Wojtyła-the-philosopher refined his distinctively phenomenological way of doing philosophy in the doctoral seminar. Many philosophers think in a linear way: they state a problem, examine a variety of possible solutions, and then, through a step-by-step process of logic, reach and state a conclusion. Wojtyła did not (and in fact does not) think linearly. His method was circular, but in the manner of walking down a spiral staircase, not going round-and-round a closed circle. He, too, would begin by identifying a problem: for example, what constitutes a just act? Then he would walk around the problem, examining it from different angles and perspectives. When he had gotten back to the starting point, he and his students would know a little more, so they would start walking around the problem again, reexamining it from this angle or that, but now at a deeper level of analysis and reflection. This continued through any number of perambulations, never forcing a conclusion before the question had been exhaustively examined from every possible point of view.64 It was a powerful method of leading a seminar, a situation in which Wojtyła’s sharply honed capacity for analysis and making distinctions worked to great effect. Transferred to the printed page, however, it made for very difficult philosophical essays.
Wojtyła’s doctoral students were also his researchers. After he became a bishop, and especially after his appointment as archbishop of Kraków, the demands on his time were such that he simply could not keep up with the technical philosophical literature in his fields of interest. The doctoral seminar reviewed articles and books for him, writing summaries of arguments that were then discussed in meetings. The students also marked up the sections of articles or books they thought he should read on his own. Professor Wojtyła told the members of his seminar that this was the first time in the history of KUL that the students were teaching the faculty.65
Arguments with the professor were not simply permitted but expected in Wojtyła’s doctoral seminar. Debate could get heated, with substantial disagreement and criticism of the teacher by the students. Yet Wojtyła was never regarded as simply another colleague. The relationship between him and his closest student-disciples, however friendly, was always marked by respect. His students wanted to be close to him; he was a thinker and human being they wanted to emulate.66
Professor Wojtyła’s sense of responsibility for his doctoral students did not cease when they completed their degrees; he also tried to help them get teaching positions. One of his earlier efforts on this front was frustrated. Sister Zofia Zdybicka, an Ursuline nun, had been through both Wojtyła’s undergraduate and graduate-level courses in philosophy. He was impressed by her interest in the philosophy of religion, and thought she would make a fine addition to the KUL faculty, where she would have been the first nun appointed to a professorship. This exercise in proto-feminism came to naught when another woman, Sister Zofia’s religious superior in the Ursuline community, refused permission for such an innovation. A successor superior agreed at a later date.67
When Karol Wojtyła joked with his doctoral students about their teaching him, he was not simply making a pleasantry. Professor Wojtyła learned at KUL as well as taught. Through faculty colleagues at KUL, and especially Stefan Swiezawski, Wojtyła had his first serious encounter with Etienne Gilson’s historical rereading of Thomas Aquinas and with Jacques Maritain’s modern Thomistic reading of Catholic social ethics, including Maritain’s moral defense of democracy as the modern method of government most reflective of human dignity. It was Swiezawski, for example, who introduced Wojtyła to Maritain’s Integral Humanism, a key 1936 text that later influenced the Second Vatican Council and its approach to the modern world.
Wojtyła’s more advanced students, like Środowisko, were also a kind of laboratory for his own developing ideas. In 1957, the professor went on vacation with philosophy, psychology, and medical students in the Mazurian Lakes country of northeastern Poland. There he discussed with them the draft of a book he was writing on sexual and marital ethics, which, like his monographic lectures for the next two years, would be called Love and Responsibility. The draft text was circulated before the group left for the lake country. Each day a different student prepared a presentation on a given chapter, which the entire group then discussed and debated. According to Wojtyła’s student and friend Jerzy Gałkowski, Wojtyła was not only interested in his students’ judgment on the book’s theoretical soundness, but also wanted to know if what he had written made sense to them practically and humanly.68
The conversation was serious, on this and other student outings with Wojtyła. There was something about him that precluded frivolity and pointless chatter. But Father Professor could also join in boisterous student songs around the campfire, including the “Pessimists’ Hymn,” a provocative line from which had it that “even the laity won’t stop the clergy destroying God’s work.”69
RESPONSIBLE LOVE
Professor Karol Wojtyła’s work as a philosopher, like his literary activity as a poet and playwright, developed in concert with his work as a priest. Wojtyła did not bracket his pastoral concerns when he stepped up to the lecturer’s podium or sat at the professor’s desk. His intellectual product was influenced, indeed driven, by his pastoral experience. Love and Responsibility, Wojtyła’s first book, was one such synthesis of the several dimensions of his life. A philosophical complement to the issues he explored dramatically in The Jeweler’s Shop, it exemplified Wojtyła’s conviction that one could only get to the truth of things by a variety of methods.
Love and Responsibility was, its author remembered, “born of pastoral necessity.” Wojtyła’s extensive pastoral experience in marriage preparation and as a confessor of young adults had convinced him that the Church’s sexual ethic needed development and re-presentation.70 Young men and women had a right not simply to instruction, but to an affirmation and celebration of their vocations to marriage, which included a vocation to sexual love. With Love and Responsibility, he stepped into one of the minefields of contemporary Catholic life.
When the early Church formally rejected the gnostic and Manichaean teachings that the world was inherently polluted, Christianity took a principled stand against the claim that sex was intrinsically evil. Yet the enduring theological influence of St. Augustine, or at least of some of his commentators, cast a Manichaean shadow over Catholic sexual ethics. The Church affirmed marriage as a vocation, included matrimony among its seven sacraments, and taught that the married couple, not the priest presiding at their wedding, were the ministers of the sacrament. But the Church also taught a theory of the “ends” or purposes of marriage that could be taken to (and sometimes did) denigrate sexual love. The primary end of marriage (and, pari passu, sex) was the procreation of children, and the sexual dimension of marital love was relegated to the secondary “ends” of matrimony, which were somewhat primly expressed as “mutual consolation of the spouses” and “a remedy for concupiscence.” Combined with the fact that the Church’s marriage law adopted a rather impersonal view of sexuality, the net result was a presentation of human sexuality that tended to focus more on legal prohibitions than on love. The Church was thus poorly positioned to respond to the challenge of the sexual revolution and its promise of liberation when it exploded in the developed world after World War II. In due course, this would result in one of the great crises of twentieth-century Catholic life, the bitter debate over contraception that preceded and followed the Second Vatican Council.
Life under communism posed its own challenges to sexual morality and marital chastity. As payback for its 1956 concessions to the Church, the Gomułka regime instituted a permissive abortion law, a direct assault on classic Catholic morality. Youngsters on state-sponsored summer outings were encouraged to experiment with sex as another means to pry them away from the Church. The communist campaign against traditional family life had its own secondary effects on sexual morality, for the linkage the Church taught between marital love and procreation was broken if men and women came to think of children as problems to be solved rather tha
n as gifts to be cherished. Communist materialism also contributed to a cultural climate in which sexuality became morally devalued.
These were the life circumstances that Father Wojtyła’s students and his young married friends were confronting. His work in philosophy and theology and his experiences as a confessor and counselor had convinced him that the Church’s sexual ethic, properly interpreted, contained essential truths that deepened human happiness when they were faithfully lived out. He had also discovered that the spiritual adviser’s “task is not only to command or forbid but to justify, to interpret, [and] to explain” the ethics of marital chastity and sexual love which the Church derived, primarily, from the New Testament.71 Rules of sexual conduct were important. In a modern cultural climate, though, men and women would not embrace those rules unless they understood them as expressions of fundamental moral truths and as a road map to basic human goods. “Such a good is the person, and the moral truth most closely bound up with the world of persons is ‘the commandment to love’—for love is a good peculiar to the world of persons.”72 Wojtyła thus argued that the best way to approach sexual morality was in the context of “love and responsibility.” Love is an expression of personal responsibility, responsibility to another human being, and responsibility to God. How, he asked, can men and women become responsible lovers, so that their sexual love embodies and symbolizes a genuine freedom? How can our love become a fully human love?
The “personalist norm,” Wojtyła’s variant on Immanuel Kant’s second categorical imperative, was his entry point for thinking about the ethics of human sexuality. Wojtyła argued that the moral imperative to avoid “using” others is the ethical basis of freedom, because it allows us to interact with others without reducing them to objects by manipulating them. Wojtyła suggested that we avoid “using” each other only when two genuine freedoms meet each other in pursuit of a good they hold in common.73 I can say, and you can agree, that I am not “using” you (or you me) when my freedom freely encounters your freedom as we both seek something that is truly good, and that we both recognize as good. This encounter of two freedoms is the substance of love, and love is the expression of the personalist norm in all relationships. Loving is the opposite of using.74
A commitment to “loving rather than using” had considerable implications for sexual morality. If someone understands his sexuality as simply another function or expression of his personal autonomy—his freedom understood as license—then whatever his knowledge about the biological facts of life, he will miss one of the crucial moral facts of life: our sexuality reveals our profound dependence on others. I cannot achieve my destiny by myself, cutting myself off from others by reducing them to pleasure-objects. To achieve my destiny, I must “meet the freedom of another person and depend on it.”75
Sexual morality transforms sex from something that just happens into something that expresses human dignity. Sex that just happens is dehumanized sex. Sex that is an expression of two persons—two freedoms—seeking personal and common goods together is fully human and fully humanizing.
Wojtyła’s key philosophical move, which he adopted from Thomas Aquinas and explored through phenomenological analysis, was to distinguish between a “human act” and an “act of man.” An “act of man” is mere instinct. Sexuality as an “act of man” does not rise above the level of animal sexuality, which is also instinctive and wholly impersonal. A “human act,” on the other hand, includes a judgment, which gives that act its distinctive moral texture. A “human act” expresses my freely rendered judgment about something that is good. Love is thus the “human act” par excellence, and ought not be reduced to the simple emotion of attraction. Attraction uncoupled from judgment reduces someone else to an object of desire.76
The other person, not simply the other body, is the true object of a sexual act that is a truly human act. And the goal of sexual expression is to deepen a personal relationship, to which the mutual gift of pleasure contributes. In freely giving myself sexually to another as an expression of love, I am being myself in a most radical way, for I am making myself a gift to another in a way that is a profound expression of who I am. The “Law of the Gift”—for Wojtyła, the basic moral structure of human life—is powerfully confirmed by a careful analysis of the ethics of sexuality.
In addition to being a more humanistic approach to sexuality, reconceiving sexual expression as mutual self-donation allowed Wojtyła to transcend the argument about the “ends” of marriage then being fiercely contested in Catholic moral theology. Rather than asserting that either the begetting of children or the communion of the spouses was the “primary end” of marriage, Wojtyła’s sexual ethic taught that love was the norm of marriage, a love in which both the procreative and unitive dimensions of human sexuality reached their full moral value.77
Love and Responsibility was an antidote to Manichaeanism and the outline of a personalistic, humanistic response to the claims of the contemporary sexual revolution. There was neither prudery nor prurience in Wojtyła’s treatment of sexuality. His analysis of marriage avoided false romanticism and the sterilities of some moral theologies’ abstractness. Love and Responsibility taught that sexuality was a good, because sexual desire led men and women into marriage, a difficult, but finally helpful, school in which we learn, “in patience, in dedication, and also in suffering what life is, and how the fundamental law of life, that is, self-giving, concretely shapes itself.”78
Chastity, in this context, is not simply a string of prohibitions. Chastity is the “integrity of love,” the virtue that makes it possible to love the other as a person. Chaste sexual love is ecstatic, in the original Greek meaning of ecstasy, being transported “outside” oneself. Chaste love involves putting one’s emotional center, and, in a sense, one’s self, in the custody of another. We are made as free creatures so that we can dispose of ourselves as a gift to others. We are free so that we can love freely, and thus truly. Freedom, not prohibition, is the framework of Wojtyła’s sexual ethic.79
Love and Responsibility raised a few eyebrows when it was first published in 1960—at which point Karol Wojtyła had been a bishop for two years.80 Wojtyła recalled that when the French edition was published in 1965, Father Henri de Lubac, one of the great theological inspirations of Vatican II, “strongly emphasized” that the fifth chapter, “Sexology and Morals,” had to be retained, which suggests that the author had been told by others in the early 1960s that questions of sexual function and the mutual exchange of pleasure between wives and husbands were beneath his priestly and episcopal dignity. Wojtyła obviously disagreed.81 If priests and bishops could not speak candidly and humbly about desire and sexual fulfillment with their people, they were defaulting in their pastoral responsibilities. If prudes disagreed, that was regrettable. But it was their problem.
Love and Responsibility was a book about responsible love, not a book about contraception. It discussed marital chastity and sexual ethics within the framework of Wojtyła’s philosophical personalism and his defense of Christian humanism as a response to the false humanisms of the time. The truth about the human person was that the heart of the individual drama of our lives is the history of love or its negation. Mutual self-donation in a communio personarum, a community of persons, was the moral framework—the humanistic framework—in which to ponder the question of birth control.*
Wojtyła affirmed the Church’s teaching that the morally appropriate regulation of births takes place through a responsible use of the natural cycle of fertility, rather than through mechanical or chemical means. He did not doubt that natural family planning was a method that required virtue, even heroic virtue, but he argued that it was the only method that met the high standards of human dignity, objectively and personally. Not everyone agreed, to be sure. Still, by locating the natural method of family planning within the broader context of responsible love and mutual self-giving, and by affirming sexual love as an essential expression of the vocation of marriage, Wojtyła’s propo
sal might have given the Church’s moral position on “natural” family planning an opportunity to be heard and engaged in a cultural climate in which “natural” was becoming a term of moral, even spiritual, force.
“Love or its negation”: that, Wojtyła always believed, was the issue posed by the sexual revolution, the unforeseen results of which included the demeaning of women into objects of male sexual pleasure (claims to a “liberation” of both sexes notwithstanding). The Catholic teaching on marital chastity and its relationship to various means of regulating births simply wouldn’t make sense, though, unless the Church could present its understanding of “responsible love” in a way that could be grasped by men and women who believed that sexual love was a good. Love and Responsibility was intended to make moral sense about human sexuality, in dialogue with the women and men who had invited the author into their lives as “their pastor and their confidant.”82 That it did not succeed immediately, beyond the author’s limited readership, would have consequences with which Karol Wojtyła would have to grapple in the not-too-distant future.
A New Pentecost
Witness to Hope Page 24