Discovering the Human Person: In Conversation with John Paul II

By Stanislaw Grygiel

A longtime friend and student of the late Pope John Paul II, Stanislaw Grygiel in this book reflects on the life and thought of this extraordinary pope, giving new insight into his character and his vision of beauty as the path that leads us to God.

More than simply biographical information about John Paul II -- who was Bishop Karol Wojtyla before he became pope -- or a dry academic analysis of his teaching, Discovering the Human Person derives from Grygiel’s extensive firsthand interaction with Wojtyla. Grygiel reflects on the importance of Christian personalism, or communion, as the ground of John Paul II’s life, particularly in response to the communist environment that surrounded him in Poland. Grygiel also addresses the pope’s call for a new evangelization, his understanding of marriage and family, and the relationship of those to a genuine, healthy understanding of nation and state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781467442121

Stanislaw Grygiel

Stanislaw Grygiel is professor emeritus of philosophyand director of the Karol Wojtyla Chair at thePontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage andFamily in Rome.

Book preview

State

Foreword

It is a commonplace today to think of the John Paul II Generation as those young men and women who may have participated in a World Youth Day event or have been strongly influenced by the papacy of John Paul II, and who are now entering their professional careers and vocations to religious life or to marriage and family. But the reality is that the John Paul II Generation began many years earlier and far from the world’s attention with another generation of young adults who gathered around Bishop ­Karol Wojtyła. This was a generation that listened to him speaking from the pulpit and in the classroom, that shared Sunday-­afternoon dinners with him, that walked with him in the forests and in the mountains. He prepared these young adults for marriage, baptized their children, gave them spiritual guidance, and during times of sickness and tragedy offered them consolation. This was a generation that went with him on pilgrimage to places like the Marian shrine at Ludźmierz and stood with him to erect a cross in defiance of communist oppression in the new churchless city of Nowa Huta. In this truly extraordinary book, Stanisław Grygiel opens for us a window into the man who inspired this generation, the man whom the world would come to know as Pope John Paul II.

Soon after his election as pope, John Paul II called Professor Grygiel to Rome to serve as one of the founding members of a new pontifical faculty that would be officially established at the Lateran University in 1981. Soon to be known as the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, it would pioneer a new approach to global theological education. Sessions of the Institute would soon be established, first in Washington, D.C., and then in the years to come on virtually every continent, bringing together scholars from Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia to study the challenges confronting marriage and family from a uniquely global perspective. And yet the Institute, which has now been engaged in this study for over three decades, is unique in another way as well. It is a community of scholars devoted to the study of the human person in all of his dimensions but centered on a study of the person in that community that is the original cell of human society: marriage and the family. From the beginning of this work, Professor Grygiel has been one of its most profound guiding lights. The reasons for this are abundantly evident in the pages that follow — an expanded version of the Fr. Michael McGivney Lectures given in 2013 at the Institute’s Washington, D.C., session at the Catholic University of America.

We see here how, while surrounded by the dehumanizing pressures of communist totalitarianism, Karol Wojtyła lived day in and day out a profound Christian personalism. In the midst of constant propaganda about creating a new collectivist, godless society, Karol Wojtyła lived a communion of persons. Over the years, he would invite many others into this communion. In this way, he experienced an authentic freedom and developed what he would describe as an adequate understanding of the human person. As Grygiel makes evident in chapter 1, there is nothing abstract or artificial about Wojtyła’s view of the person. Karol Wojtyła wrote his anthropology above all with his life. It is in relationships — especially those open to the possibility of deep personal development — that we are able to realize that we belong to one another and are obliged to care for one another. Thus for Wojtyła, the communion of persons is a place of freedom and a place that exists for freedom. It is the place where the truth that makes us free (cf. John 8:32) is revealed. Decades later such an understanding of human solidarity in freedom would change the face of Europe, but its origin could be seen in the faces of those who gathered around Karol Wojtyła years earlier.

Much has been written regarding Karol Wojtyła the artist — about his early experience as an actor in Krakow’s Rhapsodic Theater as well as his dedication as a poet and playwright. In chapter 2, Professor Grygiel takes us further by opening a window into Wojtyła’s artistic sensibility, revealing its profoundly spiritual nature and showing us how it shaped his philosophical and theological thought. In reading, we come to understand that for Wojtyła, Every human being is called to make of himself a work of art on earth. We cannot help but think of Dostoevsky’s famous observation that beauty will save the world. For Wojtyła, this beauty is inseparable from love. For the person, who is called to make of himself a work of art, this beauty is therefore also inseparable from freedom and conscience. Grygiel aptly concludes this chapter with a quote from Wojtyła’s poem Thinking My Country I Return to the Tree and its defense of conscience: History lays down events over the struggles of conscience. Victories throb inside this layer, and defeats. History does not cover them: it makes them stand out. Can history ever flow against the current of conscience?

As Grygiel suggests in chapter 3, this defense of conscience and of the vision of the human person as a work of art inevitably leads us to the Christian vocation to holiness and to the cross. This is central to Wojtyła’s understanding of the new evangelization, which requires true witnesses of faith. In our time, this true witness is called for especially regarding the defense of marriage and family. Nazism and communism showed Wojtyła that in marriage and the family, a decisive battle was being fought for truth and for freedom — a battle for the dignity of the human person. In chapter 4, Wojtyła’s concern for married life is seen as arising out of a vision of a communion of persons in the service of a culture of love. This culture is reflected first in the relationship of the married couple to each other and in their family life and then, from there, into society at large. The reader should thus not be surprised that in chapter 5 the implications of Wojtyła’s vision of the person, freedom, and communion lead us to understand that both a nation and its politics have an inherent spiritual dimension. Every political system, Grygiel writes, must allow itself to be ‘formed by love.’ Here he makes clear that for John Paul II, the reference to the necessity of Christians working to build a civilization of love is not simply a pious catchphrase but a concrete proposal arising from a fundamental commandment of the Christian life — to love one’s neighbor as one’s self.

In these lectures, Stanisław Grygiel provides us not only with the product of a lifetime of study of the thought of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II, but of a lifetime of experience in so many ways shaped by him. Grygiel offers us a unique vision into the life, philosophy, theology, and spirituality of one of history’s great personalities and saints. It is sure to become essential reading for anyone intent on entering more fully into the conversation about and with John Paul II, or on understanding how Karol Wojtyła made of himself a work of art that astonished the world.

Carl A. Anderson

Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus

Introduction

Only those who do not reflect on the human person in isolation think in conformity with the truth. An anthropology elaborated in isolation ­passes by the person and misses him, for the truth unveils itself only to those who live in communion with others. In its primordial form, the word about the human person cannot be reduced to opinions and hypotheses. It transcends these. A thinker whose reason constructs opinions and hypotheses relegates the primordial word about the person to the margins of his own personal life; he does not wish to receive the gift that is the truth. This kind of reason does not know the love in which and by means of which the truth reveals itself. Only those who dwell in love see the truth revealed. Reason detached from personal life cannot see this.

Words about the love that opens the human person to knowledge of the truth orient him to his source. In other words, they orient him to Love. Doubt has no power over words of love, for love never doubts. Doubt guides only those words constructed by reason. This is precisely why such words demand experimental verification if they are ever to function effectively. The person and the society subjected to doubt are thus treated as objects. They are judged not according to what (or who) they are, but according to how useful or successful they are in producing other objects, which are exchanged for ends the moment they are produced. An anthropology that is built up only with the help of such rationalistic processes is irrational — so irrational that it negates itself. In the end, praxis, that is, experiment, negates it. In praxis, it becomes evident that the human being who does not know the truth is an empty space to be filled carelessly with anything at all.

A rational anthropology, or as Karol Wojtyła puts it, an adequate anthropology, arises in the communion of persons, since it is in this communion that the human being matures to the truth that was promised to him. An adequate anthropology is created on the basis of internal bonds that have their source in the reciprocal entrustment of persons. A person can only entrust himself to another in a certainty that excludes the need for experimental verification. Trust is not trust if one must test ­whether one ought to entrust oneself. Love cannot be verified in this way; we ­rather live from it and become it. A lack of faith — understood to be the reciprocal entrustment of persons — destroys both their love and their hope. Freedom is suffocated in people who do not open themselves to one another to receive the gifts of faith, hope, and love, for precisely these gifts constitute the epiphanic language of freedom. In the human person, the event of freedom takes on the colors of faith, hope, and love; it creates of him a work of art that only the words of mystics and great artists can approach.

Karol Wojtyła, who was first bishop of Krakow and then John Paul II, always remained in communion with other persons. Encounters and discussions opened him to a communal search for the gift of God, to a communal prayer so that this gift might be realized. They opened him to a communal reception, when he and others were permitted to stand before the Transcendence of this gift. This standing before Transcendence is the subject of Karol Wojtyła’s adequate anthropology. With his desire, the human person already dwells in the presence of the gift of God. He exists here, but he already lives over there. Thanks to faith, hope, and love, man too is transcendence.

Only now do I realize that the conversations I had with Bishop Karol Wojtyła and Pope John Paul II were never an exchange about the theme, What is man? We spoke hypothetically about the problems tied to the institutional aspects of the Church or about the communist regime, for which the word man did not loftily resound, no matter what Mr. Gorki said. But we never spoke in this way about the human person. Why? Because thanks to the freedom of faith, hope, and love, God and man formed a harmonious unity for us. We knew well that the destruction of this unity would open the way to crimes against the human person, as well as to the offense of Love with respect to God. In other words, it would open the way to sin. Bishop Karol Wojtyła and Bishop Jan Pietraszko, who spiritually influenced him, helped me to understand an intuition that had been present in me for a long while: that excessively distinguishing theological thought from philosophical thought, as well as from the thought proper to the exact sciences, would cause all of these — theology, philosophy, and the exact sciences — to lose their way. It would warp their praxis, which then devastates the human person, society, and the whole world.

Our conversations took place very spontaneously, in the least-­expected moments and places. We talked without immediate or concrete goals. One could even say that we talked without any advantage. Our conversations began at the end of the 1950s, during seminars for doctoral students. These were the only conversations of ours that went in a precise direction. Since he had no other time, Bishop Wojtyła, then professor of the Catholic University at Lublin, organized these seminars for two or three days at a time in Krakow. No more than five or six people participated in each seminar. During the summer we went into the mountains, usually to Gorce, where, walking along the paths through the woods or climbing uphill, we discussed our dissertations or meditated on the classics of European philosophy, especially Aristotle’s Ethics. We had no access to recent Western literature, for our communist lords hermetically isolated us from the cultural events of the West. The few books that friends brought to us from there were passed from hand to hand. We read them hastily, so that others might read them as soon as possible. But to make up for that, we could read more calmly and deeply works that had been published before the world war.

In 1962, I managed to take a nice photograph (by chance!) of our professor, as he was coming out of the woods on Mount Turbacz, which belongs to the Gorce Mountains. In this photograph, he is following a path, one of the many that inspired the title I gave to the series of books published under the aegis of the Karol Wojtyła Chair at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome: Sentieri della verità, pathways of the truth. In all the conversations I had with Bishop Wojtyła and with Pope John Paul II, a path would lead us out of the dense woods into a wide field, where the sunlight arranged nature into a harmonious ensemble of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

There were many such pathways of the truth. We walked them at different times of the day and the night, but most often at dusk. The Cardinal was very familiar with the paths through the woods near Krakow. The so-­called sad gentlemen (agents of the secret police) might still be seen there, but they probably wouldn’t be able to overhear us. The secret police had its informers, but the Cardinal behaved clearly, transparently. He did not try to overthrow the regime imposed upon Poland. He lim­ited himself to laying the spiritual foundations of a future worthy of the Polish nation. When the communist bosses at the time began to understand in what the work of the Archbishop of Krakow consisted, and what consequences this work might have for their rule, they began to look on him as one of the greatest enemies undermining their power. They did not know that the priest Karol Wojtyła was filled with pity for them.

John Paul II has left for the Native Land in which he was rooted, with a hope that speaks of the Promised Land. But the dead do not forsake us. They live with us, within us — they simply live in a different way. They live with us above all in the risen Christ, who is Eucharistically present on the altar. God is so faithful that he does not allow anything to take our life from us. He transfigures this life, in order to save it from annihilation. Precisely for this reason, those who still live here can speak to those who already live there. Their conversation is not interrupted; it simply takes place differently.

The present volume is nothing other than a prolonged conversation with Saint John Paul II. On mountain paths or paths through the woods, we would interrupt our conversations with a silent prayer. This prayer transfigured our thinking, transforming what had begun in an exchange of words into an attentive listening to the Word that proclaimed the fulfillment of our hope. We hoped not only that our Native Land — God — would one day come to us, but that our country might regain its freedom and sovereignty. Many of us thought and said that communism would not collapse in our lifetime. Cardinal Wojtyła never said this. It is thus evident that he never even thought this. In Krakow, and even more in Rome, I was impressed by his tranquility and certainty that the gift of God was right next to us, and that we had only to pray and keep watch to be able to receive it at the proper time. And so it happened. Today our earthly native land is threatened by other dangers. Often, I think of this together with John Paul II. Our conversations continue.

One day in the spring or perhaps autumn of 1979, I found myself in John Paul II’s private chapel together with André Frossard. We gazed at the kneeling Pope in silence. At one point, we glanced at each other. ­Later the same day, during a conference at which we both spoke, we were seated next to one another at the presider’s table. Listening to the next speaker and criticizing the talk under his breath, Frossard sketched a few lines on a sheet of paper and passed it to me without saying a word. He had drawn the Pope kneeling before the altar in his chapel. In the corner of the drawing was a dedication that still reminds me of our gaze fixed on this white rock of prayer.

Keeping vigil over the human person, John Paul II conversed faithfully with God. He prayed even when he was not praying. Prayer shaped his thoughts and his actions. John Paul II lived on his knees before God. When he knelt in his chapel, adoring Christ in the tabernacle, I always had the impression of being in the presence of the white rock of prayer I just mentioned. I said this at the beginning of John Paul II’s pontificate and I continue to repeat it, for I continue my conversations with this white rock of prayer that is now kept in my memory. We just converse differently.

The following text is an expanded version of a series of public lectures delivered from March 18 to 21, 2013, at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. The series, titled Discovering the Human Person with John Paul II, took its place in the tradition of the McGivney Lectures, in which the Washington session of the Institute invites various theologians and philosophers of international provenance — many of them well known — to speak on themes related to the human person. The lectures are named in honor of the Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney (1852-1890), the founder of the Knights of Columbus.

RomeStanisław Grygiel

June 29, 2013

Chapter 1

Vir fortis

Who was Blessed John Paul II? Only God, whose creative thought sustains every human being in existence, knows the answer to this question. None of us fully knows the being indicated by his own name. None of us knows the content of what we desire and choose about our being persons. A person’s name is not a concept. It has no meaning and points to nothing except to indicate the direction in which the person exists, guided by his desire for greater goodness and beauty. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the person’s name points to the love that takes place in the space opened up within the great question (St. Augustine’s magna questio), that is, the question about the mystery of the Origin and the End. We always look at the person from behind, as it were. We see his footprints on the path he has taken, leading in the direction of the Future. We see the actions with which the person enters into the laborious love of others, in order to build with them a home that belongs to all.

The human person receives his name from those who love him laboriously and to whose call he must respond just as laboriously. He receives it from those on whom he fixes his gaze. I would dare to say that this name has its origin in one person’s enraptured listening to another (ex auditu), or when one person fixes his gaze on the gift of love that comes to him in and through the other person.¹ When we gaze at another person, something primordial is revealed to us. Everything in our life leads back to this; everything, even the past, continues to exist in it.

In the tradition of the home that human persons are for one an­other, moral obligations arise in them that are not at all to be conflated with the habits that govern present-­day society. Such obligations are, rather, identical with the call with which love calls to love. Love is love insofar as it obliges us to love and, as we respond to its call, becomes ever more truly love. Moral obligations sustain in us the hope of finding in Love the salvation promised to man — the salvation we await expectantly.

The