Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS
Self-Portrait of Man
Karol Wojtyła and John Paul II’s Adequate Anthropology
Your Eminence,
Your Magnificence!
While expressing my deepest gratitude for the extraordinary honor which the community of the Pontifical Lateran University has bestowed on me, I would like shortly to turn your attention to the date we all remember very well, namely, to May, 13, 1981. In this community here, we remember particularly well that on that day the Holy Father John Paul II was going to announce in St. Peter’s Square his decision to found the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University. It was to be one of his numerous initiatives, all of which had served to stress the importance of the fundamental communion of love which finds its expression in marriage and family life, the latter considered by the Pope the community in which “man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means to love and to be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person.” (Centesimus Annus, Section 39) Indeed, marriage and family are communities which truly reflect who man is as a person, as well as create the proper environment in which man, as person, can find his fulfillment.
Such a vision of anthropology was put forward by John Paul II in the special teaching of his pontificate, published as a single work: Man and Woman He Created Them. The Pope draws the «self-portrait of man» beginning, as a philosopher, with the «personalistic vision» of man and concluding, as a theologian, with the vision of man as the «incarnate image of God.» If, as John Paul II holds, «the law of gift» is inscribed in the human person, man will portray himself through an unselfish gift of self. Since the human body is among the constitutive elements of the human person, man’s unselfish gift is accomplished also through the body. This is why the body, which is a sign expressing the person, becomes part of what Wojtyła calls commmunio personarum. Thus it is in the aspect of communion that man fulfills himself as the person, while the fundamental ground on which this self-fulfillment is achieved is marriage and family. One can even say that it is above all through marriage and family that man portrays himself. Therefore John Paul II, a staunch defender of the dignity of the human person, could not but become a defender of the dignity of marriage and family. Therefore the author of The Acting Person could not but write Man and Woman He Created Them. Indeed, personalistic anthropology can be truly fulfilled only within the anthropology of communion. Only such an anthropology deserves being described as adequate.
This is why the Institute within this University which pursues systematic, philosophical and theological reflection on marriage and family cannot but conduct deep reflection on man. Thus, I suggest that we stop at this point to look at the self-portrait of man, at our «self-portrait». «Our» self-portrait means the self-portrait of any and every one of us. Is this not the case that this self-portrait can be seen already in Protagoras’s claim that “man is the measure of all things”? Indeed, the spell of his assertion does not fade in time, but becomes even more powerful. Until the present day, his claim has been the leading motto of any program that aspires to be clad in the attire of noble humanism. Thus can one say that due to his claim that “man is the measure of all things” Protagoras was granted the dignified title of the advocate of what constitutes the touchstone of culture, the touchstone of humanism?
Who knows, perhaps Protagoras would have entered the history of culture having received that honorable name, if it hadn’t been for... Socrates, who became not only a well known advocate of genuine culture, but also a highly respected one, due to his radical opposition to the program advanced by Protagoras. Yet was it actually the case that Socrates wanted to question Protagoras’s attractive claim of man being «the measure of all things»? By no means! What Socrates had in mind was not the wording of the adage, but its sense, the meaning that Protagoras, followed by numerous other sophists, ascribed to it.
According to Protagoras, the claim that “man is the measure of all things” means no more, and no less, than this: man himself decides about who he is, without making reference to any objective criterion of truth. Opinion, preferably one shared by many people, becomes then a sufficient (or the only possible, as Protagoras, being a sophist, would hold) foundation of the so-called truth about oneself. One need not ask about anything else, since there is nothing else one could ask about.
Socrates did not doubt that man is the measure of what is genuinely just in human action and what thus expresses genuinely human culture. Had he not thought so, he would not have quoted the admonition «Know yourself!» considering it to be the principal postulate of moral philosophy. His intention was to point why “man is the measure of all things,” and he discovered that measure in moral g o o d. It is precisely moral good that builds the «soul of culture.» In consequence of his discovery, Socrates, in defiance of Protagoras, recognized that the greatest threat to human culture lies in the temptation to perceive the exclusive and ultimate «measure of all things» in what man believes about himself. Socrates postulated the attitude of radical criticism towards one’s own opinion, as well as towards the opinion of others, involving the necessity of continuous control of one’s beliefs. He also deemed it indispensable that man should incessantly subject his judgment on himself to the overriding criterion of objective truth, the truth about who he is in his nature. Between Protagoras’s and Socrates’s interpretations of the claim, “man is the measure of all things,” lies an abyss which separates genuine humanism from its mere appearances and which distinguishes culture from merely «culture-like» forms, or simply from its caricatures.
However peculiar it might seem, Socrates saw the rescue of genuine culture in allowing and acknowledging the possibility that man may commit actual – and not merely apparent – mistakes in his recognition of the reality, as well as in his self-cognition. Significantly, he would compare such moments of revelation and insight to a new birth, and he held that assistance in the new birth of one’s fellows was the most noble service one could do to them, reflecting the proper task and vocation of a moral philosopher. An ethicist, he would say, is like an accoucheur, assisting at a birth of a new life in man, of a truly human life. Thus an ethicist is a servant of culture.
In other words, in defiance of the simplified project proposed by Protagoras, Socrates would put forward a difficult one, involving effort of both intellectual and moral nature. The Socratic project for mankind consists in an arduous effort of achieving «inner peace» that offers no easy comfort. Violating their comfort zone irritates people, in particular when they have succeeded in enhancing it with the comfort of others around them. No wonder Athenians found the presence of Socrates among them rather annoying. He disturbed their peace of mind in which Protagoras would have allowed them to live…
Much as Protagoras’s project made it possible to remove the concept of mistake (and even more definitely the concept of guilt) from human consciousness and to eliminate the words «mistake» and «guilt» from the common language once the consensus on a matter was reached, Socrates would rather see it all as a catastrophe of man. He would ardently trace any measures taken in order to instill uniform thinking, should they offend the criteria of objective truth. Unanimity in error will not change the error into truth, but it will ultimately cause the moral decline of man! Plebiscite results, which frequently contradict truth, will not eventually diminish it, yet what they do is discredit, with an unfailing efficacy, the human beings involved in them.
Much as Protagoras’s project made it possible to eliminate the concept of moral evil, as well as the expression «moral evil» itself, from human conscience and language, provided one’s conduct was approved by others, precisely at this point Socrates would warn his co-citizens against the danger of a crushing moral defeat. The particularly disastrous character of that defeat would result from the fact that it would be brought about under the soporific guise of goodness and… freedom, while in reality it would amount to man committing violence to himself in possibly most effective a way. That effectiveness would be, in turn, a consequence of the fact that the violence would be done to oneself willfully, yet in the disguise of autonomy. There is no tyranny that would be more threatening than such «self-tyranny.» Similarly, no teachers are more servile to that tyranny than those who teach in what way – in the name of freedom – one should simultaneously become the subject of one’s willfulness and its victim.
Can one say thus that moral evil stops being evil only because one has persuaded oneself, or allowed to be persuaded, that «freedom» means, «I am allowed to do anything others allow me to do, or anything others do not oppose»? Is this not the case that genuine human freedom consists in the capability of distinguishing truth from falsity, as well as in one’s being directed by truth rather than subordinating truth to oneself, thus bowing under the yoke of falsehood? Indeed, is this not the case that only he who allows himself to be governed and directed by truth truly governs and directs himself? Error will not stop being error due to the fact that a majority of people no longer consider it as such (or have not yet found it to be error). A truthful judgment, even if it be passed by one person only, will not lose its marks of truth for the sole reason that it encounters a contrary opinion of all the others. Otherwise one would not be able to «move the Earth and stop the Sun»! Certainly one cannot question the fact that complete unanimity, the unanimity of heart and thought, unanimitas mentis et cordis, idem velle et nolle, would be simply splendid and desirable. Yet it would have to be a unanimity of a high standard, namely a unanimity in truth. (Let me refer to a personal experience here: In the 1960’s, the participants in a session on the encyclical Humanae Vitae held in Cracow discussed the plurality of opinion concerning the norms of sexual ethics. They expressed an anxiety: What stance should one take in relation to such a vast plurality of opinion on the same subject? Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, who concluded the session, referred to that problem in one sentence only, saying, “Sometimes only one person is right.”)
It is amazing that the majority of the Athenian youth did not hesitate in deciding which of the two alternatives opened the way towards genuine humanism. They did not let themselves be enraptured or lured by the persuasive project offered by the sophists, headed by Protagoras and Gorgias. Instead, they chose the difficult option – the one proposed by Socrates. The tragic ending of the life of their master, condemned to death by a majority of votes of the jury chosen from among the citizens of Athens, would not stop Plato from following into his footsteps, which by no means portended an easy success. Yet it was to be Plato and his Academy that would get together those to whom we owe everything we dare call culture and humanism today.
It was there that Aristotle studied for twenty years. The fact that he would later leave the Academy did not mean the end of his respect for it. His leaving was rather an attempt at a creative deepening of its heritage in order to hand it down to the next generations. It was precisely that Academy that was the source of the current that has until now permeated us with the ideals of the ancient paideia…
Still, did Socrates and his disciples succeed in answering the «question of all questions,» namely, of who is the one who is supposed to be the «measure of all things»? Did they succeed in answering the question about what constitutes the «root» of anything that is genuinely culture-forming?
It is symptomatic, however, that once we have recognized the significance of the above question, the only thing that matters is the answer to it. And yet what our culture owes to ancient Greece is not its answers to the question of man, but rather this special anxiety which the successors of Protagoras, until the present day, have been trying to remove from us through recourse to a plebiscite, needless to say, having always skillfully endeavored beforehand to bring about its «successful outcome,» meaning one supporting their opinion. According to their project, an individual and collective opinion poll, preceded by a manipulation of public opinion carefully controlled by so-called experts, will definitely resolve the question of man. In short, it will eliminate the question of who, in his essence, man is, by situating this question among pseudo-problems. Why should men not be satisfied with a solid answer to the question of what they think they are? Let them premise their lives upon their convictions and live on! After all, esse is reducible to percipi, isn’t it?
Socrates succeeded in saving culture, since he handed down to us, as an inheritance, the unceasing anxiety about the «true image of man,», about the «self-portrait of man,» about the relation between man’s self-knowledge and the true essence of his being, so to say his original design. The anxiety inherent in that question is both our human right and our human duty; it is both a privilege and a burden that cannot be easily done away with.
Our century is sometimes called a century of humanisms (Indeed, a century of humanisms rather than a century of humanism!) Occasionally, it is also referred to as a century of personalisms. The peculiarity of such descriptions does not lie in the fact that they stress plurality, but rather in the enthusiasm with which this pluralism is affirmed. One might say this enthusiasm has taken the place so far reserved for concern… Can one thus call our century one in which culture has genuinely flourished?
It would seem that much depends on whether the plurality of answers to the question of who man is, apparent already in the fact of the plurality of projects each of which calls itself a humanism, manifests the depth of the concern for the truth about man, as well as the intention to satisfy the difficult requirements of this truth, or rather demonstrates man’s submission to certain «powers,» to powers that are lesser than him and that he nevertheless is prone to consider – or actually considers – as ones that define him.
It is symptomatic that actually each of those powers, so aptly described by St. John the Evangelist as “sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life” (1 J 2: 16), nowadays finds its advocates and gathers a huge crowd of proponents. It is not always easy for us to admit to the fact that the way we act is not always for the measure of our own greatness. Therefore it is even with a sense of relief that we welcome the «news» that we are not at all so great – that we do not need to be so great – as we used to think we were, that we do not need a conversion of our way of life, but rather one of our way of thinking about what we are. At precisely this point the work of the contemporary «masters of suspicion» is born and the fact is explained why their projects of the so-called humanism will always receive some response, which none of those masters will fail to refer to as a «truth test» of his «message» (vox populi). Manipulation is most efficient in the case of those people who have allowed themselves to be persuaded that they are doing what they do out of their own conviction and choice. Those convictions and choices, in any case, find an ally in our human weakness. The «masters of suspicion» know it all too well and they will use this knowledge in their masterly way. It is human weakness that grants them power…
Indeed, the source of our hope for saving what is genuinely human in man and what, on the other hand, causes our anxiety and our grave concern for man can be ultimately traced back to the essence of the controversy between Socrates and Protagoras. Also today, the core of the controversy about man lies in the alternative: truth or consensus? What should become the ultimate measure and test of human culture? Should it be insight or merely opinion?
One can say that this question is – or at least should be – simply rhetorical. If so, where are we to seek the original answer to the question of who man is? How to discover who man is, how to know oneself: the measure of good and evil, of rightness and wrongness, of self-fulfillment and self-destruction, of success and failure? The measure that will determine the level of the culture of particular individuals and of entire communities, the measure that will enable us to read the «curve of culture» in history? Quis ostendit nobis bona? That is the question!
Only in the context of the above, fundamental questions can one venture to understand the work of Karol Wojtyła, philosopher and theologian. His philosophical reflection is based, as was the case in Socrates’s philosophy, on direct insight into oneself which precedes any opinion on who man is. Such an insight is always accompanied by a recognition of the real world in which every human being appears «separately,» given to him or herself as one who transcends the world. Such an act, the act of self-cognition, of grasping the truth about oneself, precedes the act of choosing to follow this truth in one’s life. Self-cognition is accomplished in the conscience, by way of insight. “It is in the conscience – writes Wojtyła – that there is achieved the peculiar union of moral truthfulness and duty that manifests itself as the normative power of truth.” (K. Wojtyła, The Acting Person, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Boston-London 1979, p. 162.) Each of us spontaneously reveals this normative power of truth to him or herself in the deepest possible way whenever daring to deny what he or she has personally acknowledged, thus introducing a hiatus into him or herself. Man only acts accordingly to his human nature while freely transcending himself towards truth.
However, Wojtyła, a witness to the truth about man, knows that a human being only too often turns out faithless to him or herself. As a poet, he would forewarn himself against it with the words: “If I have truth in me, it will break out one day. / I cannot repel it: my own self I’d repel.” (K. Wojtyła, The Birth of Confessors, in: by the same author, Poezje. Poems, trans. J. Peterkiewicz, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1998, p. 146.) Moreover, Wojtyła was aware that man is unable to free himself from the guilt that thus originates. This sense of moral self-knowledge, perceived as experiential, was already expressed, with utmost precision and disarming honesty, in the name of us all, by Ovid, who said, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor (“I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way”). Indeed, is this not a fitting description of the moral condition of man, of e a c h a n d e v e r y o n e o f u s a s a p e r s o n? Does this mean that ethics, which, through the confession made by the Roman poet, has declared its helplessness when confronted with the «case of Ovid» in each of us, must remain absolutely silent, must leave man, and thus all of us, face to face with the description that approaches tragedy, namely, «No exit!»?
Yet what does it all mean to man who exists as a personal being, what does it mean to me, to you, to each and every one of us?
It means that from now on I must forever remain the one who has caused my own moral suicide, that I must from now on remain its victim and, to make things worse, from now on, as both the one who has caused my moral suicide and the one who has been its victim, I must forever remain myself its eye-witness, and therefore also the objective jury in my case, fully aware of its essence. Thus, as the witness and the jury in my own case I have no other option than to consider my situation as one from which there is no exit. I shall forever remain, sit venia verbo, face to face with «not-myself in myself, owing to myself!» and, unavoidably, I cannot blame anyone else but myself for this tragic state of affairs of my own being. Socrates, who was shocked by Plato attempting to arrange a night escape from prison for him, indeed gave us a warning against such a condition. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, a declared atheist, would refer to such a condition of a human person as hell (Huis clos). Therefore one can rightly say that the drama we have referred to here as «the case of Ovid» has become the classic description of the methodological locus ethicae.
Yet ethics, if construed as philosophy, is not merely a description of the moral condition of man. It is also an attempt to provide the u l t i m a t e explanation of that condition. Man is a c o n t i n g e n t being. He e x i s t s, that is he i s and is w h o he is – with all his personal dignity and with everything he himself freely does to his dignity – as a result of the g e n e r o u s g i f t of h i s C r e a t o r. Therefore, we might say in other words, ethics is not merely a p h e n o m e n o l o g y of the «case of Ovid» in man. It is also – and inseparably – a m e t a p h y s i c s of this case. It was not without a reason that in his encyclical Fides et ratio John Paul II would state: “The person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry” (Section 83).
At this stage of the «case of Ovid» in man Karol Wojtyła, a philosopher, becomes a theologian and as so he knows that that the drama of man, unsolvable by man himself, has become the drama of God. This is why Karol Wojtyła-John Paul II wants to guide man from his dramatic self-cognition towards the threshold of hope provided by the faith in God the Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ.
Here we find the inexhaustible source of Wojtyła’s, the Pope’s, powerful theological credo: “Man cannot be fully understood without Christ, or rather man cannot understand himself without Christ; he can neither comprehend who he is nor what his vocation and destination are.” Therefore it was not without a reason that John Paul II’s first encyclical with its programmatic motto: “Man is the way for the Church,” was entitled precisely Redemptor hominis: The Redeemer of man. The Incarnate Word reveals man to himself in a way that could not have been invented by seers. This way of revealing man to himself, which is exclusive of God, has three characteristic marks:
Firstly, the Word of God reveals man to himself by guiding him towards his own source, to the «beginning,» to the moment when the look of creative Love shaped his being so that he would become the image of God, either as male or as female: “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good” (Gn 1: 31).
Secondly, the Word of God reveals man to himself «after his fall,» in the historical perspective of the Redemption: in the act of Verbum Caro, the Word becoming flesh, in the act that was the ransom God was ready to offer and constantly offers in order to save man’s greatness, in the act that was the ransom God has paid in order to show man – through the magnitude of this ransom – man’s own greatness.
And finally, the Word of God reveals man to himself in the eschatological vision of complete fulfillment after the «resurrection of the flesh,» of the «ultimate» fulfillment which, as a result of the «new creation» has become an unbelievable, and yet real chance for each and every one of us.
In this way Karol Wojtyła’s anthropology of communion, built upon the «personalistic image» of man, finds its completion in John Paul II’s christological anthropology, and so deserves the name of a d e q u a t e a n t h r o p o l o g y.
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This is also why the «Divine anthropology» inherent in the event of Incarnation prompts each of us only one answer to the question, «Who really am I?» It is, «You are one for whom God became man.» Probably no one succeeded in expressing it more precisely than St. Augustine, when he said, Deus homo factus est, ut homo Deus fieret!
Indeed, the thought and the life of John Paul II do not stop inspiring us to draw from that Source.
Tolle et lege! Take and read!
Translated by Dorota Chabrajska