When we presented the triptych on St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, personalism emerged as one of the most prominent concepts. In everything I was able to read to write the texts, it was clear that, beyond the specific case of his Theology of the Body, the philosophical thought of the Polish pope was personalist.
Intrigued by this matter, I decided to investigate more about the philosophy of personalism. And it seemed very curious to me that, in the search for academic articles on personalism in Catholicism, a large majority of articles dealt precisely with St. John Paul II as one of the key exponents of personalist thought in the Church, along with Jacques Maritain and Dietrich von Hildebrand.
So let’s try, as always in these texts, to understand in a very general way what personalism is and analyze it in the light of the Catholic tradition.
Traditional Catholic thought has defined man for centuries primarily by his created, rational, and dependent nature on God, focusing on salvation and objective order. Based mainly on the classical metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church has understood man for centuries as a rational nature with an ultimate end established by God: the person is an individual substance of a rational nature, with emphasis on his being and his order to God, and not solely on his “I.”
However, as Romano Amerio systematically studies in his work Iota Unum, the Church has undergone transformations in all areas throughout, especially, the 20th century, one of them being the conception of the human being. It is not that in previous centuries there was no organic development and deepening of Revelation; what it is about is that the changes of the 20th century, gestated from the Protestant heresy and the birth of modernity, are of a disruptive, innovative, and revolutionary character.
That is why, sharing the principle that was imposed in the ecclesial mentality in the mid-20th century of denigration of the Church’s past, considering not only the ways but also many contents invalid for the “modern man,” the approach to the concept of man was transformed, introducing personalist thought. Personalism, like so many other things in the modern Church, is a philosophy taken from the world. But, unlike secular anthropocentrism, which can ignore transcendence, Christian personalism grounds the value of man in his divine and communal vocation.
Jacques Maritain and, as we said, Karol Wojtyla (St. John Paul II) are two of the most influential personalist thinkers in the 20th-century Church, placing in their approaches the human being, created in the image of God, at the center, highlighting his dignity, freedom, and relationality. Therefore, personalism is anthropocentric, which is another characteristic of the modern Church. John Paul II, like other modern Catholic thinkers, attempted to integrate modern philosophies such as personalism into the Church’s theology and Thomism, with great influence in the fields of bioethics and, as we have seen in previous texts, in marital anthropology. It is important to keep this concept of “anthropology” in mind, since a new supposedly Catholic philosophical system is being developed that offers a new reading on the human being.
At this point, it is also essential to consider that, just as traditional Catholic thought defined man by focusing on his salvation and the objective order, 20th-century personalism (which extends into the 21st century) centers its themes on freedom, subjectivity, and the communal relationship of the human being. That is why traditional criticism accuses personalism of displacing objective truth for personal experience. Among the key conflicts between the traditional approach and the modern (modernist) one are the approach to the concepts of freedom against law (personalism emphasizes the creative freedom of the person against his subjection to truth or objective law) and subjectivity against metaphysics (traditional thought considers that personalism approaches existentialism or subjectivism, by placing the accent on the “person” as experience, instead of human nature). Anthropocentrism and personalism lead to subjectivity, and for this reason, from traditional thought it is argued that personalism has distorted traditional theology by favoring a “new theology” based on the subjective experience of the person.
In this sense, it is important to contextualize that, in the face of a thought of centuries like Thomism and traditional Catholic anthropology, personalism is a system of thought born in a concrete context and as a response to it: after the First World War, it was considered necessary as a response to the modern depersonalization that totalitarianism brought with it. That is why, when the Church offers eternal, perennial answers to the question of human nature, how can its traditional explanation, with its organic development of centuries, be supplanted by a thought fruit of such a concrete and recent cultural context?
Father Juan Luis Lorda states in an article published in 2023 in the magazine Omnes that “perhaps personalism is the philosophical movement with the greatest impact on 20th-century theology.”
According to this author, “in the early 20th century, with quite a few nuances and exceptions, it can be said that the dominant philosophy in Catholic circles was Thomism. And the strong point of that philosophy was metaphysics, that is, the doctrine of being. The metaphysics of being is an important doctrine within Christianity that confesses a creator God, supreme being who makes other beings from nothing that are not part of Him, that have their own and real consistency, but do not explain themselves and are contingent.”
Throughout the 20th century, this metaphysics of being was “completed” (sic, Lorda) by several philosophical inspirations with what could be called a metaphysics of the person,” in which a capital aspect stands out: the relationality of persons. These “philosophical inspirations” have impacted almost all aspects of theology; since it is a confluence of thoughts, provoked by the common ideological situation after the First World War and the confrontation between communist movements and societies and liberal thoughts and regimes. “Very different authors, Lorda affirms, with Christian or Jewish inspiration, then perceived that, in reality, two anthropologies opposed each other that needed to be corrected, balanced, and overcome. And that for that it was convenient to understand in depth what a person is, as defined by the Christian theological and philosophical tradition.” And three currents converged, almost contemporaneous. First, what we could call “French personalists,” starting from Jacques Maritain. Second, the “philosophers of dialogue” with Ebner as inspirer and Martin Buber as the best known. And, third, several authors from the first group of phenomenologists who surrounded Husserl, especially Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and Dietrich Von Hildebrand; they are usually called the “Göttingen Circle.”
Donald de Marco explains how “Jacques Maritain repeatedly and passionately called on the Church to put its theology and philosophy in contact with the problems of the present.” His vision, qualified as liberal, on matters of politics and social justice won him staunch enemies among traditional thinkers in the Church.
On the “Göttingen circle,” Fr. Lorda states that “those first philosophers who followed Husserl focused on the fundamental experiences of the human being. And among them, the most proper to persons, knowledge and love.”
“In a long chain – Lorda explains-, many of these ideas reached Karol Wojtyła (1920-2005), and received the impact of his personality, especially after being elected Pope (1978-2005) and developing his theology of the body and love. Also his idea of the “personalist norm”: the dignity of persons. For John Paul II, personal love, claimed by Christ, is the appropriate way to treat a person, because it is how God treats her. This aspect can be expanded with Lorda’s article here.
If you remember the text on the application of the Theology of the Body of St. John Paul II, we relied heavily on Alice von Hildebrand’s critical view of Christopher West’s version of the TdC. Well, it is interesting in this sense, to properly situate these authors (Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand) in the spectrum of Catholic thought, to understand their philosophical approach to sexual relations in marriage from the traditional teaching of the Church, based on some words from the researcher Randy Engel, founder and director of the Coalition for Life in the United States of America. The objective is to understand the influence of von Hildebrand’s personalist thought on that of Karol Wojtyla.
In the linked text, Engel focuses on studying Dietrich von Hildebrand’s phenomenology and his novel teaching on marriage. She states that “many of the premises and main themes of the TdC are not original to Wojtyla, but that when Wojtyla delivered his lectures on Love and Responsibility at the University of Lublin in 1958 and 1959, there was already a strong movement in certain Catholic circles to reorient Catholic marriage toward more ‘personalist’ lines, led in part by the German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and the German Benedictine priest Dom Herbert Doms.”
Between 1909 and 1911, a young Dietrich von Hildebrand was a student of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology at the University of Göttingen, but his philosophical mentor and friend was Adolf Reinach, jurist and phenomenologist who later applied Husserl’s philosophy to law, philosophy, morals, and ethics, but following more “objective” and “realist” lines. Husserl was none other than the Lutheran founder of phenomenology. Also Max Scheler, the German phenomenologist who taught at the University of Munich, played an important role in von Hildebrand’s early intellectual formation. It is interesting to note here also the influence that Scheler had on the young Karol Wojtyla. From these influences on his thought, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, traditional regarding the liturgy and opposed to its reform after the Second Vatican Council, attempted to create an original philosophical system that incorporated contemporary philosophies, such as phenomenology and personalism. He believed that the new system offered valuable insights and truths that could be used to form a truly Christian humanism and make the Gospel more comprehensible to the modern world.
According to his widow, Alice von Hildebrand, her husband had acquired a special interest in human love and conjugal relations long before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in April 1914, at the age of 30. In lectures delivered in the 1920s to young Catholics, von Hildebrand argued that there was a distinction between love as the meaning of marriage and procreation as its purpose or end. Alice Von Hildebrand states that her husband believed that the Church’s stance on procreation and the education of children as the primary end of marriage detracted value from the interpersonal and unitive aspects of marriage, and that it was timely and necessary to introduce a correction to remedy the situation. (Alice von Hildebrand, “Introduction,” Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love in http://catholiceducation.org/articles/marriage/mf0003.html )
With his writings on man and woman in the 1920s, Dietrich von Hildebrand prepared the ground in the Church for the teaching of the Second Vatican II Council on the double meaning of the conjugal act. According to his widow, von Hildebrand was aware that «he was opening new paths by making the distinction between the purpose and the meaning of marriage so explicit,» so he turned to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio in Munich, to confirm his opinions. However, after Pacelli ascended to the papal throne as Pius XII in 1939, he changed his previous opinions, which were said to favor a “personalist” view of marriage. In 1951, at the end of his famous “Address to the Members of the Congress of the Italian Association of Midwives,” Pius XII warned against an inversion of the Church’s formulation on the ends of marriage, a warning that was applicable, in part, to von Hildebrand’s new theology of marriage.
St. John Paul II stated that von Hildebrand’s writings greatly influenced his work, with his strong personalist emphasis on “self-giving” and conjugal sex as a sacrament.
Once we have reviewed its origin and historical evolution, we will continue, God willing, next week by expounding Wojtyla’s personalist thought and its consequences.