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The moral theology of John Paul II: Protestant reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2007
Abstract
This work critically examines the moral theology of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. In his writings as Wojtyla, and later as John Paul II, the theme of human dignity served as the starting point for his moral theology. This article first describes his conception of human dignity as influenced by Thomist and by phenomenological sources. The Thomist philosophy of being provided Wojtyla with an optimistic view of the epistemic and moral capacity of human persons. Wojtyla argued that because of the analogia entis, humans gain epistemic access to the normative order of God as well as the moral capacity to live in accordance with the law of God. Built upon the foundation of his Thomist assumptions, Wojtyla's phenomenological research enriched his insight into human dignity by arguing in favour of the formative nature of human action. He argued that human dignity rested also in this dynamism of personhood: the capacity not only to live in accordance with the normative order but to form oneself as virtuous by partaking in virtuous acts or to form one's community in solidarity through acts of participation and self-giving. After presenting his moral theology, this article then engages critically with his assumptions from a Protestant perspective. I argue that, while human dignity provides a powerful and beneficial starting point for ethics, his Thomist ontology of being/substance and the optimistic terms in which he interprets human dignity ultimately undermine his social programme. I propose that an ontology of relation provides a better starting point for interpreting human dignity and for appealing for acts of solidarity in the social realm.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2007
References
1 Wojtyla, ‘On the Dignity of the Human Person’, Person and Community (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 177–80Google Scholar. This essay contains a talk broadcast in Polish over Vatican Radio, 19 October 1964. He made this comment to Mieczyslaw Malinsky before the radio talk, Pope John Paul II: The Life of Karol Wojtyla (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 173.
2 Karol Wojtyla, ‘On the Metaphysical and Phenomenological Basis of the Moral Norm’ (MPB), Person and Community, p. 74.
3 MPB, p. 76.
4 MPB, p. 77.
5 MPB, p. 78.
6 Ibid.
7 ‘Il fondamento metafisico e fenomenological dell norma morale sulla base delle concezioni di Tommaso d'Aquino e di Max Scheler’, pp. 111–12. Trans. Rocco, Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, (Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), p. 76Google Scholar.
8 MPB, p. 80.
9 Ibid.
10 In a subsequent essay, Wojtyla wrote, ‘From this follows the resemblance to God of all creatures in being; this resemblance has its own gradation. Both the resemblance as such and its gradations are gathered together and known in the mind of God as exemplars: the Creator sees in Himself the highest exemplar out of which beings are created and knows them in His image, that is to say, inasmuch as they imitate his essence, which is the first object of his knowledge. It is here that we find the nucleus of the normative order. ‘Il fondamento metafisico’, pp. 111–12, trans. Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, p. 76.
11 Mounier considered the philosophy of Max Scheler to be foundational for personalist philosophy. John Hellman, ‘John Paul II and the Personalist Movement’ Cross Currents (Winter 1980--81), pp. 413.
12 Wojtyla, ‘Ethics and Moral Theology’, in Person and Community, p. 104. Essay published in 1967.
13 Wojtyla, Max Scheler, Italian trans. Sandro, Bucciarelli, (Rome: Logos, 1980), p. 241Google Scholar. Trans. into English in Buttiglione, Wojtyla, p. 62.
14 John, Staude, Max Scheler (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), p. 22Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., p. 23.
16 Wojtyla critiqued Scheler for failing to substantiate a normative moral order. Scheler believed that good and evil are bound to emotion and revealed only in moral experience. Wojtyla believed that his method was helpful for Christian ethics but that the system he constructed contradicted the substantial basis of personhood by reducing humans to ‘lived-through emotional experiences’. Wojtyla, Max Scheler, p. 232. Buttiglione, Wojtyla, p. 60.
17 Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979), p. xxGoogle Scholar.
18 In Person and Community, ‘Act and Lived Experience’, pp. 95–6; ‘The Problem of the Will in Analysis of Ethical Act’, pp. 8–17.
19 Acting Person, pp. 74–5.
20 Ibid., p. 100.
21 Ibid., p. 98.
22 Ibid., p. 105.
23 In a side note, Wojtyla explains that the person as creature may also be seen as belonging to God but this relation which medieval philosophers refer to as persona est sui iuris does not overshadow self-possession. Ibid., p. 106.
24 Ibid., pp. 108–9.
25 Ibid., p. 111.
26 Gerard, Beigel, Faith and Social Justice in the Teaching of Pope John Paul II. (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 16Google Scholar.
27 In contrast to horizontal experience which he explains as ‘transgressing the subject's limits in the direction of an object – and this is intentionality in the “external” perception or volition of external objects’. Acting Person, p. 119.
28 Ibid., p. 124.
29 Ibid., p. 120.
30 Ibid., p. 132.
31 Ibid. and Beigel, Faith and Social Justice, pp. 17–18. Elsewhere, Wojtyla argued that the will is a potentiality for the good because of the capacity for free will and because it is a specifically rational faction on human nature and in the concrete person. Reason plays a norm-setting role by submitting different goods to the will in light of the objective norms rooted in reality. ‘The Problem of the Will in Analysis of the Ethical Act’, Person and Community, pp. 8–17 and ‘Act and Lived Experience’, Person and Community, pp. 95–6.
32 Acting Person, p. 138.
33 Ibid., p. 139.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 146.
36 Ibid., p. 332.
37 Ibid., pp. 339–40.
38 Wojtyla, ‘Participation or Alienation?’, in Person and Community, p. 201.
39 Ibid., p. 203. Cf. Samuel, Gregg, Challenging the Modern World: Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and the Development of Catholic Social Teaching (Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999), pp. 201–11Google Scholar.
40 For example, Centesimus Annus (1991), pp. 54, 55; Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), p. 41.
41 Veritatis Splendor (1993), pp. 9, 43.
42 Ibid., p. 71.
43 Solicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), p. 40.
44 Centesimus Annus, p. 13.
45 John Paul II, ‘Economy Must Respect Primacy of the Person’, L'Osservatore Romano (19 January 2000), p. 9.
46 Centesimus Annus, p. 41.
47 Wealthy civilisations find themselves enslaved to an abuse of freedom, ‘an abuse linked precisely with a consumer attitude uncontrolled by ethics’ in which material goods are given greater value than humanity and the accumulation of goods causes great social ills. Redemptor Hominis (1979), p. 16.
48 Centesimus Annus, p. 41.
49 I have addressed this issue in detail in ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Justice’, Ph.D. thesis, University of St Andrews, 2003.
50 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1957–69), IV/1, p. 493.
51 Ibid., p. 494. Barth is quoting here from the Heidelberg Catechism. He emphasised that there is no core of ‘damaged nature’ but man himself poisons his own nature by his pride and sin. In other words, God did not create an evil nature but the human, by turning away from God, made himself evil.
52 Alvin Plantinga, ‘Philosophers Respond to Pope John Paul II's Encyclical Letter, Fides et Ratio’, Christianity Today International/Books and Culture Magazine 5/4 (July/August 1999), p. 32.
53 Ibid., p. 36.
54 Wojtyla, Max Scheler, p. 232. Buttiglione, Wojtyla, pp. 59–60. Wojtyla, ‘Act and Lived Experience’ from Lublin Lectures, pp. 37–8, quoted by Kenneth, Schmidtz, At the Center of the Human Drama (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1994), p. 44Google Scholar.
55 The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1b25, 2b7; For a history of the philosophical turn to relationality, see Leron, Schultz, Reforming Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 11–36Google Scholar.
56 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), p. 113Google Scholar (B106).
57 Person and Community, p. 201.
58 Ibid., p. 200.
59 Wojtyla, ‘The Person: Subject and Community’, in Person and Community, p. 247, and Beigel, Faith and Social Justice, p. 27.
60 The articulation of a relational anthropology owes much debt to Barth's CD III/2. I have expounded the ethical implications of relational ontology further in ‘Prolegomena to a Theological Theory of Justice’, chs 5–7.
61 Desmond, Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Image Doubleday, 1999), p. 31Google Scholar.