ARTICLE

THE POPE ON
THE HUMAN PERSON

by James V. Schall, S. J

"Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can "give himself to the other."

"In inter-human relationships, therefore, the disinterested gift of self (of the person) stands at the basis of the whole order of love and the whole authenticity of love. The human being as a person is capable of such a gift. Moreover, a personal gift of this nature does not impoverish but enriches the giver."

I.

In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Vittorio Messori asks the Holy Father what exactly he meant by his oft repeated emphasis on "human dignity"? In his answer, John Paul II recalled his "involvement with young people who asked me questions." And what did they ask this remarkable Polish priest? He was surprised that they did not ask him "about the existence of God." Rather they wanted to know "about how to live, how to face and resolve problems of love and marriage, not to mention problems related to work."3 As he recalled these conversations with young men and women in his homeland, just after the German occupation, Karol Wojtyla realized that their doubts and questions indicated to him "the way," the inspiration for the major themes of his own intellectual life. Out of these encounters his book Love and Responsibility was born and later, the more theoretical work of Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person. His living background is something that shines through in almost everything he writes, in his addresses, lectures, encyclicals, and letters.

Why the Focus on the Person

As a philosopher and theologian, naturally Karol Wojtyla knew that the notion of "person" had a long and complicated history going back through Aquinas and Augustine to early controversies over Trinitarian theology in which the inner life of God was explained in terms of differing Persons in one God. He knew that the Incarnation was likewise explained in terms of person, that Christ was the Second Person of the Trinity made Man. He had learned the philosophical definition of person from the late Roman philosopher Boethius, that a person is an "individual substance of a rational nature." The Pope incorporated these earlier questions into his own explanations of the dignity of precisely the human person, as something irreducible, unique, irrepeatable, the source of action and volition.

As Professor George Hunston Williams put it, the Polish word for person, osoba, is always used by Karol Wojtyla to mean "'sovereign person' and `the subject of an act', which in the relationship of love, has another person as object, but an object who must also be treated as a sovereign, and therefore never used (exploited)."4 But we will miss the urgency and immediacy of the Holy Father's discussions about the dignity of the human person if we do not see that the profoundest of questions and intellectual studies can and do arise, even for a Pope, perhaps especially for this remarkable Pope, from what was in fact a priestly concern. Karol Wojtyla sought to respond to actual questions posed to him about how to live, about marriage, about work, about things that pertain to every human being who is like the young man who wants to know what he should do, what he should do to live rightly, to be saved.

II.

Justice, But Not Justice Alone

John Paul II goes even further with this principle. "This is as true for God as it is for man." What this implies, as the classical discussions of grace remind us, is that when we love, we are participating in a power that is found first and primarily in the inner life of the Trinity, something finally offered to the free creature according to which he is invited to live. We thus must be beings, even in what otherwise must appear to be our limited finiteness, who somehow have faculties and powers that can receive and put this love into effect. This is what founds our dignity and explains Karol Wojtyla's effort further to understand what a person is. If we recall that all love has a touch of everlastingness to it - no genuine love is just for tomorrow afternoon or till a week from Tuesday - we can appreciate the foundation of the dignity that our capacity to love and be loved gives us. It is in this context that John Paul II thinks of the person.

The Pope is fond of citing in this context a passage from Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes, no. 24), a passage he may well have had a hand in composing. He tells us that the personalistic interpretation of this command of love is found in words from the Council. The following points are made in this passage: 1) When Christ prayed that his disciples be one as He and the Father are one, he meant to imply that there was a similarity "between the union of divine persons and the union of the children of God in truth and charity." 2) Man is the only creature on earth "whom God willed for his own sake." God willed other creatures, to be sure, but for the sake of their species and all for man's sake within a universe that was willed itself for God's own purpose and glory. Each individual person, however, from the moment of conception, as the Pope will frequently remark, is willed for his own sake, not as a means of something else. Each has eternal life as his immediate destiny. 3) Someone in existence for his own sake, someone who is capable of bearing and exercising a love that is identified as God's love for Himself, someone to whom we are just only if we love them, the Pope concludes with the Council, "can only discover himself by the sincere giving of himself "

Thus, if we speak of "self-realization", we totally misunderstand what it means if we think it is something that we can accomplish solely by ourselves looking to ourselves, by certain forms of asceticism or psychology. "The person is realized through love." We cannot understand the person as person if we do not have and choose to exercise our human freedom to give to others. "If man does not commit himself to becoming a gift for others, then this freedom can become dangerous. It will become the freedom to do what I myself consider as good, what brings me a profit or a pleasure, even a sublimate pleasure."5 The Holy Father is quite aware, as was Augustine, that love directed to the wrong things is supremely dangerous.

We must grant, then, that our world is filled with a huge legacy of misplaced loves. This is what constitutes its danger, for even misplaced love carries the force of passion and enthusiasm that belongs to all love. We cannot, however, escape from the possibility of loving wrongly because any loving at all, including especially loving rightly, must also be free. The drama of our personal existence, of the person we are, can best be described as a struggle between loving rightly and loving wrongly. "If we cannot accept the prospect of giving ourselves as a gift, then the danger of a selfish freedom will always be present." Again, not to have this prospect simply means that we could not exist, for the only creature in the world made for himself is the same creature that loves rightly or wrongly. He is not given the possibility of not existing or of not loving at all. He exists and his existence is given to him that he might love rightly, give himself as Christ gave himself, even unto death. The Pope realized that a finite creature given such powers is one of great dignity, of great worth.

III.

The world, as John Paul II sees it, is composed of incarnate persons. Each has an inner life in which he fashions his own awareness of what he knows and what he is. He is also to relate himself to other persons, ultimately including the divine Persons, in all their human and spiritual dimensions. Person, with its Trinitarian origins, already implies otherness. We are not solitary beings. It is not without accident that the Holy Spirit is spoken of as "Gift." The Holy Spirit is likewise the point at which a God, Who is complete in Himself, can look outward, but with no inner necessity, to create freely what is not Himself, yet something that is intended to return to Himself. Thus, the Holy Father wrote in his Encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem, that

It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between divine Persons, and that through the Holy Spirit, God exists in the mode of gift. It is this Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person-Love. He is Person-Gift. Here we have an inexhaustible treasure of the reality and an inexpressible deepening of the concept of person in God, which only divine revelation makes known to us (no. 10).

What lies behind the Holy Father's thinking on the human person is his reflection on the divine Persons and the sort of being the human person must be to be able to receive and live this lofty, yet vital gift.

In his first Encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II explained that his concern with the philosophy of person and of human dignity was not some abstraction addressed to "humanity in general", but something very particular because the drama of God's redemption was to reach each one for whom the divine personal mission was intended. "We are speaking of each man on this planet," he wrote, "this earth that the Creator gave to the first man, saying to each man and woman: 'subdue it and have dominion.' Each man in all the unrepeatable reality of what he is and what he does, of his intellect and will, of his conscience and heart. Man who in his reality has, because he is a 'person,' a history of his life that is his own and, most important, a history of his soul that is his own. Man ... writes this personal history of his through numerous bonds, contacts, situations and social structures linking him with other men, beginning to do so from the first moment of his existence on earth, from the moment of his conception and birth."6

Perhaps no single passage can be found to emphasize better the concrete realism of the Christian faith that is concerned with the salvation of actual, unique men and women, with human persons, in this very earth. We sometimes forget, in our attempts to accommodate diversity, the concreteness of the Christian purpose -"each man without any exception whatever has been redeemed by Christ, "7 This defines the scope of the love that the Holy Father thinks is intrinsic to us. Yet it is a love with a certain definite order, beginning with the family.

This unique context is the objective situation of each person. The fact is that each person needs to have this self-understanding, to become aware of it. The full meaning of person includes one's understanding of what he is, whoever and wherever he is. "This vocation of perfect love is not restricted to a small group of individuals," the Pope wrote in Veritatis Splendor (no. 18). There is a universality that fearlessly teaches that each person, in each nation and culture, needs this knowledge of his redemption to know who he is and what it is that he is created to be, "The human being holds a position superior to the whole of nature and stands above everything else in the visible world," Karol Wojtyla wrote in his essay on "The Dignity of the Human Person." " ... A being that continually transforms nature, raising it in some sense to that being's own level, must feel higher than nature - and must be higher than it. In this way, the constant confrontation of our own being with nature leads us to the threshold of understanding the person and the dignity of the person."8

IV.

In a remarkable phrase to which the Holy Father often returns, we find just why it is that what might be called a clear and objective understanding of our lot and position as human beings in terms of science or merely human knowledge is not sufficient. What is revealed needs to be known and lived because it is only here that a full explanation of man is possible. "Man cannot live without love," the Pope repeats again to emphasize his purpose. "He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This is why ... Christ the Redeemer 'fully reveals man to himself.'9 This phrase about man's being "fully revealed" to himself implies that knowing fully about ourselves is itself necessary for our acting and for our ability to judge properly about what is important.

The Person and Society

Clearly, what the Pope implies is that man cannot explain himself to himself fully by human sciences and disciplines alone, however helpful they might be. The dignity of the person is something much more than human self-reflection can ascertain. However, unless this final destiny of eternal life open to each person offered redemption is known and taken into consideration by each person in his acts, man will not fully understand himself or be himself. The missionary aspect of the Church, its urgency, as it were, relates not only to the dangers that result if we do not correctly know ourselves as persons but also to the confusion and disordered lives in others that ensue from their lack of proper understanding about knowing themselves. This is why the Holy Father sees, as he pointed out in his Encyclical, Redemptoris Missio, the missionary element in every Christian life to be of vital importance for everyone.

During his first visit to Turin, in Italy, in 1980, John Paul II addressed the following words to thousands of university students there about what exactly constitutes the dignity of the human person:

The man of today often lacks the sense of the transcendental, of supernatural realities, of something that is beyond him. Man cannot live without something that goes further, that is beyond him. Man lives his life if he is aware of this, if he must always go beyond himself, transcend himself. This transcendence is deeply inscribed in the human constitution of the person."10

This sense of what transcends the person also indicates the person's own dignity. All through John Paul II's life he has maintained that an accurate understanding of the human person is the central point of every relationship that he will encounter, be it in family or society. Consequently, he has seen the need to explain the person as someone who is capable of loving and for whom love constitutes the purpose of his existence.

But the reason why this purpose constitutes the core of human existence, the full revelation of man to himself, is because he is initially created in the image and likeness of God. Man is not God, but as the being he is, is called to live in God's very love. The early historical reflections about person did not usually attribute personality to man, only to God. What seems to be the fruit and core of the thought of John Paul II is that he has explained why the word person is the best one also to describe what man is. Once a man knows himself, knows that he has a transcendent destiny, what remains is for him to become what he is. The Holy Father's understanding of the human person leads naturally to that same unique person's deciding in his freedom whether he will accept the gift of his own reality and its destiny.

"Self-determination ... points as though inward - toward the subject, which, by willing this value, by choosing it, simultaneously defines itself as a value: the subject becomes 'good' or 'bad'," Karol Wojtyla wrote.

Human beings not only determine their own activities but also determine themselves in terms of a most essential quality ... Through self-determination, the human being becomes increasingly more of a "someone" in the ethical sense, although in the ontological sense the human being is a "someone" from the very beginning. ... Self-determination ... points to self-possession and self-governance as the structure proper to a person.11

The person who is self-governed, self-determined then must decide what to do with himself, with what he is, with the full revelation of himself to himself as the only creature created for himself, his unique, particular being. John Paul II's final purpose is to show that only by self-giving can this person really be himself because that is the nature of the love he has received, a love received as a gift, designed to imitate God's own love manifest best in the Incarnation, a love even unto the Cross. It is this personal, self-giving love alone that will make the world what it ought to be and that will be the eternal life that is the final answer to all of our questionings.

1 John Paul , "The Church's Position on the Transmission of Life," Reflections on Humanae Vitae: Conjugal Morality and Spirituality (Boston: St. Paul Books, 1993), pp. 32-33.

2 Karol Wojtyla, "The Family as a Community of Persons," Person and Community: Selected Essays, Translated by Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 322.

3 Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 200.

4 George Hunston Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought and Action (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p. 153.

5 Ibid., p. 202.

6 Redemptor Hominis, no. 14.

7 Ibid.

8 Karol Wojtyla, "The Dignity of the Human Person," Person and Community, ibid., p. 178.

9 Ibid., no. 10.

10 John Paul II, Address of April 13, 1980, in The Whole Truth about Man: John Paul II to University Faculties and Students, Edited by James V. Schall (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), p. 146.

11 "Wojtyla, "The Personal Structure of Self-Determination," Person and Community, ibid., p. 192.

Father James Schall, a Jesuit, is professor of political science at Georgetown and a writer of Chestertonian energy and scope.