Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Archbishop Baziak, who knew Father Wojtyła’s tendency to do the work of three men, told the young priest that he would personally approve Wojtyła’s pastoral engagements during his academic sabbatical. Wojtyła began saying his daily Mass at St. Catherine’s Church in Kazimierz, accompanied by his “little choir” of Rodzinka members. He was also allowed to continue some of the work he had begun with students and returned to St. Florian’s during the academic year to lecture on ethics. He gave an annual retreat at his former parish during the fourth week of Lent, and on the First Friday of each month said Mass at St. Anne’s collegiate church for university faculty and students. As far as Archbishop Baziak was concerned, though, Father Wojtyła’s job was to write his habilitation thesis, earn his degree, and get himself approved as a university professor.

  EXPLORING THE TRUTH OF THINGS

  Karol Wojtyła brought certain intellectual convictions to the assignment his superior had given him. His struggle with Wais’s Metaphysics at the Solvay chemical factory during the war had convinced him that, if one probed questions deeply enough, the unity of things-as-they-are, from the lime buckets he carried to the God he worshiped, would reveal itself in due course. Reality itself was the true measure of thought. Thought was ordered to getting at the truth of things, as iron shavings are ordered to a magnet.

  Wojtyła held on to this hard-won conviction about the “objective” reality of the world as his philosophical interests matured. When he began to focus more directly on ethics, he came to a further conviction, that the “objective” reality of the world disclosed important things about the virtues, about the pursuit of happiness, and about our moral duties in life. He also came to see that the philosophical analysis of reality and its relationship to the moral life he had been taught at the seminary and the Angelicum was inadequate in the contemporary world. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had built their philosophies from the foundation of cosmology. But starting with a general theory of the universe and moving to a theory of the human person didn’t leave much room for human freedom, and modern science had falsified many of the assumptions that ancient and medieval philosophers had made about the universe.

  Some thinkers concluded from all this that morality was, at best, a matter of pragmatic calculation.8 Wojtyła disagreed. He thought that, beginning from a different starting point, philosophy could still probe deeply enough into things-as-they-are to help us grasp the way we ought to act. The human person’s moral experience of life “between” the person-I-am and the person-I-ought-tobe was the stage on which the great moral questions of good and evil, virtue and duty, presented themselves. This was where thinking about the philosophical foundations of morality had to begin.

  But how could you begin ethics with an analysis of human experience and avoid falling into the trap of solipsism—thinking about thinking about thinking? How could modernity avoid a cul-de-sac of radical skepticism about the human capacity to know anything with certitude?

  Reconstructing the foundations of the moral life—that was the problem, posed by his earlier intellectual training and amplified by his pastoral experience, that Karol Wojtyła now brought to his postdoctoral philosophical work. At the suggestion of his former mentor and current housemate, Father Rózycki, Wojtyła decided to explore the work of the German philosopher Max Scheler, to see whether Scheler’s new style of philosophy could help solve the problem. Wojtyła concluded that it couldn’t, entirely, but that there were important things to learn from Scheler nonetheless. That conclusion marked a critical intellectual “turn” in Karol Wojtyła’s life.

  Max Scheler was born in 1874 and, after a turbulent career, died in 1928. In his time he was thought to be a genius. But he was also a rake and something of a loner in the German academic world. His partly Jewish origins made him suspect to some, as his conversion to Catholicism and his later abandonment of the Church made him suspect to others.9 Nonetheless, Scheler was one of a number of German thinkers who helped lead a Catholic intellectual revival in and around Munich immediately after the First World War. Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein were other members of the movement, which was linked to the Polish philosophical scene through Roman Ingarden, a onetime member of the group who had moved on to Lwów.

  The original lodestar of all these thinkers had been Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the new philosophical method called “phenomenology.” Scheler, Ingarden, von Hildebrand, and Stein came to believe that Husserl had abandoned his original commitment, which was to use this new way of doing philosophy to relink philosophical reflection to objective reality. Carrying on where their master had declined to go, each of these thinkers created an original body of work in pursuit of Husserl’s original intention.

  Despite the movement’s complexities of analysis and terminology, understanding the basic program of the phenomenological movement is not difficult. Doing so is essential if one wants to get inside the mind and the thinking of Karol Wojtyła.

  Phenomenology is an effort to “bring back into philosophy everyday things, concrete wholes, the basic experiences of life as they come to us.”10 The early Husserl and his later disciples thought that philosophy had come unglued from everyday life, in one of two ways. Empiricists reduced our experience to “sense data, impressions, chemical compositions, neural reactions, etc.”11 Idealists, determined to fit everything into ideal types, forms, or categories, drifted off into a world of extreme abstraction and subjectivism.12

  These very different approaches to philosophy can be illustrated by a simple yet important everyday human example: girl meets boy. An empiricist will analyze the brain chemistry of a young woman seeing, hearing, and touching a handsome young man. Influenced by Immanuel Kant, an idealist may worry that the young woman’s commitment to the second categorical imperative (never use another person as a means) may be wavering in the face of other desires.

  The phenomenologist, on the other hand, will be interested in the experience as a whole, the psychological, physical, moral, and conceptual elements moving this young woman. How are these elements related? How is her experience of this boy unique? What is her heart telling her head (and vice versa)? And what does this experience—girl meets boy—tell us about the human condition itself?13

  It was phenomenology’s determination to see things whole and get to the reality of things-as-they-are that attracted Karol Wojtyła. In his habilitation thesis, he asked whether it was possible to create a solid philosophical foundation for the moral life on the basis of Scheler’s phenomenology of ethics, and particularly his ethics of value.

  Every moral code has to have an answer to the question, “Why be good?” How could that question be answered in a culture habitually suspicious of any answer thought to be traditional (“Because that’s the way we do things”) or authoritarian (“Because God [or your mother, or the legal system] said to be good”)?14 How is it that moral choices are not just personal preferences? How can a modern man or woman make a binding moral judgment and say, “I ought to do this,” rather than merely “I’d prefer to do this”? How can society discuss questions of how we ought to live together if nobody knows where “ought” comes from, and everybody thinks that “ought” is an imposition of someone else’s will?15

  These were not only urgent questions in a communist country. On both sides of the iron curtain, modern culture had raised a critical primary issue: Could modern human beings talk coherently about morality at all?16 Wojtyła thought that Scheler might help him deal with this question, as part of a “great and necessary effort to find a new way of philosophical thinking.” This in turn required Wojtyła to go back to quarrying, although now of an intellectual sort. As Pope John Paul later said, “I had to translate a lot of Scheler so that I could work on him and do a philosophical and theological analysis of his mind.”17

  It was a grind, certainly at the beginning. One day Mieczysław Maliński came to Kanonicza, 21, and Wojtyła complained, “Look at what I’ve got to cope with…I can hardly make it all o
ut, my German is poor, and there are a lot of technical terms I don’t know how to translate. Do you know what I’m doing?…I’ve started to make a translation of the whole book—there’s nothing else for it.”18 The attempt itself was an important indicator of Wojtyła’s philosophical development. That he looked to Scheler as a possible guide, and that he put himself through the backbreaking work of translation so that he could analyze Scheler in his own language, suggests that Wojtyła had become convinced that the answers were not to be found in the neo-scholasticism of Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

  Wojtyła didn’t lock himself into intellectual combat with the philosophical method he had been taught, expending his energies in a war of attrition against an entrenched Catholic way of thinking. Certain forms of neoscholasticism might have been an obstacle to a genuine Catholic encounter with modern philosophy. Wojtyła simply went around the barrier, having absorbed what was enduring about neo-scholasticism—its conviction that philosophy could get to the truth of things-as-they-are. The young priest was open to engaging modern philosophy on its own terms, and would recall years later that wrestling with Kant’s second categorical imperative was “particularly important” for his later thinking.19 (That it was indeed wrestling was nicely conveyed by John Paul II on one occasion when he remarked to guests, “Kant, Mein Gott! Kant!”) As a confessor, a teacher, a writer, and a man with a wide range of human contacts, he also brought a “natural phenomenologist’s” intuition to his analysis of Scheler. The net result would be what Wojtyła would call, years later, a way of doing philosophy that “synthesized both approaches”: the metaphysical realism of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the sensitivity to human experience of Max Scheler’s phenomenology.

  It was Scheler’s personalism, which rescued moral philosophy from the dry abstractions of Kantian ethics and restored the pathos, ecstasy, and indeed ethos to human life, that Wojtyła found most attractive.20 Wojtyła also agreed with Scheler’s claim that human intuitions into the truth of things included moral intuitions, a certain “knowledge of the heart” that was, nonetheless, real knowledge.21 Scheler’s careful analysis of moral sentiments, especially empathy and sympathy, was also important, for it helped break modern philosophy out of the prison of solipsism—empathy and sympathy necessarily involved an encounter with another.22 Perhaps above all, Wojtyła appreciated Scheler’s attempt to ground morals in an analysis of the realities of moral choosing, rather than in a formal, abstract system like Kant’s. The question Wojtyła posed in his habilitation thesis was whether Scheler (and, by extension, the phenomenological method) could do for contemporary Christian philosophy and theology what Aristotle had done for Thomas Aquinas.23

  The answer, for the young priest, essentially, was “No.” The moral act is a real act with real consequences, and to Wojtyła’s mind Scheler had failed to come to grips with how moral choices actually shape a person. Therefore, in Scheler’s system, morality was still suspended somewhere “outside” the human universe.24 Wojtyła was also critical of Scheler’s tendency to emotionalize experience and consciousness, leading to a truncated portrait of the human person. The men and women he had hiked with, talked with, and accompanied in their various moral struggles were more than composites of their various emotional states and experiences.25

  These were specific criticisms of Max Scheler’s philosophy. The more general conclusion of his habilitation thesis, An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler, was crucial for the future of Wojtyła’s own philosophical project.26 Phenomenology, he argued, was an important instrument for probing various dimensions of the human experience. Phenomenology would drift off into various forms of solipsism, however, unless it were grounded in a general theory of things-as-they-are that was resolutely realistic and that could defend the capacity of human beings to get at the truth of things. This, he believed, was crucial if modern men and women were going to be able to understand and live by real moral norms. If the choice was not between good and evil, but only between personal preferences, then all choices were ultimately indifferent and real choice no longer existed. This, in turn, would empty the drama of human freedom of its essential tension and deprive human beings of their most distinctively human quality.27

  The Scheler study was Karol Wojtyła’s first sustained attempt to link the realist objectivity embedded in the philosophy he had learned in the seminary and at the Angelicum to modern philosophy’s emphasis on human experience and human subjectivity. In his habilitation thesis and in his later philosophical work, reconciliation, synthesis, and “connection” would be among Wojtyła’s principal intellectual traits, enabling him to think through Thomism and phenomenology, love and responsibility, freedom and self-denial—and, years later, democracy and public morality, the market and solidarity.28 This synthetic approach also reflected Wojtyła’s ongoing pastoral concern and his sense of priestly ministry as a matter of “meeting someone wisely.”29 Wojtyła’s openness in his encounter with others was a way to “see” into his philosophy, even for those without formal philosophical training. Other philosophers remembered texts. Karol Wojtyła always remembered persons.30

  There was also an echo here of Wojtyła’s constant rereading of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus tells his disciples, after the multiplication of loaves and fishes, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost” (John6.12). Fragments of a life could be gathered into a whole; fragmented human understandings could be similarly reconnected. It was, and is, an approach to thinking that cuts across the grain of modern intellectuals’ antipathy toward synthesis and their passion for deconstruction. It seemed to Wojtyła the only way to account for the many dimensions of the human drama while staying in touch with the great minds who had laid the intellectual foundations of our civilization.

  Father Karol Wojtyła’s habilitation thesis was read by two Jagiellonian professors, Father Aleksander Usowicz and Władysław Wicher, and by Professor Stefan Swiezawski of the Catholic University of Lublin. This three-man committee unanimously accepted the work and the Council of the Faculty of Theology accepted their recommendation at a special meeting on November 30,1953. The process for admission to the Theology Faculty seemed complete when, on December 3, Father Karol Wojtyła delivered a lecture that brought together his interests in John of the Cross and Max Scheler: “An Analysis of the Act of Faith in View of the Philosophy of Values.” His second doctoral degree was awarded by the Jagiellonian University Faculty of Theology in 1954, but before Wojtyła could be formally named a “docent,” the lowest rank of senior faculty member, the faculty was suppressed by Poland’s communist regime.31

  Still, his successful completion of a second doctorate meant that Karol Wojtyła was now qualified to begin a career as a university professor. That career would take him into one of the bolder intellectual enterprises of the mid-century, which was then beginning to unfold, as improbable as it may seem, in a small, harassed university in a medieval town called Lublin.*

  THE LUBLIN PROJECT

  The Catholic University of Lublin [Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, or KUL] was founded in 1918 by Father Idzi Radziszewski. Oddly enough, one of its midwives was Lenin, who allowed Father Radziszewski to take the library and equipment of Petrograd’s Polish Academy of Theology back to Poland when the priest was trying to get KUL launched.33 Given a state charter by the Second Polish Republic in 1938, the university was shut down by the German Occupation, with numerous professors imprisoned, tortured, or killed outright. Its state charter, which had never lapsed, permitted KUL to survive the imposition of Stalinism in Poland after the war, and KUL became the only Catholic university behind the iron curtain, a distinction it maintained throughout the Cold War.

  The faculty and students of KUL pursued the academic life in a situation of constant confrontation, sometimes cool, sometimes hot, with the communist regime. Between 1953 and 1956, the faculties of law, social science, and education were shut down. Even a
fter the Gomułka thaw in 1956, the student population was kept artificially low, KUL graduates found it difficult to obtain academic positions at other universities, and the KUL faculty had trouble publishing its work.34 These pressures, meant to marginalize the institution, in fact helped turn KUL into a university with a vocation. At a time when many influential figures in European intellectual life were flirting with Marxism, KUL would defend the unique dignity of the human person against an aggressive ideological opponent while demonstrating that Catholic faith and human reason were allies in that humanistic mission.35

  In allowing KUL to function, even under pressure, the communist regime in Poland may have imagined the school as little more than an intellectual petting zoo. “They had no idea that something new could happen in such a medieval place,” according to Professor Stefan Swiezawski; KUL, to the regime, was the Catholic equivalent of “a Hasidic ghetto.”36 The authorities may also have thought that they were creating another opening for penetrating the Catholic Church. (If so, they covered their bet by setting up a larger rival next door, the Marie Curie-Sk?odowska University, named for the Nobel Prize–winning discoverer of radium.37) The KUL faculty and student body, and especially the university’s Faculty of Philosophy, had very different ideas about what they were doing.

  KUL’s Faculty of Philosophy was established in 1946, in part as a response to the great hunger for philosophy evident throughout Polish intellectual life. The war and the Nazi attempt to decapitate Polish culture had (as Swiezawski puts it, rather gently) created a “very distinctive spiritual and intellectual situation” in Poland. In the immediate postwar period, philosophy lectures at the reconstituted Jagiellonian University were delivered to overflow audiences.38 Now, at KUL, lectures in that most abstract of philosophical disciplines, metaphysics, drew standing-room-only audiences, with students sitting on the floors, in the aisles, and on the window sills of the lecture hall.39 There, they heard different members of the KUL faculty examine the philosophical issues posed by the hard experiences both faculty and students shared—life under Nazi Occupation and in Stalinist Poland.