Time named him “Man of the Year” in 1994. Mikhail Gorbachev, who might have been expected to take a somewhat rueful view of the matter, declared that John Paul II was indispensable to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Fidel Castro remarked privately that his first meeting with John Paul II was like being with family. Those who work with him on a daily basis—even those who disagree with certain of his decisions or with his method of conducting the papacy—unanimously testify to his personal sanctity, his kindness, and his seemingly limitless capacity to listen.
Yet journalists of wide experience and historians of literary distinction have heaped opprobrium on him. One of the latter, who admitted that he prays daily for the Pope’s demise, charged him with plotting a Rome-Riyadh Axis, an unholy Catholic-Islamic “Alliance for the Repeal of the Enlightenment,” in order to conduct a joint jihad, a “final war against the godless.”1 A papal biographer described John Paul II as becoming “increasingly emotional and confrontational in his vision of the world and its ills” as he ages, an angry old man incapable of understanding the world he helped to create.2 Another pair of biographers claimed that he “surrounds the Church with barbed wire.”3 Another veteran journalist has conceded that while “my faith in God is intact…my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I examine this brief Polish interlude in its long history.”4 The London Independent, which editorialized in 1995 that John Paul II was the only global leader left in the world, charged eighteen months earlier that his pontificate has been “characterised by intolerance…and an authoritarian character that has left him out of touch with many Western Catholics.”5 Inane rumors about John Paul II’s alleged intentions (e.g., his putative plans to announce a new dogma, according to which the Virgin Mary is present in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist) have been reported without a blush by sources that consider themselves papers-of-record (in this particular instance, the Sunday Times of London).
Why has this most visible of public figures never come into clear focus? Why do the judgments on his accomplishment vary so wildly?
Several reasons, although touching the surface of the problem, are still significant.
In the first instance, Pope John Paul II has always been a man with a deeply ingrained sense of privacy and has only recently begun to reveal certain aspects of his early life and development in published autobiographical reflections.6 Karol Wojtyła’s mysticism is another factor in his reticence. As with other mystics, he would find it virtually impossible to describe his deepest religious experiences, which make him the man he is. Those who have heard Pope John Paul II groaning in prayer before morning Mass in his private chapel know that there is a dimension of Karol Wojtyła’s life in which God is his sole companion and interlocutor, in a conversation literally beyond words.
John Paul’s Polishness has been a barrier to his being understood in the West. Poles may be admired for their romantic heroism. But a deeply entrenched prejudice, compounded by historical and geographical ignorance, makes it difficult for many Western intellectuals and writers to imagine Poles in the forward thrust of world intellectual and cultural life. Indeed, the very term “Polish intellectual” strikes too many in the West as oxymoronic. What was once an advantage—John Paul II, the pope from the Slavic borderlands, an indisputably romantic figure—turned rather quickly into a virtual indictment. How could this Pole, this Slav, this man from a country that had dropped out of history, understand freedom, modernity’s highest aspiration?
Understanding John Paul II has also been made difficult by the traditions of secrecy and the habits of suspicion that characterize the relationship between many of those who work in the Vatican and those who analyze its activities. The habit of caution ingrained in many officials of the Holy See is not without foundation. Living in a cultural environment in which journalism is even more an inexact science than in other parts of the world, the men of the Vatican have learned, perhaps too well, that silence is often safer than the effort to communicate a point of view. The upshot is that, while things have improved considerably during the pontificate of John Paul II, Holy See public relations remain underdeveloped by most contemporary standards. Combine the modern journalist’s working assumption that all public figures are guilty until proven otherwise with habitual Vatican caution, and the net result is coverage that too often begins with the assumption of duplicity on the part of Vatican officials. Although he has made an unprecedented personal outreach to the world media, John Paul II has been regularly caught in the backwash of this unfortunate set of relationships.
But when one probes beneath the surface, the more interesting causes of the contradictory assessments of John Paul II, man and pope, become clearer. John Paul II is frequently perceived in conflicting terms because he is, in fact, a sign of contradiction. His life, his convictions, and his teaching pose an unmistakable challenge to his times, to which he seems in many other respects so well-attuned.
To a late modernity dominated by the pleasure principle and by personal willfulness, he has insisted that suffering can be redemptive and that obligation is at the core of biblical religion.
In an intellectual environment in which the human capacity to know anything with certainty is denied, he has taught that universal truths exist, that we can know them, and that in knowing them certain moral duties are laid upon us.
At a time in which the “personality” is deemed infinitely plastic and in which “human nature” (if its reality is admitted at all) is viewed as a cultural construct, he has defended the idea of a universal human nature and has insisted on the givenness of the human condition.
In a culture in which happiness is identified with talent and its assertion, he has taught that happiness is found in the obedient submission of talent and will to transcendent truth and love.
Against the temptation to regard utility as the sole criterion for measuring anyone’s worth, he has insisted that every human being possesses an inherent and inalienable dignity and value.
At a historical moment that celebrates the pursuit of self-interest, he has taught that we worship God and we strive for holiness, not because these are “good for us,” but because these are things that are to be done.
In a world that takes history to be the product of impersonal economic and political forces, he has defended the priority of culture and the world-transforming power of the human spirit.
That John Paul II has been a sign of contradiction within the modern world is not much in doubt. But that he has been a pope against modernity and its aspiration to freedom, a pope of “rollback” and “restoration,” is another matter altogether. Indeed, the countercase can be made: that the “contradictions” embodied by John Paul II are in fact in service to the human happiness that is freedom’s goal.
Demonstrating that case requires stepping back from the conventional analysis and looking at this well-known public figure from a different angle—from inside the convictions and commitments that make him who he is.
UNDERSTANDING “FROM INSIDE”
In a brief author’s introduction to his play Our God’s Brother, Karol Wojtyła wrote of a “line inaccessible to history” that stands between any man and our attempts to understand him.7 The “history” that cannot get to the fundamental truths about a human being is “history” understood as documents, statistics, and the other materials of the contemporary academic historian’s craft. These are important. They tell us things, some of them quite significant. But they cannot give us an authoritative answer to the questions, “Who is he? Who was she?” Referring to other biographical efforts and their emphasis on his role as a statesman, Pope John Paul II once remarked, “They try to understand me from outside. But I can only be understood from inside.”8
What is this “inside,” and how might it be approached?
It may help to begin by thinking of Karol Wojtyła as a man who grew up very fast. The traumatic events that shaped his early life could have led him to conclude that human existence is ir
rational, even absurd. Wojtyła came to a different conclusion. Beginning with his late teenage years under the Nazi Occupation, he gradually came to the conviction that the crisis of the modern world was first of all a crisis of ideas, a crisis in the very idea of the human person. History was driven by culture and the ideas that formed cultures. Ideas had consequences. And if the idea of the human person that dominated a culture was flawed, one of two things would happen. Either that culture would give birth to destructive aspirations, or it would be incapable of realizing its fondest hopes, even if it expressed them in the most nobly humanistic terms.
Karol Wojtyła’s early intuitions about the root of the crisis of the modern age were refined experientially. No pope in centuries has brought to his office such extensive pastoral experience with the real-world problems of ordinary men and women. His convictions were also developed philosophically as Wojtyła participated at the Catholic University of Lublin in a bold experiment at reconstructing the intellectual foundations of modern civilization. Through thousands of hours in the confessional, in hundreds of seminars, books, lectures, and articles, and throughout a pontificate that has addressed virtually every major issue on the human agenda, his fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.
The modern age prides itself on its humanism and declares freedom its noblest aspiration. Though Karol Wojtyła shares both the pride and the aspiration, he believes that neither contemporary humanism nor the freedom it seeks has been given a secure foundation. And the cracks in the foundations are not of interest to philosophers only; they are life-and-death matters for millions. For a humanism that cannot give an adequate account of its most cherished value, freedom, becomes self-cannibalizing. Freedom decays into license; anarchy threatens; and in the face of that anarchy a host of devils, each promising security amid the chaos, is set loose—demons like the supremacy of race (Hitler) or class (Marx), the messianic lure of utopian politics (Lenin), chapter after bloody chapter, the butcher’s bill always lengthened by humanity’s increasing technological accomplishments.
Very early in his life, Wojtyła began to think about a question of historic consequence: How might we realize our humanity in an age in which the artifacts of our own creativity threaten the very existence of the human project? As he pondered that problem, certain convictions grew in him. One was that the human person is a moral being as such: morality is not a culturally constructed and historically conditioned appendage to what is, essentially, a cipher. To be human is to be a moral agent. That, in turn, meant that we live in a human universe the very structure of which is dramatic. And the great drama of any life is the struggle to surrender the “person-I-am” to the “person-I-ought-to-be.” That struggle meant confronting, not avoiding, the reality of evil. Evil had made itself unmistakably manifest—in the world, in such distinctly modern enterprises as the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago; in daily life, in the exploitation of one human being by another, economically, politically, or sexually. But evil did not have the final word, because at the center of the human drama is Christ, whose entry into the human condition and whose conquest of death meant that hope was neither a vain illusion nor a defensive fantasy constructed against the fear at the heart of modern darkness.
Karol Wojtyła believed that Christ-centered hope to be the truth of the world.9
THE DISCIPLE
To try to understand Karol Wojtyła “from inside” also means to think about him in something other than the conventional “left/right” categories that have shaped the world media’s coverage of his pontificate. These are, of course, political categories that date from the French Revolution and have dominated much of modern thought. Though they illuminate some facets of various policy issues, political parties, and ideological tendencies, the “left/right” taxonomy is hopelessly inadequate for getting “inside” John Paul II, the man and the pope. In fact, John Paul seems to defy the rules of this categorization by occupying several positions along the conventional spectrum. Thus we have often read about John Paul II, the “doctrinal conservative” and “social-political liberal.”
There are not, though, two Wojtyłas, the “fundamentalist” on matters of Church doctrine and the “social progressive” on political and economic issues. There is only one Karol Wojtyła, a Christian so completely convinced of the truth that Christianity bears that this conviction animates literally everything he does. On one interpretation, the depth of this conviction and its particularity mark John Paul II as “sectarian.” John Paul believes, however, that this Christian radicalism commits him to an intense conversation with nonbelievers and with believers of different theological and philosophical persuasions. That conversation has led him to articulate a set of genuinely transcultural moral requirements for the exercise of freedom. As he put it to the representatives of worldly power at the United Nations in 1995, “As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ…[who] is for us God made man, and made a 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 others 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….”10
The universality of Karol Wojtyła’s interests and concerns is thus a function of his particular, specific, and radical Christian commitment.
It is important to clarify the meaning of “radical” here, for as it applies to Karol Wojtyła, it does not mean “further left” (on the conventional left/right spectrum) but deeper. The English word “radical” (like the French and Spanish radical and the Italian radicale) comes from the Latin radix, “root.” To see Wojtyła as a “Christian radical,” then, is to try to understand his radicalism as an example of what the American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once described as the simplicity that lies on the far side of complexity. Wojtyła has never denied the sometimes tortuous complexity of the human condition in the modern world. The Wojtyła difference, so to speak, is that he has not been paralyzed by that complexity. As he worked through those complexities intellectually, he became convinced that some things are, simply, true.
In more biblical terms, Karol Wojtyła was seized early in his life by the “more excellent way” of which St. Paul spoke to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 12.31): the way of Christian love, which the apostle described as the greatest of spiritual gifts. And having been seized by this, Wojtyła committed his life to it. To be seized by the “more excellent way”—to be seized, ultimately, by Christ—was a life-transforming truth, to whose lifting-up he committed his own life. From his seminary days, Karol Wojtyła’s life has been a continual encounter with those who understand the “more excellent way” and those who do not, with those whose dedication to the “more excellent way” he would like to help deepen, and with those he would like to introduce to it. Nothing in his life happens outside the truth of the “more excellent way.” His faith is not one facet of his personality or one dimension of his intellect. His faith is Karol Wojtyła, at the most profound level of his personhood.
This intense rootedness can be startling, even disturbing, in a world in which assembling a personality from bits and pieces of conviction—religion here, politics there; morals here, aesthetics there—is one of the hallmarks of modernity. But it is precisely this rootedness that has allowed Pope John Paul II to proclaim, without hesitation or fear of hypocrisy, “Be not afraid.” His life, forged in the furnace of the great political and intellectual conflicts of the twentieth century, is an embodiment of that proclamation, just as his teaching is an explanation of the sources of his fearlessness and his public ministry is the action
implied by it. The ground on which he makes that proclamation, which is universal in intention, is the conviction that Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.
To put it in a single word: to understand Karol Wojtyła “from inside” is to understand him as a disciple.
SURPRISES
Now it must be admitted that there is something surprising about the advent of John Paul II, particularly at the end of the twentieth century. This was, after all, the century that was supposed to witness the withering away of religion as a maturing humanity, tutored by science, outgrew its “need” for such psychological props as religious faith. Yet at the millennium, the most compelling public figure in the world, the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead, is the man who is best described as the compleat Christian.
Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. The life of Karol Wojtyła and his accomplishment as Pope John Paul II suggest a dramatic, alternative possibility: that a man who has been seized and transformed by the “more excellent way” can bend the curve of history so that freedom’s cause is advanced.
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