These efforts touched only certain sectors of the Kraków archdiocese, though. Wojtyła wanted the whole archdiocese to have a sense of participation in Vatican II, which was fostered in part by special days of prayer he organized in the parishes, convents, and monasteries of the archdiocese. Each day during the Council, one institution of the Archdiocese of Kraków was linked to Rome through a day-long vigil of prayer. As for a sense of connection to the “news” of the Council, that could only be created through the media. Since the state-run Polish press was wholly uninterested in, if not downright hostile to, Church matters, Wojtyła had to turn to alternative media to keep his people in touch.
On November 24, 1962, six weeks after the Council opened, he broadcast to Poland on Vatican Radio, telling his listeners that the spirit of Vatican II was, above all, one of spiritual renewal.67 Wojtyła broadcast twice on Vatican Radio during the second session. On October 19, 1963, he participated in a radio program marking the 600th anniversary of the Jagiellonian University, reminding his listeners that the suppressed Faculty of Theology “had undoubtedly earned a right to be a full participant” in the life of the university and in Polish culture. On November 25, he broadcast on the role of the laity in the Church and the world. Others might have been tempted to use this topic to define the ideological divisions among the Council Fathers. Wojtyła chose to give a lesson in Christian humanism, proposing that “The world was entrusted primarily [to laypeople] so that they could carry into…all the facets of its existence that which is in the Son of God: truth and love.” The lay role in the Church, he continued, “consists in completing the work of Christ, the Son of God, in the world, and with the world’s help.” In doing so lay Christians were “regaining the world, in all its facets and manifestations, for the Eternal Father. On the road to this, however, lies an even higher aim: the regaining of man himself, in his humanity, for the Eternal Father….”68
During the third session, on October 19, 1964, the archbishop broadcast a reflection on the dignity of the human person, noting that the Council documents did not include a special treatise on the human person because “the person is deeply embedded in the entire teaching of this Council.”69 During the fourth session, on October 20, 1965, he discussed the Declaration on Religious Freedom on Vatican Radio, linking its teaching to the fifteenth-century rector of the Academy of Kraków, Paweł Włodkowic, who protested the forced conversion of pagans at the sixteenth ecumenical council, the Council of Constance.70
Archbishop Wojtyła also wrote about the Council for Tygodnik Powszechny. In March 1964, Wojtyła analyzed the sometimes heated debate on the nature of the episcopate and the role of bishops in the Church. On the disputed question of “collegiality” (i.e., how the college of bishops, as successors of the apostles, shared responsibility for the governance of the Church with the pope, the successor of Peter), the archbishop characteristically took a theological rather than political approach—to strengthen the principle of collegiality was a “strong move toward the realization of universality and solidarity in the Church.” The question was not so much “Who’s in charge?” but “How does the college of bishops manifest the unity of the Church amidst its splendid diversity?”71
In a February 1965 article on “The Council and the Work of Theologians,” Archbishop Wojtyła reflected on his experiences with consultors at the recent meeting in Rome to shore up the draft of Gaudium et Spes. Theology, he argued, was not a form of “religious studies.” Theology began with God’s revelation and was always revelation’s servant. Theology fulfilled that service in dialogue with other branches of the intellectual life, of which Wojtyła made special mention of the hard sciences. Like the Council itself, theology should focus on “the problems of the contemporary world” and especially the crisis of humanism. How were the men and women of modernity to be “human, reasonable, and free”? That was the great question for theologians and bishops alike.72
Two months later, Archbishop Wojtyła addressed an open letter to the editors and staff of Tygodnik Powszechny, which summarized his thinking on the meaning of Vatican II as he prepared for its fourth and final session. It was important, the archbishop suggested, to look at the Council from inside as well as from outside. From the outside, the Council could sometimes appear to be a political exercise, a question of which faction in the Church would dominate the Catholic future. If the press wanted to tell the full story of Vatican II, it had to take an “interior” view of the Council as well.
Wojtyła argued that a view “from inside” would treat Vatican II as, above all, “a personalist Council.” This intense focus on the human person, evident in both Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes, was neither a “concession” to modernity nor a lapse into subjectivism and relativism. Truth and freedom were always linked, and an emphasis on religious freedom was, at the same time, an “augmentation” of human responsibility. If men and women were truly free to seek the truth, they were ever more obliged to take that search seriously. The relationship of freedom to duty and truth took human beings into the heart of the relationship between creation and Creator.
Then there were the politics of Vatican II. There were, to be sure, debates and votes, as in a legislative body, but something else, something deeper, was going on. The Council Fathers were in constant conversation, and even those who did not speak formally in public nonetheless participated in the evolution of the Council’s thinking, through their conversations in and around the Council aula. One couldn’t get to the full reality of what was happening at Vatican II simply by analyzing public speeches and votes.
“Differences in points of view play an important role” in the Council, the archbishop wrote, but they should be understood in terms of the distinctive character of the Church, which was not, in its essence, a political community. The bishops constituted an “authentic plurality: a plurality of persons, a plurality of experiences and reflections, a plurality of interior lives, a plurality in the surroundings they represent, a plurality of life in different conditions.” What the Council was doing was turning that plurality into a unity, through diversity, contradiction, and opposition.
The same could be said, Wojtyła suggested, about the debates over “authority” at Vatican II. Authority in the Church was a matter of service. It was not about personal privilege, nor was it about power. Moreover, when the issue of authority touched the debate over collegiality, commentators had to understand that they would never get to the truth of the issue if they insisted on pitting the pope against the bishops. The Church was always a matter of the pope and the bishops. What Western political theorists called the “separation of powers” was not an ecclesial model of governance.73
Archbishop Wojtyła’s letter to Tygodnik Powszechny, a gentle suggestion that his friends should look more deeply into the spiritual reality of the Council than their Western journalistic colleagues were doing, summed up his experience of Vatican II as, at its irreducible core, a religious experience. Having just come through the conciliar battle over religious freedom and the struggle to save Gaudium et Spes, Wojtyła could hardly be accused of naïveté about the political facts of life in a complex human event like the Second Vatican Council. Yet he continued to insist that this was only one dimension—indeed, the surface dimension—of what was happening in Rome. The Holy Spirit was preparing the Church for a renewal of its mission in the third millennium. That, he was convinced, was the real story of Vatican II, and it was far more compelling than tales of ecclesiastical intrigue.
SECURING THE FOUNDATIONS
Not even so assiduous a listener as Karol Wojtyła could just sit for hours in the Council aula, absorbing a seemingly endless flow of Latin rhetoric. Decades later, Pope John Paul II would admit, a little sheepishly, “You know, I wrote many parts of books and poems during the sessions of the Council.”74 The poems describe Wojtyła’s personal and spiritual experience of the Council. At the same time, Wojtyła was also thinking the Council through philosophically—and drafting, in the Council a
ula, what would become his major philosophical project, the study entitled Osoba y czyn, or Person and Act.75
The idea, he later recalled, was first put to him by Monsignor Stanisław Czartoryski, a Cracovian priest, who, after reading Love and Responsibility, had told Wojtyła, “Now you must write a book on the person.”76 Wojtyła had a slightly different understanding of what he was doing in Person and Act. The point, John Paul II later wrote, was to work out in detail the philosophical issues involved in putting the older Aristotelian-Thomistic “philosophy of being” together with the “philosophy of consciousness” he had analyzed in the Scheler dissertation (i.e., to work out the relationship between the objective truth of things-as-they-are and our subjective or personal experience of that truth).77 Wojtyła’s leading philosophical disciple, Father Tadeusz Styczeń, has a third variant reading on the intention of Person and Act. Its purpose, he claims, was to make the philosophical argument for moving from Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], which had eventually landed philosophy in the prison of solipsism, to Conosco ergo sum [I understand, therefore I am]. This would reconnect thinking-about-thinking to the things that were to be thought and understood.78
Still, the book is perhaps best understood as a product of the Second Vatican Council. Person and Act is Karol Wojtyła’s attempt to give a coherent, intellectually sophisticated, public account of the philosophical basis of Vatican II’s teaching on freedom and its relationship to truth. Like any complex event, Vatican II can be “read” in a number of ways. Theologians point to two of the Council’s dogmatic constitutions, on the Church and on divine revelation, as the core of the Council’s teaching. Millions of Catholics, whose primary contact with the Church is at Sunday Mass, “read” Vatican II through its Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. If, however, the Council was the Church’s response to a crisis in humanism—a crisis of such magnitude that it was no exaggeration to view it as a genuine crisis of world civilization—then it was clear to Wojtyła that the Council’s proposal to the modern world, in its Declaration on Religious Freedom and its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, needed a clearer philosophical explication.
The Council had ringingly affirmed that the human person, precisely as a person, has a right to religious freedom, and that the right of religious freedom is ours so that we may freely meet our obligation to seek the truth—including the ultimate Truth, which is God in his self-revelation. Wojtyła believed it was crucial to demonstrate philosophically that the human search for meaning is directed toward the good, and that the person who seeks the good wants to direct himself to something that is, objectively, good. The internal dynamism of our freedom thus impels us to take seriously the question of what is, in reality, good—which is also what is true.
In Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the Church proposed how the world might achieve its aspiration to freedom and build a civilization characterized by justice, peace, and prosperity through an enriched and deepened concept of the human person. Wojtyła thought that this anthropology had to be put on a more secure philosophical foundation, accessible to everyone no matter what his or her religious disposition. As he wrote to Father Henri de Lubac while finishing the first draft of Person and Act:
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 much 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….79
Person and Act is not a debate with other philosophers and is very light on such scholarly apparatus as footnotes, cross-references, and digressions on the work of others. But that did not make it an easy read. On the contrary, Person and Act is an extraordinarily dense work. Wojtyła asked his protégé, Father Styczeń, to review his first draft. The two took a hiking trip into the Tatras to discuss it, and when Wojtyła asked Styczeń what he thought, the younger man puckishly replied, “It’s a good first draft. Perhaps it could be translated first from Polish into Polish, to make it easier to understand for the reader—including me.”80 A generation of Kraków clergy joked that the first assignment in Purgatory for priests who misbehaved would be to read Person and Act. This density was the result of many factors. Wojtyła’s distinctively circular style of thinking made for difficulties, as did the fact that he was writing such a complex work in his spare time. It is also not clear whether Karol Wojtyła has ever found the scientific language to express himself adequately. A close student of his poetry and plays, Anna Karoń-Ostrowska, suggests that the answer is, “No,” for there is always something about the truth of things that escapes our ability to express it analytically.81*
Person and Act: The Foundations of Solidarity
With Person and Act, Karol Wojtyła took his intellectual project to a new level by attempting to create a fully developed philosophy of the human person in which his interlocutors were his readers. Despite the extraordinary demands it makes on the reader, Person and Act is actually an invitation to a conversation. This, Wojtyła suggests, is how I read the human condition. How does that fit with your own experience?
The book begins with a lengthy and rich introduction in which Wojtyła reflects on the nature of human experience. The author then tries to show how our thinking about the world and ourselves helps us to understand ourselves precisely as persons. While it is true that some things simply “happen to me,” I have other experiences in which I know that I am making a decision and acting out that decision. In those experiences, I come to know myself, not as a jumble of emotions and sensory perceptions, but as a person, a subject, or, in the classical term, the “efficient cause” of my actions. Some things don’t simply “happen” to me. I am the subject, not merely the object, of actions. I make things happen, because I think through a decision and then freely act on it. Therefore, I am somebody, not simply something.
Wojtyła then shows how, in moral action, that somebody begins to experience his or her own transcendence. Our personhood, he argues, is constituted by the fact of our freedom, which we come to know through truly “human acts.” In choosing one act (to pay a debt I have freely contracted) rather than another (to cheat on my debt), I am not simply responding to external conditions (fear of jail) or internal pressures (guilt). I am freely choosing what is good. In that free choosing, I am also binding myself to what I know is good and true. In this free choice of the good and the true, Wojtyła suggests, we can discern the transcendence of the human person. I go beyond myself, I grow as a person, by realizing my freedom and conforming it to the good and the true. Through my freedom, I narrow the gap between the person-I-am and the person-I-ought-to-be.
Freedom, on one modern reading of it, is radical autonomy—I am a self because my will is the primary reference point for my choosing. Wojtyła disagrees. Self-mastery, not self-assertion, is the index of a truly human freedom, he argues. And I achieve self-mastery not by repressing or suppressing what is natural to me, but by thoughtfully and freely channeling those natural instincts of mind and body into actions that deepen my humanity because they conform to things-as-they-are. Empiricists try to find the human “center” in the body or its processes. Kantian idealists try to find it in the psyche, in the structures of my consciousness. Wojtyła leapfrogs the argument between empiricists and idealists by trying to demonstrate how moral action, not the psyche or the body, is where we find the center of the human person, the core of our humanity. For it is in moral action that the mind, the spirit, and the body come into the unity of a person.
That person lives in a world with many other persons. So Person and Act concl
udes with an analysis of moral action in conjunction with all those “others” who constitute the moral field in which our humanity realizes itself and transcends itself, or grows. Here, philosophical anthropology touches the border of social ethics—How should free persons live together? As might be expected, Wojtyła takes a position beyond individualism and collectivism. Radical individualism is inadequate, because we only grow into our humanity through interaction with others. Collectivism strips the person of freedom, and thus of his or her personhood. Once again, Wojtyła suggests, the issue is best posed in “both/and” terms, the individual and the common good.
In working out his theory of “participation,” Wojtyła analyzes four “attitudes” toward life in society. Two are incapable of nurturing a truly human society. “Conformism” is inauthentic because it means abandoning my freedom. “Others” take me over so completely that my self is lost in the process. “Noninvolvement” is inauthentic, because it is solipsistic. Cutting myself off from the “others” eventually results in the implosion of my self. “Opposition” (or what might be called “resistance”) can be an authentic approach to life in society, if it involves resistance to unjust customs or laws in order to liberate the full humanity of others. Then there is “solidarity,” the primary authentic attitude toward society, in which individual freedom is deployed to serve the common good, and the community sustains and supports individuals as they grow into a truly human maturity. “It is this attitude,” Wojtyła writes, “that allows man to find the fulfillment of himself in complementing others.”85
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