The human person seeks fulfillment through love, whereby he conquers solitude and becomes part of a friendship or community involving moral responsibility. As a person becomes aware of the deeper values revealed through love, he is "born" into a certain newness of life and opened up to the influence of God’s grace. A "birth" takes place in the heart every time one human being loves another unselfishly, recognizing in him a dignity that must be honored. This dignity derives solely from the participation in truth and goodness each person has owing to his creation as an image of the God who is absolute truth and sovereign goodness. It is only because the Word of God is reflected in each of us that we can be worthy objects of love, since God alone is supremely lovable and He is ultimately responsible for making man a lover of what is true and good. As we said in the conclusion of the last article, "Love demands and begets moral goodness; it urges men, once they are reborn in truth, to become active co-creators of the mystery of life; and it directs our gaze towards the absolute source of love, the Word of the Father." These themes are at the heart of Wojtyla’s philosophical ethics. Thus for him ethics and moral theology are not awkwardly juxtaposed: one leads to the other by a natural, inevitable progress of thought. When the ethicist turns to the Gospel, he sees that God’s revelation complements and brings to perfection what reason and phenomenological analysis have already indicated, in a manner appropriate to their more limited field.

Although in his philosophical works Wojtyla closely considers the significance of love, he describes it most poignantly in his plays and poetry, where protagonist and antagonist, image and counter-image, more readily express the mysterious dynamic of love and the tragedy caused by its absence or rejection. The Jeweler’s Shop (1960), carrying the subtitle "A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony, Passing on Occasion into a Drama," contains an immense wealth of commentary on the role of human and divine love in the auto-teleological perfection of the acting person. The character Anna asks Adam: "Isn’t what one feels most strongly the truth?" Then, applying that mind set to love, she recounts Adam’s reaction:

As former Cardinal of Krakow and present universal pastor, Wojtyla feels grave anxiety at the ubiquitous cheapening of love into blurry emotion, cinematic fantasy, selfish whim, utilitarian contract, or a mere routine performed without the consciously committed gift of the person. Love thus cheapened makes another person into an object, an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, futureless pleasure, or a more refined, but no less unstable, psychological gratification. If person and action cannot be divided, then love properly so-called is a manifestation of the whole self, the revelation of the unique ‘I’ who enters into relationship with the Other. If an "act of love" is predominantly self-directed or non-committed, it cannot be a revelation or communication of the whole person to another; it is not an act of love in the fullest sense, since perfect love signifies the total gift of the person. Although good Christian marriages give the clearest examples of this kind of love, such intimacy between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ does not take place only within the framework of the sacrament of marriage. Wojtyla is speaking of the common Christian caritas or vocation of love that should pervade all relationships, including celibacy, and above all, the nuptial covenant between the Creator and His creatures.

Revelation helps us to see that every relationship has a "spousal" nature patterned after the primary example of Jesus Christ as Bridegroom of the Church. Our Lord’s mission, His dying for us, is the eternal exemplar of unconditional, all-encompassing, active love of neighbor. In his theandric (at once divine and human) actions, Christ most fulfills the essence of humanity—and this fulfillment is shown to consist in self-sacrifice, in making one’s life an offering of love for another. The fact that Christ chose not to marry teaches all Christians, married or celibate, that the greatest perfection is found in loving the Father with one’s entire being, in whatever state of life God has called us to. The most fulfilling love man can experience and bestow is not confined to the limitations of the natural world; love is always transcendent, it always seeks the divine. In his writings, Wojtyla often stresses this transcendent quality of love, while in no way lessening the value of human love and its conjugal expression. Indeed, it is only because of the eternal significance and divine destiny of love that Christian marriage possesses a dignity which far surpasses that of any other earthly relationship. (2)

Returning to Anna and her speech, we must pose the simple question, very relevant to modern times: What is human love, if it is not the exchange of commodities, the self-seeking contract, our society typically makes it out to be? Wojtyla, a realistic playwright who introduces the less known by way of the more familiar, embeds his answer in reflections on the common experience of unhappiness and loneliness. Because the personalistic vision would never permit a simplistic approach to a reality as multifaceted as love, Wojtyla insists that love must be understood as a mystery (analogous to the mysterium fidei) whose illimitable content can be probed and illuminated but not mastered by our finite minds. The character Adam, plunged in depression as he thinks about how inner emptiness leads to the desperate act of adultery, comes to see certain truths about human love:

There is no other matter embedded more strongly in the surface of human life, and there is no matter more unknown and more mysterious. The divergence between what lies on the surface and the mystery of love constitutes precisely the source of the drama. It is one of the greatest dramas of human existence. The surface of love has its current—swift, flickering, changeable. A kaleidoscope of waves and situations full of attraction. This current is sometimes so stunning that it carries people away—women and men. They get carried away by the thought that they have absorbed the whole secret of love, but in fact they have not yet even touched it.(3)

Just as any mystery has a name or a surface, human love has the "surface" of "waves and situations full of attraction," i.e., the sensual and emotional quality of human sexuality. But to identify this surface with the "matter unknown and mysterious" would be to take the part for the whole, not to have "touched" love or "absorbed" its secret at all. Anna, at a later stage in her life, has lost this realization in the midst of her dry and desolate marriage; she walks aimlessly through the streets in search of a companion whose mere physical presence can do nothing to heal her inner wounds. Seeing Anna as she wanders along a city avenue, Adam (her friend) steps forward and removes her hand from the door handle of a stranger about to pick her up, because he understands the primary demand of human love, commitment. As he says: "Love is not an adventure. It has the flavor of the whole man. It has his weight and the weight of his whole fate." Because any act of committed love reveals a fundamental personal attachment of the ‘I’ to the ‘Thou,’ such an act is immortal, for through it the person communicates something of his soul which is itself undying. In loving another, a person co-creates spiritual and moral life, sometimes physical life as well; he participates in the work of creation, which enfolds both nature and grace in its scope. Hence Adam says that love "cannot be a single moment. Man’s eternity passes through it. That is why it is to be found in the dimensions of God, because only He is eternity." To live "for the instant," as the phrase goes, is impossible.

To be for a moment only—only now—and cut himself off from eternity. To take in everything at one moment and lose everything immediately after. Ah, the curse of that next moment and all the moments that follow, moments through which he will look for the way back to the moment that has passed, to have it once more, and through it—everything. (4)

Memory, the servant of conscience, is the curse of false love, for recollection of action betrays flaws in the will and intensifies the pain of loneliness when a relationship—wherein the gift of the person has been, or was intended to have been, irrevocably bestowed upon another—ends in a failure that was avoidable.

Committed love is eternal, and thus its full realization is an ideal to be sought in the midst of repeated failings—much the way a Christian takes the imitation of Christ as his goal, though the very fact that he sins or has sinned separates him from the sinlessness of his ideal. But just as sin cannot undermine the mercy of God, likewise failure cannot doom a genuine love. Man, therefore, should not despair when he falls short of the nobility of caritas, a virtue that is, at best, gained only in degrees by a lifetime’s conscious effort and receptivity to grace. "Succeeding" in love—a feat quite unlike succeeding in a business transaction, though it might be presented that way in our world of conditional marriages and temporary vocations—involves lasting and irreducible suffering. Indeed, this ought to be evident from the simple fact that, as a result of the effects of original and personal sin, man is and will always be far from perfect. Man comes face to face with weakness in any great venture of faith. To achieve victory in spite of all that could impede the venture, he must have the courage to diagnose in himself the disease of pride and seize hold of the cure while healing is still possible.

In Radiation of Fatherhood, Adam speaks of fulfillment as a birth or re-birth, implying that no one can attain the happiness of love without undergoing the pain of separation from self demanded by constant conversion of heart. In The Jeweler’s Shop, Christopher, speaking to his fiancée Monica about the nobility of a commitment to love without reserve, perceives that such a tremendous "birth into communion" must be accompanied by pains in which something is lost or left behind as well as gained.

Adam eloquently connects birth and love in a different way: Love is always a choice and is always born by choice.

As a mother forgets the pains of labor after her child has been born and placed into her arms, so too, love’s suffering gives way to the mysterious fascination between persons that constitutes "a synthesis of two people’s existence." This ideal of complete oneness between "spouses"—the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the pastor and his parish, the monk and his community, the husband and his wife—must have as its model a love that absolutely transcends human love, a divine source that supernaturalizes the natural bonds of relationship. The absolute divine measure should never be supplanted by or ignored in favor of a relative human value. If the relative human value is made to take the place of the divine measure, man cannot escape from the failure, the catastrophe, this false inversion brings about. An inverted love remains bounded by earthly limitations, which means, more often than not, it will be afflicted with the pride of self-seeking individuals who treat one another as objects.

The thing is that love carries people away like an absolute, although it lacks absolute dimensions. But acting under an illusion, they do not try to connect that love with the Love that has such a dimension. They do not even feel the need, blinded as they are not so much by the force of their emotion as by lack of humility. They lack humility toward what love must be in its true essence. The more aware they are of it, the smaller the danger. Otherwise the danger is great: love will not stand the pressure of reality. (7)

Man as a subject who actualizes and manifests himself through conscious action must therefore orient his being humbly toward Love (the transcendent Person) in order to escape psychological alienation, cynical utilitarianism, and joyless obsessions. He must actualize himself in the presence of Love and manifest that Love to others. The significance, indeed the necessity, of Christ’s life becomes evident the moment one attempts to describe the ideal of unselfish love or caritas, exemplified to its utmost in the self-effacement and immolation of the Son of God. He was made to be sin who knew no sin so that we might become righteousness (see 2 Cor. 5:16); He lowered Himself to the status of a slave, renewing fallen man’s capacity for love. Love is revealed to us as a daily commitment to the paradox of life-giving sacrifice, the paradox of the cross, through which pain is transformed into joy, despair into happiness, "tears into dancing."

The Christian vocation draws its meaning from total identification with the crucified Christ, whose promise of everlasting freedom requires that we who follow Him forgo the immature freedom of "doing as we please." The "pleasure of the moment," divorced from its basis in person and God, is fundamentally incompatible with the "pleasure of eternity," the joy of a love which enters profoundly into the heart of the beloved and finds there a reflection of God’s glory. "For love denies freedom of will to him who loves," Adam says to his "adopted" daughter Monica, continuing with these extraordinary words,

Love is beyond price, since it alone gives purpose to freedom and liberates one from slavery to an absolutized but abstract freedom; to exchange love for loneliness, however "free," would be a fool’s bargain. At the drama’s conclusion, Adam, speaking of the single source of companionship, the Bridegroom, excitedly tells us: "How full of substance He is! He is the living denial of all loneliness."(9) For Wojtyla, Christ is not just a paragon of virtue or a model of charity; He is the Alpha and Omega of Love, the only mirror in which man can properly view himself and the only guarantor of peace on earth among and within nations, communities, families, and individuals.

In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II powerfully develops the message of Gaudium et Spes:

The evangelical commandment given by Christ—that we must love one another as He has loved us—was not laid down purely as law,(11) although its legal roots may be seen throughout the Old Testament. Instead, He gave the law because He knew that obeying it was the only way for man to complete himself, the only way to restore with God’s help the image of God, the only way to achieve temporal happiness and the fullness of eternal joy. It is not merely a matter of following or disregarding an arbitrary commandment according to one’s inclination. Since this law is the law of man’s very being, the alternatives are much more stark: communion or alienation, painful love or meaningless isolation, sacrificial commitment or lonely despair.

In reflecting on Christ’s liberating commandment, we are drawn to ponder Christ Himself. What meaning does the Incarnation bring to the concept of "acting person," and what, in this connection, does the Redemption reveal about God?

The scope of this article precludes more than a brief mention of the deep connections Wojtyla finds between the mystery of the Incarnation and the ethics of action and love we have already discussed. The Holy Father’s thought is particularly rich and expansive in this area. Here we shall touch on the reality of divine action, or more precisely God’s dynamic interaction with the created world, which reaches its fulfillment in the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ, Deus verus homoque perfectus.

Wojtyla’s description of the dynamism of God in human history stresses the traditional Thomistic notion of the pure actuality of God. In Him there is no potency to be actualized, no part of being which remains to be self-manifested and developed. God is act itself, and his state of perfect action implies the fullness and preeminence of all perfections, primarily an absolute plenitude of being. While man can act towards nonfulfillment, can choose not to become what his God-given nature prescribes for him, God by nature cannot choose against Himself. He is most free to love, because limitation and servitude have no part in Him: He is His own self-sufficing completeness. However, this all-perfect God is not an infinitely distant watchmaker who builds a world and, preoccupied with himself, forgets about its fate. He is on the contrary ever present in the history of the world, intimately concerned with the destiny of mankind, ready to hear the groanings of creation in bondage. God did not abandon His children after the first sin, and does not abandon them now, in the bleak desert of contemporary history: "From the moment of the very first denial, truth—the divine truth—will always seek, in ways known only to itself, to penetrate world history, to enter the minds and hearts of men," said Wojtyla in a sermon preached before Paul VI. (12)

Elucidating the drama of the divine economy, the Holy Father speaks of God as Prime Actor, the protagonist on the stage of history—a more personalistic name for the incorporeal Prime Mover or First Cause whose existence was demonstrated by Aristotle. A metaphysical title for God suffices to a degree, yet it answers only to the question what, not to the question who. Cardinal Wojtyla understood this well when he called the Creator "the Great Heart," whose love urges Him humbly to take a place on the very stage of the world He has made. The Father of heaven and earth directly intervenes in human history, and He chooses to act most dramatically through His Son. "The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history," John Paul II proclaims at the start of Redemptor Hominis. The Word became flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary: "God entered the history of humanity and, as a man, became an actor in that history, one of the thousands of millions of human beings but at the same time Unique!"(13)

Salvation history may be thought of in two stages: after man denied God, falsehood and isolation became the standard of the world; the Incarnation restores the world to holy truth, furnishing man with the grace to attain communion with God and neighbor. The coming of the Son of God to earth is an outpouring of divine life and the cause of our adoption by grace into the relational life of the Blessed Trinity. In his exegetical reflections on the Book of Genesis, our Holy Father reminds us of the simple yet often forgotten truth that man is created in the image and likeness of God, whose inner life has been revealed to us as relation, as love. Because the human person is fundamentally oriented towards the Other, his heart is restless until it rests in God, who is the origin and goal of every aspiration, every need. "You did not make me closed," says Wojtyla’s Adam. "Loneliness is not at the bottom of my being at all; it grows at a certain point. The fissure through which You enter is far deeper. You enter_and slowly begin to shape me."(14 )

Here on earth the Son of God reveals to man the fulfillment of the acting person: undying Love achieved by the victorious cross of caritas. Love is the substance and worth of life, the first cause of our creation and the final good of our existence. Those who truly love come to see that love is both a crucifixion and a resurrection, or rather, a resurrection only because it is first a crucifixion. In order to be itself instead of one of its numerous stand-ins, love must be an incarnation of self-sacrifice; it must achieve triumph through suffering. The cross of Christ, therefore, is the symbol or exemplar of the reality of love. Human love, so long as it aspires to be worthy of the dignity of the person, is an absurdity without the cross of total self-giving freely embraced by lover and beloved in their mutual consecration of self to self. How is an undying union of lover and beloved to be attained? Can that which is mortal be freed from death, or that which is sown corruptible be raised incorruptible? What is the origin, nourishment, protection, and destiny of true love? There is but one answer to all of these questions: the cross of Jesus Christ. As St. Paul says to the Corinthians: "I judged not myself to know anything among you, but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2).

Although God never ceases to act in history and in the hearts of men, He always respects the free will of the human (‘I’15)—as shown in the sending of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary of Nazareth, upon whose free cooperation the world’s salvation depended. Wojtyla has contributed immensely to our understanding of the structure and consequences of man’s free will. According to Catholic teaching, man has a natural liberty to act as he pleases; this indeterminate power, like any other power, stands in need of perfection. The fulfillment of natural liberty, called moral liberty, occurs only when man chooses what is objectively good for him. To this, Wojtyla adds that although an individual may choose not to love and thus to close himself in, in the end, every yearning of his soul will cry out for liberation from the hopeless slavery of narcissism. A soul without love soon comes to resemble a flower withered up, collapsed into itself from lack of life-giving moisture. Beyond the self-imposed limits of human free will, however, exists the cosmic scheme of divine love, the Father’s plan in Christ, who everlastingly preaches to us, pleads for us, rises anew in our midst and prepares our every moment for the gift of His grace. The Father’s radiance in all the things He has created makes it nearly impossible for us to close our eyes permanently to His "relentless" design of divine filiation.

How does the Creator enter into us, even when we do not welcome Him? How does man perceive his own inadequacy, the stupidity of selfishness, the absurdity of living as nothing more than a consumer or a cog in the social machine? These insights can only occur when the person is compelled to confront, in the silent inner chamber of conscience, the soul-piercing agony of nonfulfillment, and begins to see, as if awakening from a dream, the only cure for his isolation. This is the moment of spiritual self-knowledge, the discovery of the depths of the self as a creature of great dignity, made for eternal love. Self-knowledge brings about a "creative restlessness" in which "what is most deeply human. . .beats and pulses": "the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience."17 A person who listens to this voice and measures himself honestly against the ideal it proclaims will see that he was made to know the truth and to love what is truly good; he will see that life has meaning only when poured out in faithful love. If he then starts to search intently for the perfect love that alone fulfills man’s profoundest need, he will, with God’s grace, discover it in Jesus Christ, who unites the fullness of man with the splendor of God.

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(© Copyright 1998, As translated into HTML for Catholic Information Center on Internet by Jill Gooler 9/19/98)