John Paul II on Understanding

A few recent posts struck me as having arrived at a felicitous moment. The first pair were Rick Garnett's posts on the fifth anniversary of John Paul II's death and on Catholic moral anthropology. A third was Patrick Brennan's post on understanding. They were particularly timely for me, having just returned from giving a short talk to a group of economists on the topic of John Paul II's moral anthropology.

A critical dimension of John Paul II's thought on the human person is related to the impossibility of comprehending the person. I mean that he believed that because the human person bears the image of God (imagio Dei), the person is incomprehensible as God is incomprehensible. This is a consequence of the Majesty of God and the noetic effects of sin. This is not to say that either God or the person is unknowable. God is absolute in being open to the human person. But, John Paul II's thought does not equate comprehension and knowledge. He sees persons as unfathomable in human knowing. It is not that the person is unknowable, indeed we can and do know others. It is as if we can always dive deeper and deeper into knowledge of the person, and yet never "touch bottom." And for that reason, we can never master intellectual control over human nature. And he affirmed that the mystery of the person is essential to our personal experience to being human. In Fides et Ratio, he taught that:

Man is seized with the awe to see that he has been placed in the universe, in fellowship with others like himself with whom he also shares a common lot. This is the beginning of the journey which will lead him to discover new realms of knowledge. Without this sense of wondering amazement, man would subside into deadening routine and would bit by bit lose the power of leading a proper personal life. (Section 4)

For John Paul II, the human person is a mystery to himself, and that mystery is tied fundamentally to human dignity. This dimension of the mystery of the person is deeply tied to Christian Neo-Platonism and the mystical tradition of figures like St. John of the Cross--the subject of John Paul II's doctoral dissertation written as Karol Wojtyla.

A deep difficulty with much of modern thought is that it seeks to avoid the mystery of the person by reducing the person to a conceptualization over which one can achieve intellectual control and dominion. In doing this, it creates an idolatrous image of God within the human person. Kenneth Schmitz has called this the "secularization of the interior." For John Paul II, this secularization has to do with the exclusive preference for mental objects (intentionality) in modern epistemology and philosophy of mind, which seems to preclude knowledge of unfathomable truth. (He differs from Lonergan on this point). 

John Paul II's critique of modernity seems particularly applicable to Analytic philosophy, which underwrites much of contemporary Anglo/American jurisprudence. And post-modernists fair no better. For them, the Other is absolutely unknowable, not unfathomable. By denying the possibility of knowledge of the Other, post-modernity replays the modern reduction of knowledge to conceptual control and then denies its possibility. And therefore, post-modernity is only hyper-modernity--modernity turning its critique back on itself. 

For John Paul II, the truth about the person is approached indirectly, through the analysis of the lived experience of moral action. While he did not deny any aspect of the Thomistic metaphysical account of the person, he believed that it was incomplete (as any account is) and in need of a personalist account of the subjective experience of acting with moral purpose. This was the starting point of his moral philosophy. And, his analysis of such experience informs us that human beings know one another most perfectly in shared acts of charity and love--acts in which the mystery of the Other can be honored and venerated. 

He warned us that a proper understanding of the person is essential for avoiding the totalitarianism that he experienced in his youth. The political and economic systems of Fascism and Soviet communism that he endured were out-workings of misunderstandings of the person. Assuming away the mystery of the person is perhaps the ultimate modern fantasy. It renders God and humans as beings among beings, and thereby undermines the Majesty of God and the Dignity of the human person.

It seems quite likely that over the next thirty years or so, Catholic conceptions of the dignity of the person will confront new, in some ways unprecedented, challenges brought about by the economic decline of Europe and the US, the cultural consequences of globalization, and emergence of new technologies that will radically question what it means to be human. John Paul II speaks to us today by cautioning that in confronting these challenges Catholics must adhere to the mission of seeking to know the truth. 

Let me close by encouraging you to read, this Holy Week the "Ode for the 80th Birthday of Pope John Paul II" by Czeslaw Milosz. I quote the last stanza:

You are with us and will be with us henceforth.
When the forces of chaos raise their voice
And the owners of truth lock themselves in churches
And only the doubters remain faithful,
Your portrait in our homes every day remind us
How much one man can accomplish and how sainthood works.

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