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Summaries of Special Meetings of Love & Responsibility Discussion Group

Fr. Bob Connor: “The Gift of Self as Developed in Love & Responsibility” (11 Oct. 2000)

To hear an audio recording of Fr. Bob Connor's talk on the “Gift of Self as Developed in Love & Responsibility,” along with the discussion that ensued, click here. (You must have RealPlayer installed to hear the recording. Click here to download a copy of RealPlayer, if necessary.)

0:0 to 14:25: Introduction

Father Connor begins his talk by pointing out that through John Paul II, for the first time in the history of thought, the self has been re-discovered as “the privileged locus for the encounter with being.” (Fides et Ratio #83) What the Pope is doing through his pontificate, Father Connor asserts, is no less than launching a new culture, a civilization of love. This is not a Catholic culture per se, but rather a secular culture based on the dignity of the human person achieved by the gift of self.

14:25: The Polish Soul

George Weigel, author of the papal biography Witness to Hope, has defined the seven aspects of the soul of John Paul II. Father Connor takes us through the first two of these, the Polish soul and the Carmelite soul. Father Connor first describes the Pope's Polish soul, drawn in the context of his pre-papal life in Poland. Through hundreds of years of oppression the Polish people steadfastly retained their culture and identity through their language. As an actor, dramatic playwright and organizer of an underground theatre during the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla himself was intensely drawn to language as a means of perpetuating culture. And on first papal visit to Poland in June of 1979, when he spoke to the crowd of two million gathered for Mass in Warsaw's main square, he reminded them of their history and culture as experienced since the year 966 in the Catholic faith. In doing so, he ignited the spark that led to the defeat of Marxism in Eastern Europe.

20:37: The Carmelite Soul

According to Father Connor, the entire development of the mind of the Pope comes from Carmelite philosophy. During the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla joined a secret group called the “Living Rosary” headed by Jan Tyranowski. Tyranowski taught the fundamentals of spiritual life through intense prayer and service to others. He also introduced Wojtyla to the Carmelite theological works of St. John of the Cross. Wojtyla studied and meditated on these writings, especially “Dark Night of the Soul” which said that the truth of the human condition is on the cross. In 1949, Wojtyla wrote his thesis on “Faith According to St. John of the Cross.” In this work, he was trying to give an explanation of what faith meant to St. John of the Cross. Faith is not a series of concepts, creeds or propositions; faith involves the gift of self. Faith is a handing over of one's very self to God. And in that handing over, a splendor veritatis, a splendor of truth, emerges wherein one is enlightened with a consciousness—not concepts—about God. Self-giving, not self-assertion, is the royal road to human flourishing. Self-giving is the way one comes into a knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Based on Emmanuel Kant's second categorical imperative (the human person is a self-determining freedom), Wojtyla began Love and Responsibility with the essential thought that persons are not to be used, and that the only adequate way to deal with a human person is to love him or her (the personalistic norm). The notion of freedom is not choice with regard to this or that, but rather, choice as “determining myself.” The problem, Father Connor says, was that there did not exist a philosophy to explain “determining myself,” aka, the gift of self.

34:23: “Page 96”: Betrothed Love and the Gift of Self

Father Connor points to page 96 of Love and Responsibility as the very essence of the Pope's view on the experience of spousal love. He quotes:

Betrothed love differs from all aspects or forms of love analyzed hitherto. Its decisive character is the giving of one's own person (to another). The essence of betrothed love is self-giving, the surrender of one's “I.” This is something different from and more than attraction, desire or even goodwill. These are all ways by which one person goes out towards another, but none of them can take him as far in his quest for the good of the other as does betrothed love. “To give one's self to another” is something more than merely “desiring what is good” for another.... Betrothed Love is something different from and more than all the forms of love so far analyzed, both as it affects the individual subject, the person who loves, and as regards the interpersonal union which it creates. When betrothed love enters into this interpersonal relationship something more than friendship results: two people give themselves each to the other.

In this text, for the first time there emerges the phrasing “gift of self.” Up to this point in time, the human person has been analyzed as a rational animal: from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas, through to the modern-day, the definition of man and everything about man has been reduced to animalogy, which has been reduced to biology, which has been reduced to chemistry, which has been reduced to physics, which has been reduced to particle physics, which has been reduced to the principle of indetermination… But Wojtyla is saying that the human person is not an animal at all—because of this “gift of self.” People in marriage have the experience of making a gift of self that is so complete that the bond is unbreakable.

40:58: The Original Unity of Man and Woman

Through a series of Wednesday addresses when he first became Pope in 1979, John Paul spoke on the topic of the original unity of man and woman. He presented his interpretation of Genesis, explaining how man and woman entered into a communion of persons so intimate it was like God. Matrimony, then, is an icon of the oneness of God, an icon of the Trinity. The sexual act in matrimony is in fact an act of imaging God, where the husband and wife, through the gift of self, become one flesh.

47:16: Why is Love-making Inseparable from Life-giving?

Prior to the Humanae Vitae's publication in 1968, contraception was viewed as morally wrong because it goes against nature, the nature of sex primarily being to have children, secondarily to have love. Humanae Vitae presented a new reason, setting forth that love-making can never be separated from life-giving. Contraception is wrong because it is love but no life; in vitro fertilization is wrong because it is life but no love. Wojtyla's body of thought on love and marriage was certainly instrumental in the formation of Humanae Vitae but the encyclical did not capture the full power of his message. It never went further to explain exactly why love-making must be inseparable from life-giving. Page 96 of Love and Responsibility (and the series of Wednesday audiences now captured in Theology of the Body) does so.

Does life have to proceed from love? Does life have to come from the self-gift? Life is self-gift, Wojtyla is saying. This is what it means to be a person in God. The body is the person, the person is love, and the person is self-gift. This is what it means to be—to live spousal love to which of us are called (even priests and religious, in a celibate sense ). Therefore one cannot separate life and love in God. This is also the essence of the incarnation, that matter has been divinized, that the sexual act is a holy and sanctifying act.

George Weigel: “Reflections of a Papal Biographer” (18 December 2000)

George Weigel, author of the papal biography Witness to Hope, asserts that Pope John Paul II is “the most compelling public figure in the world, the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead.” On December 18th, 2000, members of the Love & Responsibility discussion group had the very good fortune to hear Mr. Weigel address an audience at the Union League Club. Weigel, a distinguished Catholic author, scholar and theologian, completed his biography in the fall of 1999. It follows a slew of biographies written on the Pope, yet it surpasses each of them in many respects. It is beautifully written, carefully researched, and meticulously thorough. But perhaps most importantly, through his understanding and professing of the Catholic faith, Weigel has been able to explain with great lucidity the theological, pastoral, and spiritual dimensions of Karol Wojtyla.

Weigel often refers to the Pope's comment regarding the other papal biographies: “They try to understand me from the outside. But I can only be understood from the inside.” In writing Witness to Hope Weigel had unprecedented access to the Pope and his closest advisers, confidential documents and personal conversations, as well as interviews with old friends and colleagues in Poland. He traces the Holy Father's life and pontificate, from his early years in Wadowice, life under the German occupation, his call to the priesthood, his leadership of the Polish church during the long years of the Communist regime, his poetry, plays and writings on love, human rights, sexuality and marriage, his rich contributions to Vatican II, through to the twenty-year span of his ground-breaking papacy. With this insight, and through the prism of his Catholic worldview, Weigel has provided us with a most precious chronicle and portrait of a Pope whom Weigel believes history will remember as John Paul the Great.

The following are some highlights of Mr. Weigel's remarks:

On when he first was asked to write the papal biography…

He was in Rome along with his wife Joan attending a conference, had just presented and was sitting in the back row with the translator headphones on, volume turned off, just about to enjoy a short winter's nap, when a Roman seminarian hurriedly tapped him on the shoulder. Don Stanislaw is calling for you. [Apparently, all Roman seminarians know to jump at the name of Don Stanislaw, who is Fr. Dziwisz, the Pope's private secretary.] So Don Stanislaw asked him to come to dinner that night and bring along Fr. Neuhaus, who was also at the conference. Weigel returned to the conference and found Fr. Neuhaus (who WAS sleeping in the last row) and said, if your social calendar permits, you are requested to dine this evening with the Holy Father.

On when he got final confirmation from the Vatican to begin the effort…

He had returned to the US. He wrote to Fr. Dziwisz to ask for a written confirmation of their agreement. About three weeks later, he received in the mail a plain gray envelope with Vatican postage mark. Inside was a personal letter from the Holy Father, typed on a manual typewriter, with exactly three spelling mistakes (“a true Trinitarian to the end”) in Polonicized English (“Please say Hi to Mrs. Joan”).

At that point, he considers the best decision he made, intellectually and literarily, was to write nothing for a year and a half, so that he could see what patterns emerged (as Henry James would say, patterns on the carpet). He felt he had been writing about the Pope for so many years already, his “nose pressed to the window” for so long that he had to take a break and step back. So he collected over 10,000 pages of documents, 2,000 pages of transcribed interview notes, and wrote an outline that was 150+ pages long.

In November of 1998, the book was basically written, with just some final editing left. Weigel returned to Krakow and had tea with some of the people who had been helping him on the book. A woman came to tea with a leather satchel of over 300 letters she had exchanged with the Holy Father from 1949 until just two weeks prior to this meeting. Weigel was very touched that she offered these letters to share with the world her personal relationship with the Holy Father, including one letter (printed in the book) where he writes to her on what it means to fall in love.

On what was the biggest surprise he discovered about the Holy Father…

Weigel was most surprised by the degree to which World War II remains an ongoing formative experience for the Holy Father, how often in conversation he'll use it as a reference point to express his conviction about the degradation of the world through base ideas on the nature of the human person. Wojtyla attributes the Nazi occupation of Poland and the communist usurpation of Poland in one fashion or another to defective concepts of the human person, human origin, human nature, human community, and human destiny. He is convinced that ideas have consequences. When bad ideas are married to bad “technology” the result is enormous human suffering. So his answer is not a pulling back of the Church from the world, but rather a proposal that the Church makes to the world on how we should understand ourselves, our capacity for human love, the gift of love, and the need to understand ourselves.

On the Pope's most important influence…

Weigel says he takes it as iron-clad law of the human condition that those photographs people display privately are a very clear window into their lives. Now the Pope has met most of the world's most important people, and over 100 million people have seen him, yet he displays just two pictures in his private room. The first is a small picture of his parents. His father was an especially important influence—with his granite-like integrity, he had taught his son that manliness and piety can go together. The second is a small silver-framed portrait of Adam Stefan Sapieha—bishop of Krakow during World War II, arch-defender of the rights of people. These two photos alone tell you who formed him.

On his personal experiences with the Holy Father…

He last saw the Pope just three weeks ago (he's doing well and “full of beans”). Weigel says he is always impressed by how astonishingly natural and unaffected the Holy Father is. Even at his age, he does not live life looking in the rear view mirror; rather, he is extraordinarily future-oriented, “constantly asking what is God asking of me now?”

On the question of when the Pope realized he himself is a historic figure…

Weigel does not believe the Pope asks himself “what is my place in history?” because he's too intensely focused on the process of discerning God's will, to be in tune with what God is asking... a man coming to grips with his destiny.

On where might the Holy Father be disappointed in lack of accomplishment in his papacy…

First on the union with Eastern Orthodox: the Church had split in 1054, so the Holy Father was hoping to mend the split within the millennium, and obviously did not succeed here. Second on the public dialogue with Beijing: in 1983, the Pope wrote to Deng Xiaoping with a plea for conversation; the letter remains unanswered. The Holy Father desperately wants dialogue with this land of 1.4B people, but the regime is plainly scared to death of that prospect.

On the collaboration of the Pope and President Reagan in bringing down Eastern European Communism…

Largely speaking, Weigel believes, these stories are exaggerated. Actually, the Pope's most successful onslaught against the Soviet Empire came in June 1979 on his first return to Poland, when he gave the people back their authentic history and culture, which Communism tries to take away, substituting false history and culture. This happened a full 18 months before Reagan even took office. However, Reagan and the Holy Father did share a profound confidence in the power of truth to cut through the static of the world's lies. If you say it often enough, strongly enough, whimsically enough, the truth will prevail.

On the Pope's views of his mission and evangelization…

The Holy Father's life is a life so very deeply engaged with ideas. He is making a proposal to the world. He is most fundamentally not a statesman nor a papal diplomat nor a political figure, but a disciple of Christ. Everything he does, large or small, is a reflection of that discipleship and all that undergirds it... whether in Manila, January 1995 when he met with the largest crowd in world history, or just a few weeks ago when he celebrated the Jubilee with pizza-makers, or when he prays for a sick child or a confused couple. This conviction animates every moment of his life. His combination of intense piety with an unaffected nature is a clear demonstration of the capacity of faith to shape the whole human person.

Mass with Christoph Cardinal Schonborn (30 January 2001)

The beautiful notes of Mozart's Coronation Mass truly joined heaven to earth in welcoming His Eminence Christoph Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna to St. Jean Baptiste Church on Tuesday, January 30th. Members of the Love and Responsibility Discussion Group participated in this Mass, where His Eminence Archbishop Renato R. Martino, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, was the main celebrant and where nearly twenty priests co-celebrated a memorial Mass for Chauncey D. Stillman, benefactor and founder of the Homeland Foundation.

As one of the youngest Cardinals, Cardinal Schonborn has been frequently mentioned as a possible future pope. His homily did not disappoint us who were gathered to hear him. Drawing from St. John's Gospel in which Jesus brought the sick girl back to life and commanded, “give her something to eat,” the Cardinal remarked on Jesus' patient attention to the little things and the little ones. He also spoke on the importance of marriage and family at a time when sociologists and leading voices around the world are proclaiming the end of the family. And he cited John Paul II's 22 years of ceaseless effort in calling attention to the “bleeding wounds of marriage and family.” “The future of humanity passes through families,” he said. Families, he added, are like stars in the darkness.

After the Mass, discussion group members enjoyed lively conversation and dinner at a local Indian restaurant, having the good fortune to have one of our members, Raj, order for us a delicious selection of Indian specialties.

Fr. Bob Connor on “Betrothed Love: Gift of Self” (21 February 2001)

Father Bob Connor begins with a short introduction reflecting on a variety of quotations all around the theme of "Gift of Self" and the question of "What is the 'I'?" He first remarks on a photograph of small boy kissing the Pope -- an emblem for the Radiation of Fatherhood, which is the Gift of Self.

The second quote is from the Holy Father as told to papal biographer George Weigel, "They try to understand me from the outside. But I can only be understood from inside." -- in other words, you have to experience what I experience.

Next is a quote from The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater of Karol Wojtyla, where Wojtyla explains that the Gift of Self is the only thing that is going to last: "And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential, except for this: father, child and love." The only realities, he is saying, are father, child, love.

From the introduction to Fides et Ratio, Wojtyla's admonition is to know yourself: Who am I ? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?

The question is "What is the 'I'?" Sources of Renewal is the study Wojtylamade for the Archdiocese of Krakow in 1966-1968, including his personal notes on the Second Vatican Council. What was the Second Vatican Council about? It strove to answer the more complex question - what does it mean to be a believer, an 'I' believing, an acting person? The Council raised the question of "What does it mean to be subject, not object?"

Walker Percy: The Bored Self -- why the self is the only object in the cosmos which gets bored?

John Lukacs: Words referring to 'self' appeared in English and French in their modern sense only two or three hundred years ago.

Percy also says that the self is literally unspeakable to itself. There is no concept or category in which we can subsume the 'I'. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

Finally, we have the symbol of the birdwatcher, an icon of the epistemology we are discussing. The telescope represents the only experience we consent to. We are looking for the 'I' through the telescope, but the bird is sitting on your head, so you do not see it. There is another tier of experience besides the experience you can capture through the telescope, which is the experience of the acting person. That experience yields a being which is called 'I' and which is discovered only in the act of the gift. Is there an experience in the moral moment, the moment of freedom and morality, in which we discover a being which until Descartes (17th c.) has never become explicit? Descartes isolated the being as res cositas, a thinking thing, i.e., consciousness. And the whole of modern thought has given us an understanding of the self as consciousness. Excellent, says the Pope, but something has been missed: specifically, the experience of the self.

Gift of Self

Page 96 of Love and Responsibility says that betrothed love has as its decisive and unique character the giving of one's own person to another. Here, Wojtyla is talking about a giving which is radical; he is talking about the 'I' not as consciousness or some sort of thought, but about the 'I' as being.

He continues to explain that in a marriage a woman experiences, in a psychological sense, a surrender -- that her role in marriage is to give herself, whereas the man's role is possession. But objectively and ontologically, there is a mutual gift of self on behalf of both the woman and the man; else there is a danger that one treats the other as an object to be used.

The Recovery of the 'I' Before Sin

Wojtyla is trying to recover an experience of the 'I' gift, an experience which we had prior to sin; yet we're in sin. We lost our primordial humanity through sin, and he's trying to recover it. God was revealed to be a triple 'I' -- Yahweh, a revelation of subjectivity (Yahweh means "I am who am with you.") John Paul II takes Christ's invitation to cross the threshold of sin to the pristine, primordial experience of what it means to be man, from the beginning, before he said 'no.' He does this by using the blend of a phenomenology of experience as a metaphysics of being and the first two chapters of Genesis. The goal is to disclose the underlying anthropology (meaning of man) and thereby disclose the non-reductive anthropology of the human 'I' and its dynamic as self-gift. Wojtyla discloses all of this through the series of Wednesday addresses (The Original Unity of Man and Woman) that follow.

The Discovery of the 'I'

Wojtyla explores the meaning of the experience of solitude in the first man: God had man name the animals, and in so doing, man experienced solitude and being alone. God put him to sleep and recreated man as male and female, and he then brought them together. The man knew the woman was different from the animals (man is not an animal...)

Meaning of Man's Original Solitude (10 October 1979)

God gives three commands to the primordial man: 1) subdue the earth (i.e., work) 2) procreate and 3) moral command -- don't eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. God brings the animals (Genesis 2) to man to see what man is going to call them -- naming, not abstract knowing. When man names the animals, he suddenly has an experience of being alone. Wojtyla says that man now has the experience of being an 'I' -- he has exercised himself, since he is deciding for himself the names of the animals. In the act of naming, he differentiates himself. Naming is a way of subduing -- by naming them, he owns the animals. In so doing, he actualizes his 'I' and exercises his subjectivity. This is self-determination.

Helen Keller: Corroborating Experience from Walker Percy

At the well-house, Helen became an 'I' through the experience of revelation of the mystery of language -- in realizing the word/symbol for water. There has never been a philosophy of the 'I' as being prior to this discovery of the experience of self. The Pope wanted to show this through this text. All of this is in line with the Greek tradition: with no external stimuli, one cannot know God -- all knowledge starts with the senses. There is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses. Yet this goes further.

Priesthood

The subduing of the animals --as well as the tilling of the earth -- is a priestly act. Priesthood means "mediation." Christ is the supreme priest because he is perfect God and man. He exercises his priesthood as God and man by subduing himself and relating to the Father, making a gift to the Father through the human will of Christ. Also, man is the priest of the universe. Our mission is to subdue ourselves and to turn it all into gift to God and to one another -- and that act is the priestly act.

What is involved in this topic is the transformation of the world, a new civilization, the third millennium, loving being laymen, becoming another Christ.... The subduing of self, experience of solitude, the gift of oneself to another is the basic anthropology, the basic meaning of man and woman... and it involves everything.

The Body as 'I' is not 'Thing'

It is not good for man to be alone. As soon as God sees that man has named the animals, and man has started to feel bad because he is alone, God said "it is not good to be alone." There is something wrong with the state of being of man alone.

"In this way, the second narrative could also be a preparation for understanding the Trinitarian concept of the "image of God," even if the latter appears only in the first narrative. Obviously, that is not without significance for the theology of the body. Perhaps it even constitutes the deepest theological aspect of all that can be said about man." Aristotle and Plato are incomplete, working with an experience which is post-lapsarian, post sinful, not with the full experience of what it means to be man. No one can cross that threshold unless he crosses it through Genesis.

Notice that the talk is not body / soul -- the body is the whole person. "In this way, we find ourselves almost at the heart of the anthropological reality that has the name "body." Man says to woman: Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. The man uttered these words as if it were only at the sight of the woman's body he sees an 'I' -- whereas with the animals he did not see an 'I.' The body reveals man. Your body is your 'I.' Your body is a language of 'gift.' "Right from the beginning, the theology of the body is bound up with the creation of man in the image of God (triple gift). It becomes, in a way, also the theology of sex, or rather the theology of masculinity and femininity, which has its starting point here in Genesis."

"Consciousness of solitude might have been shattered precisely because of his body itself. The man, 'adam, might have reached the conclusion, on the basis of the experience of his own body, that he was substantially similar to the living beings (animalia). On the contrary, as we read, he did not arrive at this conclusion; he reached the conviction that he was "alone." He has a consciousness of himself by naming the animals, a consciousness of being an 'I.' He experiences his body by naming. Then he looks at the animals and says "I'm alone." The woman is given to him, and he looks at the woman and says "I am not alone. Hi!" He sees in her body the experience he has of his own. She is an 'I' as I am an 'I.' She is a subject, rather than an object like the other animals. Catholicism is a religion of incarnation: Jesus Christ is a body, and always will be a body. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father.

"The body, then, is not an object, nor a "thing" understood in the modern sense of a machine or reducible to machinery." From Monday's paper, an article on the Genome project says that worms have 19,000 genes and we have 29,000. Yet, we are infinitely more complex than a worm. If the Pope is correct, if Genesis is correct, that means that the understanding the body is not a "thing" The human body is the person. The key to complexity is not more genes but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code. Organisms must be explained as organisms and not summations of genes -- a huge refusal to be deterministic. It means that in living organisms, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They can't explain the totality of a person. The Pope's approach is that reality is experienced in its profundity not only through sensation which has given us a conceptualism of grasping reality, but there is another level of experience which is the 'I.' Being is encountered most profoundly on the level of the 'I,' the totality.

Since the experience of solitude is bad for a being made in the image and likeness of a Three, the gift of the 'I' is its achievement as Image.

We are, with this notion, at the very grounding of reality. Here is where the metaphysics of reality is; to be evil is to be alone. This reflects the natural law from an Aristotelian understanding of nature... natural law is the law of the person. Where do we get the notion of good and evil from? From an experience of ourselves from being. But we are now going back before sin. Evil is rectified by the completion of creation.

By the Communion of Persons Man Becomes the Image of God 14 November 1979

The climax of our discussion is here: "If we wish to draw also from the narrative of the Yahwist text the concept of the "image of God," we can then deduce that man became the "image and likeness" of God not only through his own humanity (by being an individual, by being alone, by having intellect and will), but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning. The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion (man and woman). Right "from the beginning," he is not only an image in which the solitude of a Person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of Persons."

This means that the human person is never fully a person alone. God is gift so man is gift. God reveals who he is, the very nature of God, and we are discovering that man is made in the image of God, so if God is gift, we have to be gift. To be alone, to turn back on yourself, to think about yourself, to worry about yourself, not to think about others -- is death. To reflect the prototype, man must be in union with another. Jesus Christ recreates us into this relation by subduing the will of the man Jesus which carries all of the sin of all time, and he obeys the Father -- in other words man becomes relational in the crucifixion. And that is how He recreates the human person -- that's what redemption is and what the new millennium has to be about: the self-giving. Self-giving is the recreation of man as imaging the trinity.

This anthropology was not explained in Humanae Vitae, yet this is the reason why there can't be contraception. Since the Body is the 'I' and the 'I' is relation, you can't have sex and withhold egg and sperm, because they are you. Sex always has to be gift. With in vitro you are furthering life, but you don't have love, you don't have self-giving. It has to be self-giving, and it has to be physical, because you are the body. [The ramifications of this anthropology are immense. In politics, you can't have socialism without subsidiarity. See Gaudium et Spes 24.]

The Methodology of Wojtyla Enabling This Disclosure of the 'I' as Gift: The Experience of Self-Determination

The self was always considered thinking, yet Wojtyla experiences himself as the cause of free action. He has always "been here" on this -- as a Pole, as a member of the Rhapsodic Theatre, as a Christian, the understanding of faith through his thesis of St. John of the Cross -- his 'I' is not the result of reflection on the act of thinking or willing; it is discovered as the cause (freedom) of an experience of self-determination, as a free act. Our text is taken from the essay "Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being" from Person and Community.

What does he mean by irreducible? In philosophy, to reduce is to abstract and to put in a category. In other words, you talk about the nitrogen atom or the genome or the gene -- that's a reduction: a concept, a universal. Science reduces. Human thinking reduces. We're always creating a symbol of reality. To know is to "be identified with". In sex, the man "knows" the woman. In Genesis, the word for the act of sex is "to know." And knowing is a direct experience of -- to know is to "be one with." To know the pen, I have to create a symbol, to form a concept of the pen, an abstraction. The irreducible is that which can be expresses without need of concepts... the irreducible is the 'I.'

The Pope is trying to get at the root of knowing -- to "become one with." I can experience through sensation, I know through sensation, but he puts forth another way, which has not been explored in 3000 years of philosophic thought. Experts in the field of phenomenology claim that Karol Wojtyla has done what no other philosopher has done. He has transcended Plato and Aristotle, by the recovery of the being of the self, the 'I,' not by a concept but by a new understanding of experience:

"But as the need increases to understand the human being as a unique and unrepeatable person, especially in terms of the whole dynamism of action and inner happenings proper to the human being -- in other words, as the need increases to understand the personal subjectivity of the human being -- the category of lived experience takes on greater significance, and, in fact, key significance. For then the issue is not just the metaphysical objectification of the human being as an acting subject, as the agent of acts, but the revelation of the person as a subject experiencing its acts and inner happenings, and with them its own subjectivity." So lived experience is going to reveal to me my 'I.'

The 'I' is being, not consciousness. But the experience which discloses the 'I' as being is the work of consciousness. He distinguishes consciousness from thought which abstracts and reduces relation to categories. In its non-abstractive function, consciousness captures the subject in two moments, grasping the subject which has been objectified by reflective thought, and then actualized by itself. Wojtyla distinguishes between the reflectiveness of the mind turning back on its own act of knowing things, and the reflexiveness of consciousness which captures both the reflections of the subject in potency to self-determine and in the act of moving itself. This capturing of both states (of pre and post self-determination, as potency and act with respect to itself) constitutes the experience of the 'I' as 'I.' John Paul II uses this phenomenology, connected to a metaphysics of potency and act which he takes from Aristotle and St. Thomas, to fashion this experience of the 'I' as being, which becomes gift. Through this, you have the whole of sexual morality, the whole understanding of faith, etc.

The Acting Person

In The Acting Person, Wojtyla says: "The consequence of the reflexive turn of consciousness is that this object, just because it is from the ontological point of view the subject -- while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation 'reflexiveness' is also seen to be an essential as well as a very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment because apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and still a different thing to experience one's self as the subject of one's own acts and experiences..." What's the difference between being a subject, reflecting on a subject as an object, and experiencing the subject as the efficient cause of its own action?

Notice how important the word experience is for him. See page 34 of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, where Wojtyla says that there is an experience of the external world, and there is another level of experience, an experience of God. Ratzinger, in his review of Crossing the Threshold of Hope, said that Karol Wojtyla insists that we have an experience of God. How do you experience God if God is other than the world -- the world didn't have to exist? Wojtyla's point is that in the experience of the 'I,' which is the imaging of the three persons, I am experiencing God by experiencing myself. He says that this is the answer to the atheism of the 20th century. The point is not to prove that God exists by the five ways of St. Thomas, or by thought or induction or deduction. They way to overcome the atheism of today is to experience self-gift.

He writes: "...it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and still a different thing to experience one's self as the subject of one's own acts and experiences." This experience is to enter into the prayer of Christ, it is the experience of giving oneself, it is non-contraceptive sex, it is to live for others, to have a preferential option for the poor, this is to be celebate as a priest or layman -- another way of making the gift of self. "This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience." The grasping of the subject of potency and act in self-determination constitutes the experience.

Novo Millennio Inuente

On October 22, 1978 in Wojytla's first address as Pope, Urbi et Orbi, to the world and the city of Rome, he began with the words "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." By this he meant that he is Peter. He explains this in the new document Novo Millennio Inuente, the blueprint of the new millennium [-- on www.zenit.org under Documents]. How had Peter come to this faith? And what is asked of us if we wish to follow in his footsteps with ever greater conviction? Matthew gives us an enlightening insight: "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven." Wojtyla says that "flesh and blood" is a reference to man and the common way of understanding things (by abstraction.) Luke 9:18 gives us an indication when Jesus was praying alone -- Jesus' prayer to the Father is self-gift. Who do men (who aren't praying) say who I am? The answer, using flesh and blood/abstraction/reason was wrong: in the case of Jesus, this common way of understanding was not enough. A grace of revelation is needed which comes from the Father. Jesus was praying alone -- Jesus' prayer to the Father is self-gift. Jesus says "You (who are praying), who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter says "You are Christ, Son of the Living God." Only the Father knows the Son and only the Son knows the Father. How could Simon know who Christ was unless he had the experience of being Christ while praying?

This is the faith in it's most profound experience, before sin, and we can do that because Jesus Christ is God, pre-lapsarian. He who is man and God can tell us what it was like from the beginning. What it means to be man is to be Gift, so come pray with me to the Father, Jesus says. And in that prayer, experience what it means to be God.

Gaudium et Spes 24 and the "Definition" of the Human Person

Karol Wojtyla was one of the critical architects of Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World. Number 24 of that document is a "definition" of the human person. "The human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself (i.e., is self-determining), the person cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself."

Dominum et Vivificantem #59 and the Recovery of the 'I'

"As the year 2000 since the birth of Christ draws near, it is a question of ensuring that an ever greater number of people "may fully find themselves through a sincere gift of self,'... Through the action of the Spirit-Paraclete, may there be accomplished in our world a process of true growth in humanity, in both individual and community life. In this regard, Jesus himself when he prayed to the Father that "all may be one as we are one' implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine persons and the union of the children of God in truth and charity."

"For if man is the way of the Church, this way passes through the whole mystery of Christ, as man's divine model. Along this way the Holy Spirit, strengthening in each of us "the inner man," enables man ever more "fully to find himself through a sincere gift of self." These words of the Pastoral Constitution of the Council can be said to sum up the whole of Christian anthropology." And the whole of Christian anthropology is the foundation of ethics, politics, sex, art, everything... He has taken Gaudium et Spes 24 and lifted it out as the blueprint for the 21st century.

Who am I, where am I going, what's important? All, in the end, crumbles, and the only thing that is going to last is gift of self: Father, Child and Love.

Closing Thoughts

Christ is the Way for us now. We are not locked into a post-sinful state; we can be liberated from sin. Find the face of Christ, deal with Christ, love Christ, stay with Christ, go to Communion, go to Confession, start again, pray, change work into prayer, change fun into prayer... The bottom line is we all have to be saints -- if we are not saints, we are not human. If we have Christ, we have everything.

Alice von Hildebrand on “The Loss of the Supernatural...” (1 April 2001)

"The supernatural is the core of Catholic life," said philosopher and author Dr. Alice von Hildebrand as she introduced her lecture on The Loss of the Supernatural and How to Regain It on Sunday, April 1st at the Church of Our Saviour. We are witnessing a war, she added, where secularization is encroaching more and more on Catholic life.

Members of the Love & Responsibility Discussion Group listened attentively as Dr. von Hildebrand explained that man, in his pre-lapsarian state, was capable of becoming God-like through grace. This supernatural life was lost when Adam and Eve disobeyed God -- nature was wounded. God so loved us that he sent Our Saviour who opened the gates of heaven through the cross. Yet very few are willing to follow Christ to Cavalry. Dr. von Hildebrand referenced Kierkegaard's term "unholy cleverness" to explain how people are trying to find a middle way to escape the cross. And increasingly, we see examples of how Catholic saints are being praised for purely secularistic reasons.

How are we to reconquer the supernatural? Through prayer, sacrifice and penance, Dr. von Hildebrand explained. Being supernaturally motivated means we work for the greater glory of God, not for our own glory. With the rise of feminism, women realized that they were not appreciated, and they were quite right that they were not. "But if you do it for God," Dr. von Hildebrand asked, "why does it matter? Don't concede that human recognition really has value."

What about the supernatural in our lives? All of us go through disillusionment, disappointment and suffering. All of us have crosses. The message of the supernatural, she explained, is to use one's holy imagination to turn these crosses into glorifications of God. A Catholic is never defeated -- perhaps in the secular sense, but never in the supernatural sense. Dr. von Hildebrand related a personal experience from her teaching days at Hunter College where because of her Catholic views she was denied a tenured position. In response to her great disappointment, a friend gave her a good piece of advice: Why don't you offer it up for one of your students who doesn't respect the reality of God? "And what an amazing discovery," Dr. von Hildebrand said, "when one of my students decided to enter the Church." She continued, "I know people who go through their lives offended. Stop for a moment and contemplate Christ on the cross."

Following the lecture, Dr. von Hildebrand graciously signed copies of her recently published biography of her late husband Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of the preeminent Catholic philosophers of the 20th century. Entitled Soul of a Lion, the book is based on a very long letter Dietrich wrote his wife. Members of Love & Responsibility invited Dr. von Hildebrand to join us for one of our discussion evenings. It would be our great honor should she accept.

Dr. Frederick Zugibe on “The Wounds of Christ” (24 June 2001)

On Sunday, June 24th, members of the Love & Responsibility Discussion Group attended a communion brunch at The Church of Our Savior Church to hear a talk by Dr. Frederick Zugibe, Medical Examiner of Rockland County, actual examiner of the Shroud of Turin, and author of The Cross and the Shroud: A Medical Inquiry into the Crucifixion.

Dr. Zugibe, who is internationally renowned for his work in forensic pathology, told us that he has been studying the Shroud of Turin for more than 52 years. His intent has been to understand more deeply the greatest expression of God's love, the passion and death of Jesus Christ to affect the redemption.

As a doctor with professional knowledge of the pain Christ's wounds could cause, Dr. Zugibe presented what he called a “medical way of the cross.” Christ’s suffering was extreme mental anguish as well as excruciating physical pain. First, Dr. Zugibe referenced Christ sweating blood while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. (St. Luke included this detail in his gospel — Dr. Zugibe commented that as a physician, St. Luke was quite observant of physical details.) Dr. Zugibe cited a number of known cases of people sweating drops of blood — all in states of acute anxiety or fear. The doctor explained the medical/anatomical reasons for this reaction.

Dr. Zugibe then described the scourging of Christ — 39 lashes by an instrument with three sharp metal prongs — whose markings in fact are evident on the shroud. Scourging is a brutal punishment which often motivates convulsions, he explained. The crown of thorns (actually, a cap, we learned) was also a cause of traumatic shock, digging into sensitive cranial nerves. The cross piece that Christ carried on the road to Cavalry was approximately 50 pounds — Simon from Cyrene was forced to help Christ carry the cross — and the nails driven into his hands and feet were square-shaped and 5 inches in length. With detailed analysis and experimentation, Dr. Zugibe illustrated his assertion that the nails in fact were not driven into the wrists but the palm of the hand near the thumb (this is significant as the Bible states that none of the Savior’s bones would be broken).

Lastly, Dr. Zugibe presented experiments indicating that Christ died not of asphyxiation, as commonly thought, but rather from traumatic and hypo-bulemic shock due to crucifixion. He also showed us a number of slides of the Shroud and its negative relief image of the face of Christ.

We all agreed that Dr. Zugibe’s presentation has provided us with material for deep reflection and meditation on the intense sufferings of Christ.

Dr. Philip Mango on “The Theological and Psychological Dimensions of a Healthy Marriage” (4 October 2001)

It may be the hope of each of us to fall in love, to give ourself to someone who truly loves us. John Paul II has written The Theology of the Body which we will be studying for this entire century. It is so profound and important, and it is at the very core of what it means to be a human being. While difficult to understand in its original presentation, Christopher West has translated the Pope’s thinking into a book called The Good News About Sex and Marriage. [Note: both The Theology of Body and The Good News About Sex and Marriage are available from Our Father’s Will Communications at (866) 333-6392.]

Based on 30 years experience as a psychotherapist with individuals, couples and families, coupled with research on what constitutes a healthy marriage, Dr. Mango set fourth four dimensions of a healthy marriage, interweaving psychology with the teachings of Pope John Paul II.

1. The Influence of Our Family of Origin

First, it is important to look at major trials in our childhoods — sexual abuse, alcoholic parents, fathers not loving sons —and confront these. There’s a crisis in our culture — a fear of commitment — stretching back to the emotional unavailability of the father to affirm the son. Also for girls — what does it mean to be feminine? Maybe we’ve already dealt with this. We should close our eyes and go back to when we were seven years old. If pain comes up, that’s normal. It’s not over till it’s over, and we want it to be really over. Facing this means we will have more insight on ourselves and others, more compassion for ourselves and others, and we will develop character qualities called virtues: courage, perseverance, humility.

2. The Quality of How We Communicate with Others and Resolve Conflicts

Neurologically, men and women are different. Learning how to communicate effectively and resolve conflict is a step-by-step process, which becomes second-nature. The book Brain Sex shows how hardwired and radical these differences are. Men think on the right side of their brain. Women think on the left side, but can also switch left to right. John Paul II asked the human sciences profession to study masculinity and femininity from the biological, cultural, social perspectives.

Right brain thought — how men think — is neurologically oriented towards doing, objectivity, analysis rather than synthesis, parts rather than whole, goals, actions, externally oriented. Women are oriented towards relationships, persons, whole context, detail, concreteness, specificity, being (not primarily doing).

Research has shown young girls and boys to play games very differently. When asked to make a scene with blocks, boys build towers and lanes. Girls build round objects to put something in. The way the little boy experiences his physical self is the phallus going up and down, and he is propelled outward. The girl has an interior sense of her vagina. The body is the basis for characteristically feminine and masculine attitudes which then become the basis for the spiritual roles of men and women in the church and society.

Men initiate a positive action. A man who is not taking initiative is experiencing conflict. Like God (who is “Papa”), their essential identity is to initiate good action and sustain it with love and power.

Woman is predominantly taking in and working on what is given by the male and giving back out creatively. The masculine power is authority — this is how we should do things for harmony. The feminine power is relational — you and me, honey, we have to relate to each other. Women glue things together. Like Mary at the wedding at Cana. She asked her son to do something about the wine. It’s not my time, he said. She went to speak to the waiters. Then they went to Jesus and said “Yes, sir?”

There are two definitions of manipulation in the dictionary. The first is skillfully arranging conditions so that something selfish can happen to you. The second is skillfully arranging conditions so that something good happens to others. This second definition is the feminine genius, so, women, go into your law firms and businesses and bring the genius of Catholic womanhood. Help heal the world and glue us back together.

Once, while working with Mother Teresa, Dr. Mango wrote up a study and showed it to her. It’s got a very beautiful border, she said. As Dr. Mango was leaving, he felt a gentle tap. “Dr. Mango, if we say it this way, everyone will know we love them.” Dr. Mango had the technique, principles, the objective truth, but women are mercy. Men are justice. Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice is corruption. This is why we need both. Only God has this together totally.

So, effective communication hinges on learning the differences between men and women. Men and women have the same needs with different intensities of voltage.A woman wants connection, she needs to be physically and emotionally touched, tenderly cared for. Five on a scale of 1 to 5. Men need this too, but at a 3 level. For a man, the most intense need — a 5 — is to be admired for who he is and what he does.

Women imagine in their subconscious that the man has the same need, so she gives the guy what she likes. He’s not being selfish, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you, but his way of feeling love is admiration for his character — he wants to be affirmed for what he is doing. Women’s greatest fear is abandonment. Men’s greatest fear is failure. A woman can help restore a man if he is demoralized — thought she cannot give him his manhood. These are forms of love between the sexes.

The fact that women want connection and men want independence and autonomy causes fights in relationships, and it need not. Abandonment is not meant at all by a man sitting silently. Or a woman who is looking for affection is not necessarily clinging and desperate. A man’s need in marriage to express love and affection sexually is more intense and frequent than a woman’s. This need not cause conflict if dealt with as a human difference. Women are more likely to get their needs for affection met if she meets his needs, and vice versa.

St. Paul said women, respect and fit into your husbands’ plans. Men, love your wives as Jesus loved the Church. John Paul II calls this a mutual yielding to one another. Men are the head of the family, the authority, but they are not the boss, not authoritarian or wimpy. It is not a suggestion by God that men lead, but a command. Any country, church, school, family without authentic sacrificial male leadership is dying.

When our brothers stormed into the Twin Towers, we saw authentic manhood at its best. Dr. Mango had the honor to interview some of them. “You guys are heroes,” he said. “Naw, just doing what I’m supposed to do.” There’s no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friend. And when we have that in a father in a family, when we have that in a priest, then the women benefit too, because they flourish.

So, the needs of men and woman have a different hierarchy, and if we appreciate this then we talk to each other differently.

3. Sexuality and Love

The first dimension of sexuality and love is libido, the physical sexual drive for the opposite sex. This needs to be present pre-maritally. The second is the erotic dimension. Eros includes the sexual and physical but goes beyond this to his person and her person. She has a sweet smile, a sweetness and gentleness. The third dimension is friendship. I’m not only attracted to her, but I enjoy her, I respect her, we have mutual values, we trust each other. The fourth is agape. I am ready and willing and able and I do make a commitment to you. I will love you. Your needs are as important as my own.

Before marriage, we should look at where we are at in each of these dimensions. Are there former boyfriends or girlfriends we have not healed from? Are we still angry/do we feel inadequate? Does Mom or Dad need to be forgiven? Etc.

How long do you date? Dr. Mango would say 1 or 1 1/2 years. He has women who come to him who say “I’ve been dating John for six years. John’s not sure." Dr. Mango says, “Take John and dump him now.”

4. Spirituality and Prayer Life

There is extrinsic spirituality and intrinsic spirituality. Extrinsic means we are doing all the right things, belong to the Catholic club. Intrinsic means we are Roman Catholics trying to live out the fundamentals of our faith. Am I letting Jesus take my heart? Am I trying each day to give him my heart? Is there anyone in my life whom I hate, whom I haven’t forgiven? Christ came to reconcile us to ourselves, so we can be at peace with ourselves, with each other, and with the Father. The rosary, Mass, scripture are only to help us reconcile us to ourselves, to each other and to the Father, with preferential love for the poor.

Couples with a personal relationship with God have much more success. The University of Chicago has a beautiful study that says the more religious a woman is the better her marriage and sexual satisfaction. This came as a shock. For one hundred years, psychologists have been saying religion is bad, it’s the thing that makes you sick. The more genuinely intrinsic our spirituality is — we pray, love, forgive, believe in the Eucharist — the chances are we’ll have a better sexual and married life, we will live longer, we will come out of depression quicker.

Non-contracepting couples have a 2-4% divorce rate, compared to 50% on average. Why? The woman is responsible concerning her fertility, and so is the man. They are both learning about her body together — God’s creation. They are spacing their children for just reasons. They are allowing Christ inside their marriage. The woman does not feel like she is being used. The man is not viewing her as a sexual object. So when they make love, there is a certainty they are not using each other. And it requires that they talk to each other and communicate well.

John Paul II said that sexuality in marriage is what life is all about. What’s going on in the Trinity for all eternity is that the Father is giving Himself totally to the Son, the Son is receiving and giving Himself totally back to the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the relationship between the Father and Son. This is the highest level of love. The sexual act where man and woman give and receive each other is a profound medium of exchange of God. Orgasm is the physical symbol of God — God’s incredible delight and joy.

In the last chapter of Love and Responsibility, Wojtyla writes that man must be lovingly attentive to bring his wife to climax, or else she might develop resentment and bitterness. This is a very beautiful thing, because John Paul is saying that a way for a man to be Christ to his wife, to be holy, is sexual. The Holy Spirit has given this brilliant and holy Pope the insight into a very important issue of our time. “I will have no prudery,” the Pope has said, “I’m dealing with God’s creation.”

Our sexuality is that part of us that is very vulnerable. It is not something we do but something we are. Every single cell in a woman’s body is female; every single cell in a man’s body is male. The first reality we perceive about another person is gender. Our awareness of each other is always sexual.

See George Weigel’s Witness to Hope for the finest summary (twelve pages) of the theology of the body. Read it and meditate on it, because it is the most important issue of our lives, for our happiness and holiness.