclical on Christian
mission, John Paul had taught the orthodox faith
of the Church: that many are saved who do not
belong to the Church, but that those who are not
saved in the Church are nonetheless saved
because of Christ. At the same time, and in the
same encyclical, John Paul made a decisive break
with certain aspects of the Christian past and
embraced the method of freedom when he wrote
that "The Church proposes; she imposes nothing"
(emphasis in original). Here was a decisive,
historic break with the shadow–side of the
Constantinian legacy. The Church, not by a
merely prudential calculus but for the
weightiest of theological reasons, renounced any
use of state power in advancing its mission. A
deep respect for every human being’s search for
the truth and a commitment to the method of
persuasion in preaching the gospel were twin,
"universal" implications of the radical
specificity of the Christian claim embedded in
the doctrine of the Incarnation.
And here, too, John Paul II taught the twentieth
century something important about the nature of
the human person and about genuine humanism. A
universal empathy with others comes through, not
around, particular convictions. One empirical
test of the truth of particular convictions is
their capacity to engage empathetically with the
"other" in ways that enrich the humanity of all
concerned. It was, in the root meaning of the
word, a crucial lesson at the end of a century
in which "otherness" had too often been seen as
a lethal threat, with lethal consequences.
The twentieth century, which witnessed the
announcement of the death of God, was in fact a
century of the death of the gods. None of the
false gods of the twentieth century was able to
exorcise the paralyzing fear that first hung
like a pall over the opening battles of World
War I and then drifted down the decades,
blighting the lives and destinies of four
generations of human beings. Being on the right
side of history didn’t expel the demon of fear
from the Bolsheviks and their progeny; it gave
greater scope to deviltry, from the execution
rooms in the Lubyanka basement to the frozen
wastelands of the Kolyma mines. Racial
determinism and its presumption of biological
superiority didn’t exorcise the passions that
informed German National Socialism; the master
race, living out its fears, created a new reign
of terror from the Atlantic to the Urals. The
therapeutic society explained fear away, which
worked only for a while, or medicated it, which
was another form of the pulverization of the
human person.
In the face of the great fear of his time—a fear
formed by irrationality and the nihilism that
always accompanies the degradation of
reason—John Paul II could say, and mean, "Be not
afraid!" because he worshiped the one true God,
whose conquest of fear he had encountered in
God’s only–begotten Son.
With the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, a
human being was inextricably taken up into the
Godhead. And if, as St. Paul insisted to the
Romans, Jesus Christ is the first fruits of
God’s salvific action in and for the world, then
all creation is eschatologically destined to
fulfillment within the inner life of God. This
truly radical humanism is the most compelling
response to the false humanisms that wrought
havoc with the twentieth century. Communion with
God is the source of the liberation that
humanism has sought for centuries.
John Paul himself would insist most vigorously
that there are many others who could claim to be
the human icon of the twentieth century. This is
not simply a question of modesty, for Pope John
Paul II knows that the truths he has taught and
lived are iconic: they point beyond themselves
to the One who is the Truth. Self–giving as the
source of genuine human flourishing and the
central moral imperative of true humanism is
such a truth. This is the gospel, and the
Church’s raison d’ętre is to preach it. The
Church is the Body of Christ. And thus the
figure of this century, or any century, is Jesus
Christ.
That, Pope John Paul II has insisted since his
1994 announcement of the Great Jubilee of 2000,
is what the world’s celebration of the turn of
the millennium must recognize: that the
revelation of God in the incarnate Christ is, at
the same time, the revelation of true humanism.
George Weigel,
a Senior Fellow of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Roman
Catholic theologian and one of America's leading
commentators on issues of religion and public
life. He holds the William E. Simon Chair in
Catholic Studies at EPPC. He
is
the author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of
John Paul II, published by HarperCollins.
.
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