The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  He had become the “sign of contradiction” of which he had preached to Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia in 1976. In emptying himself of himself, he had struck a chord that resonated in billions of human hearts. And he had done so as a disciple of Jesus Christ. He knew, with T. S. Eliot, that “in my end is my beginning.”61 He had defined and lived his life as a Christian disciple. He had met his end as a Christian disciple. And that end marked a new beginning for Karol Józef Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II—the disciple who had gone home to the Father’s house.

  PART THREE

  METANOIA

  A Disciple’s Life Explored

  CHAPTER TEN

  From Inside

  The interior lives of great men are often cloaked in mystery.

  More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any historical figure other than Jesus; yet there is still disagreement over Lincoln’s relationship to the God of the Bible, whom he cited to such powerful effect in his Second Inaugural Address. During a secret August 1941 meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, Winston Churchill choked with emotion while singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” at church parade aboard HMS Prince of Wales; yet Churchill’s relationship to biblical religion remains murky, although it was likely as distant as Lincoln’s, if not more so. Ronald Reagan’s inscrutability drove at least one of his biographers to distraction.1

  At the opposite end of the scale of the admirable and the odious, who would pretend to understand fully the demons that drove Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, not to mention less consequential but no less reprehensible characters such as Dzerzhínskii, Yagoda, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and the rest of the twentieth-century rogues’ gallery of mass murderers? Psychiatry might shed some light on these lethally warped personalities, but even the most secular mind will likely concede that, at bottom, there is a mysterium iniquitatis at work here, a deep-rooted and unfathomable wickedness that our science can neither touch nor measure.

  Getting to the inside of consequential lives has its fascinations, but it is not essential to understanding the public accomplishments of most public men. That Churchill ranks as one of the few men in history who can be called saviors of civilizations as well as of countries is not much in dispute, save among cranks; yet even if we could identify precisely the spiritual or philosophical sources of the courage with which he summoned Britons to their finest hour, little more about that epic accomplishment would be explained. Grasping in detail the hatreds and passions that drove Lenin is not essential to grasping the essential fact about Lenin’s public life: that he successfully created the world’s first totalitarian regime and then secured his achievement with singular ruthlessness. In both instances, the admirable and the odious, the public man and what he did are large enough, striking enough, and complex enough to fill the horizon of our curiosity.

  The same cannot be said, however, for the life of Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II. In an author’s introduction to Our God’s Brother, the play he wrote about the man he later canonized as St. Albert Chmielowski, Wojtyła observed that there is a “line inaccessible to history” that runs between our understanding of any human being and the person we are trying to understand. For every human being is a mystery, except when we stand before God—the point at which, as St. Paul told the Corinthians, we shall know ourselves, even as we are fully known (cf. 1 Corinthians 13.12b). In more direct and personal terms, Pope John Paul II once applied this truth to himself when he observed, of certain attempts to tell the story of his life, “They try to understand me from outside. But I can only be understood from inside.”2

  Grasping as much as we can of the person and accomplishment of Karol Wojtyła means beginning from the premise that the outside of Wojtyła’s life—the public accomplishment—was the by-product of the inside: his interior life, the life of the human spirit (and, he would say, the work of the Holy Spirit within him). There are many ways to characterize that interior life: as the life of a radically converted Christian disciple; as the life of a man who combined poetic sensibility and philosophical rigor; as the life of a solitary and frequently orphaned man whose personality was nourished by long and deep friendships; as the life of a celibate who mastered the arts of fatherhood; as the life of a mystic and contemplative who was compelled, by what he believed to be God’s design, to be a man of action. He was all of those things. The thread that wove those facets of Karol Wojtyła’s life into a single tapestry is perhaps best captured by a term from biblical Greek: metanoia, which is usually translated as “conversion.” Karol Wojtyła’s life was a life of ongoing metanoia.

  Conversion was at the heart of the preaching of Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, Christ’s first recorded words are a call to conversion: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1.15). Metanoia, as the Catholic Church understands it, is a complete turning to God that begins with the “first conversion” sacramentally effected by baptism. Metanoia is essentially a lifelong project, however, in which the Christian disciple grows into the new life of grace intellectually, morally, psychologically, and affectively.3 Intellectual metanoia is that process by which we abandon our empiricist blinders and come to understand that the world of sensory perception is not all the world there is; that, as Guy Crouchback puts it to a skeptical army chaplain in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, “the supernatural is the real.” Moral conversion is the process by which we grow into our freedom, freely choosing what is truly good as a matter of moral habit.4 Affective conversion means emptying ourselves of dehumanizing passions and ordering our emotional lives and our imaginations toward the truly good and beautiful, who is God. Each of these processes can be discerned in the life of John Paul II; in each of these conversions Karol Wojtyła grew in the grace of his baptism, in which he was first given the gifts of faith, hope, and love.

  The paradox of metanoia, which was manifest in the life of Karol Wojtyła, is that all this emptying of self leads to the richest imaginable human experience: a life unembittered by irony or stultified by boredom, a life of both serenity and adventure. Moreover, for the Christian, the pilgrimage of metanoia is not a solitary or solipsistic one, for the journey is walked in and through the Church, which is both a communion of disciples and the Body of Christ alive in history. Even Christian hermits live the journey of metanoia with and through the Church of which they are members, for to be a member of the Church is to be a member of the Body of Christ, which is different from any other “membership” in which we freely engage. To live that pilgrimage of metanoia as a pastor is to live a special responsibility for the journey of others; to live it as the universal pastor of the Church is a responsibility of a different order of magnitude.

  FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE

  If we are to understand John Paul II’s life as one of ongoing metanoia, a useful place to begin exploring that life’s “inside” is to read the life of Karol Wojtyła—the man, the priest, the bishop, the pope—through the prism of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. As the Catholic Church understands them, the theological virtues are not like muscles—native capacities that can be developed by natural training. Rather, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are gifts from God that animate our natural capacities—“the pledge of the action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it.5

  Faith

  Karol Wojtyła’s faith was supernaturally given him when he was baptized in the Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Wadowice on June 20, 1920; it was first nurtured by his parents, and especially by his father. From the Captain, Karol Wojtyła, Sr., the son learned that manliness and piety are not antinomies, but rather complements; or as John Paul II would write of his father forty-five years after the Captain’s death, “his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.”6 If one is looking for a source of John Paul’s remarkable equanimity and resilience in situations ra
nging from international crises to grave personal illness, one need look no further than the example of his father, whose devotion to his son, whose prayer, and whose manly acceptance of suffering taught deep if unspoken lessons about Christian realism: facts submitted to without tears; duties accepted without complaint.

  The early lessons in faith that shaped the interior life of Pope John Paul II are embodied in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, the vast, wooded Holy Land shrine between Kraków and Wadowice that he first visited as a boy, and that he continued to frequent until a few years before his death. In its design, Kalwaria is both Christ-centered and Marian: its two principal trails, the Path of Our Lord and the Path of Our Lady, intersect at the chapel of the Assumption of Mary: the first fruits in heaven of Mary’s Son’s victory over death. Walking the paths of Kalwaria thus taught young Karol Wojtyła a basic lesson in faith: Christ is the center of the life of faith, and a sure path to Christ is found through a proper devotion to the Mother of God. The lesson stayed with him throughout his life. For Karol Wojtyła to adopt the Marian motto Totus Tuus [Entirely Yours] as his episcopal and papal motto for almost forty-seven years was a distinctively Marian way of making that most basic of Christian acts of faith, that “Jesus is Lord.”

  Kalwaria’s very name, evoking as it does the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, taught another lesson: the spiritual life of the Christian is always cruciform, for, as the Lord himself said, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16.24). Karol Wojtyła’s introduction to this aspect of the spiritual life was deepened by his encounter with the classic Carmelite mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila during the Second World War. Reading the Carmelites with Jan Tyranowski amidst the terrors of war and Nazi occupation left a permanent impress on Wojtyła’s soul, manifest in his regular practice of making the Stations of the Cross—and, most memorably, in his embrace of the cross on the last Good Friday of his life.

  In its most dramatic form, the embrace of the cross and metanoia into Christ lead to martyrdom—and this was the third facet of Karol Wojtyła’s interior life that was nourished at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Four of the Franciscan priests who lived in the monastery at Kalwaria died in concentration camps during World War II, three at Dachau and one at Auschwitz; all were arrested for giving refuge to a professor from Kraków’s Jagiellonian University. Their sacrifice is remembered on a plaque on one of the exterior walls of the basilica at Kalwaria, a place Wojtyła knew well from his regular visits to the shrine during his Cracovian years as a priest and bishop. Thus it is not unlikely that a central feature of Wojtyła’s life of faith—his conviction that the ideal of the Christian life is that of the martyr7—drew at least in part on his experience of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska.

  Throughout his life, John Paul II’s faith was nourished by prayer. His spiritual life had its daily rhythms: Mass; the Liturgy of the Hours (which he once described as “very important, very important”8); periods of meditation, Scripture reading, and other spiritual reading; adoration of the Blessed Sacrament; recitation of the Rosary (or, as Stanisław Dziwisz once observed puckishly, “Many Rosaries …”9). At the same time, his prayer spilled over into just about every other facet of his life. He never made a decision without praying over it—sometimes, for a considerable period of time.10 Walking between meetings in the Apostolic Palace, he prayed. Preparing to celebrate Mass in the far corners of the world, he disappeared into prayer while his aides wrestled with the liturgical details of the moment. The same habit continued during his vacations. The physicist Jerzy Janik, John Paul’s old friend and partner in skiing and hiking in the mountains of Poland, remembered years later that being outdoors with Karol Wojtyła was a time of jokes, songs, and serious discussions. Yet, as Janik recalled, “what was [also] characteristic of such a day was that, after some hours of walking and hiking in the mountains, he would gradually withdraw to the back of the group and contemplate for two hours or so. It was almost difficult to notice … but everyone felt that we should not disturb him; that was his private time with God.”11

  The man who succeeded him as Bishop of Rome, Joseph Ratzinger, once described Karol Wojtyła’s immersion in God as the source of energy animating John Paul’s spiritual and intellectual life and his pastoral work:

  [H]is personal meditation, his personal dialogue with God, is decisive for his life. He is a man of God, and his philosophy and theology are essentially born in his dialogue with God. The deepest source of what he says is that, every day, he is, for an hour, alone with his Lord and speaking … about all the problems of the world. But he is also seeking the face of God, and this is very important. In his meditations he is in personal contact with the Lord and thus directed to sanctity and sanctification. Before the literary sources, before his experiences of life, this dialogue with God is the central element in his spiritual and intellectual life.

  But it’s clear that the dialogue with God is also living from the dialogue with man. All his intellectual reflections helped him to be more intensive in his dialogue with God and in his pastoral experience, because dialogue is not an isolated and individual phenomenon, it is always with the Lord, for others: for the sanctification not only of his own person but to do the work of sanctification with the Lord in the world.12

  That lifelong dialogue of faith, which continued through Wojtyła’s dark nights, sheds light on two facets of his personality that puzzled some who tried to get to him from the “outside”: his seeming inscrutability, and his lack of concern for closure. Another old friend, the art historian Jacek Woźniakowski, felt that, even after decades of conversation, he “never had the feeling of getting to the bottom, so to say, of [Wojtyła’s] thoughts and attitudes. There was something he kept for himself.… With some people, you have the feeling, which may be misleading, of coming to the bottom. But with Wojtyła you did not have that feeling.”13 Which was, Woźniakowski understood, the way of all mystics—for the experiences of the genuine mystic are, by definition, indescribable, at least in discursive terms (which perhaps also explains Wojtyła’s affinity for such mystical poets as John of the Cross). Thus John Paul II was not so much “inscrutable,” in the psychological sense of having built up formidable interior defenses; he was, rather, a man whose deepest human and spiritual experiences took place in a realm beyond words, which he could only begin to describe through such vehicles as his poetry. Or, one suspects, in those groans that often accompanied his private prayer.

  His immersion in God was also the true explanation for John Paul II’s seeming lack of interest in getting closure on a project or initiative, according to Jacek Woźniakowski. That, Woźniakowski remembered, was his way in Kraków—sometimes, perhaps, to the discomfort of his colleagues in the management of the archdiocese. It was also his way in Rome, as in his ecumenical and interreligious initiatives—and this was certainly to the discomfort of the traditional managers of popes. Some read this as a flaw in his composition as an administrator, which perhaps it was, at least from one angle of vision. But Woźniakowski believed that the deeper truth of John Paul II’s willingness to live with incompleteness was his faith: “there is a path you tread,” Woźniakowski once put it, “and you leave the rest in God’s hands.”14

  Hope

  In October 1995, speaking from the green marble rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly, Pope John Paul II described himself as a “witness to hope” at the end of a century of fear:

  It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that man, who began the period we call “modernity” with a self-confident assertion of his “coming of age” and “autonomy,” approaches the end of the twentieth century fearful of himself, fearful of what he might be capable of, fearful for the future.…

  In order to ensure that the new millennium now approaching will witness a new flourishing of the human spirit, mediated through an authentic culture of freedom, men and women must learn to conquer fear. We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope
and a spirit of trust … [and] regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires.15

  Coming from other public figures, such sentiments might have been taken as inspiring, or perhaps illusory, optimism. The key to grasping the hope that animated John Paul II, however, is to understand that Karol Wojtyła was not an optimist (or a pessimist, for that matter). Optimism and pessimism are matters of optics, of how one sees things—and the optics can change with the observer’s mood. John Paul II lived beyond optimism and pessimism, in a world of Christian realism infused with Christian hope. Christian realism requires seeing things as they are; or, as he put it in that same UN address, “hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past.”16 Yet Christian realism has an open-ended, not crabbed, quality about it, because it is enlivened by Christian hope.

  All of which is to say that the hope of John Paul II was built, not on optics, but on the far sturdier foundation of Christian faith. His hope, he told the assembled leaders of the world in the UN General Assembly hall, was “centered on Jesus Christ,” whose “Death and Resurrection … fully revealed God’s love and his care for all creation.” Christ-centered hope, the source of which is God’s presence in “the radiant humanity of Christ,” fills the Christian with a hope that reaches every human person, John Paul concluded, in an echo of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: “nothing genuinely human fails to touch the hearts of Christians.” It was to proclaim that Christ-centered hope in the world, recognizing the God-given dignity of every human being, that the Bishop of Rome, a “witness to hope,” came to the UN to speak to the world of power, of a power different from and greater than the power the world typically recognized.17