An Catholic influencer wondered on X last May: “The big issue in question that I hope to resolve someday: how does Scholasticism (Thomism) fit with personalism?”
Will she succeed? Is it possible?
We are going to consider the personalist philosophy of John Paul II to try to understand its implications, and whether it is possible for it to “coexist” in Christian thought with Thomism.
Cardinal Avery Dulles commented in America Magazine in 2004 that, as the literary output of Pope John Paul II accumulated, expanding almost beyond the assimilation capacity of any reader, he wondered what is at the very center of his message: Is there any concept that can serve as a key to deciphering what distinguishes this pope as a thinker? Dulles’s hypothesis is that this key is the mystery of the human person from philosophical personalism.
In his early years as a professor of ethics at the University of Lublin in Poland, Karol Wojtyla identified as a Thomist. Although he enthusiastically affirmed the teaching of Thomas Aquinas on most points, he pointed out a weakness. Saint Thomas paid very little attention to the human person as experienced from within. In an article on “Thomistic personalism” presented in 1961, he declared: “When it comes to analyzing conscience and self-awareness, it seems there is no place for it in Saint Thomas’s objectivist view of reality. In any case, what most reveals the subjectivity of the person is presented by Saint Thomas in an exclusively—or almost exclusively—objective way. He shows us the particular faculties, both spiritual and sensory, through which all human conscience and self-awareness—the human personality in the psychological and moral sense—take shape, but there he stops. Thus, Saint Thomas offers us an excellent view of the objective existence and activity of the person, but it would be difficult to speak, from his point of view, of the experiences lived by the person.
Wojtyla was convinced that Saint Thomas correctly situated the human person in terms of the general categories of being, as an individual subsisting in an intellectual nature. But he wished to enrich Thomas’s doctrine on the person by referring to our experience of ourselves as unique and ineffable subjects: each person is an “I,” an original source of free and responsible activity.
Wojtyla’s experience as a young bishop at the Second Vatican Council confirmed and deepened his personalism. He participated especially in the drafting of the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes), which speaks of “the exalted dignity proper to the human person” and of universal and inviolable human rights (GS, no. 26). In another of John Paul II’s favorite passages, Gaudium et Spes affirms that human beings are the only creatures that God wills for their own sake, and adds that they cannot reach their full stature except through a disinterested gift of themselves (GS, no. 24).
In his continued struggle against Marxism in Poland after the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Wojtyla identified the doctrine of the person as the Achilles’ heel of the communist regime. He decided to base his opposition on that point. In 1968 he wrote to his Jesuit friend, the future Cardinal Henri de Lubac: “I devote my scarce free moments to a work that interests me greatly and that is dedicated to the metaphysical meaning and the mystery of the PERSON. The evil of our time consists, first of all, in a kind of degradation, even pulverization, of the fundamental singularity of each human person. This evil is much more metaphysical than moral. To this disintegration, sometimes planned by atheistic ideologies, we must oppose ourselves.”
As pope, John Paul II would continue to insist that the extraordinary brutality of the 20th century was due to the unwillingness to recognize the inherent value of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God, which confers inalienable rights that no human power can grant or withdraw. “The human person—proclaims—he receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend every social order to advance toward truth and goodness” (Centesimus Annus, no. 38.1). Moreover, persons are essentially social and oriented toward life in community. They realize themselves as persons through interaction, giving to others and receiving from them in turn. To reconcile the good of the community with that of its individual members, Wojtyla proposed a theory of participation. All must contribute to the common good, which then redounds to the benefit of the individual members. This teaching on participation and the common good contains an implicit critique not only of Marxist collectivism, but also of libertarian individualism and anarchist alienation.
Since becoming pope, John Paul II used personalism as a lens through which to reinterpret much of the Catholic tradition: accepting all the dogmas of the Church, but presented with a personalist bias. But, is it possible—as we wondered at the beginning—to “marry” the perennial Catholic thought with philosophies that are, on the one hand, modern (modernist) and, on the other, the fruit of such concrete contexts as Marxist thought and the idea of the person that emerges from them? Isn’t it because of this attempt to fit together different and perhaps incompatible thoughts that John Paul II is so difficult to read? At least on my part, I cannot help but fully agree with the traditional French thinker Louis Salleron who, in December 1981, wrote in the magazine Itinéraires: “the visceral faith of John Paul II is clouded in the strangeness of a vocabulary and a philosophy that we no longer manage to follow in his inexhaustible word” (Jean Madiran, History of the Prohibited Mass, vol. II, Via Romana, Versailles, 2009).
For an exhaustive review of John Paul II’s personalism in all areas of his thought (ecclesiology, sacraments, ecumenism and interreligious relations), I recommend reading the full text that we have been quoting from Cardinal Dulles. However, here we are going to present summarily some concrete aspects, because the personalist theme appears in almost all of John Paul II’s teachings, including the social ones; because his experience of living under a Marxist regime in Poland led him to consider that the controlled economy, he maintains, “diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys, the spirit of initiative, that is, the creative subjectivity of the person” (SRS, no. 15.2). The notion of creative subjectivity comes to occupy a central place in John Paul II’s third social encyclical, Centesimus Annus. “The free market economy,” he states, “is the most effective instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs” (no. 34.1). At one point, the Pope directly asks whether the former communist nations seeking to rebuild their economies should be advised to adopt capitalism. His answer is a carefully nuanced yes. He is in favor of the business economy, the market economy, the free economy, but he is convinced that the energies unleashed by the market must be contained within a solid legal framework and a public moral culture, so that the economy remains at the service of the common good (no. 42). It would be necessary to delve into how this vision fits with traditional Catholic thought. On the one hand, it must be for this nuanced defense of capitalism, among other things, that John Paul II is almost an idol for neoconservatives of the “Catholics and public life” type, average voters of the lukewarm PP, unvoteable from a Catholic perspective.
However, as could not be otherwise, this personalist thought implies tensions with the previous tradition.
First, in natural theology: At least since the time of Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic tradition has insisted that the existence of a personal God, creator and end of all things, can be established by human reason on the basis of visible things. The usual arguments have been based on the principle of causality, contingency, degrees of perfection, and the principle of finality. John Paul does not reject these arguments at any time, but curiously remains silent about them. Instead, he starts from the longings of the human heart for personal communion with others and with the divine. For personalist philosophers like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, he writes, “the path does not pass so much through being and existence [as in Saint Thomas] as through persons and their encounter” in coexistence and dialogue. We are left with questions like these: Can a rigorous and convincing proof be built on a personalist basis? If so, is it preferable to the traditional ontological and cosmological arguments? Have these other arguments been shown to be deficient?
Second, natural law: when writing about natural law, John Paul II speaks more of the human person than of human nature. As Janet Smith points out, he wishes to integrate natural law into his personalist framework, thus avoiding the accusation of “biologism.” However, Oxford professor Oliver O’Donovan objects that John Paul II seems too indebted to the idealist tradition, which “understands the rationality of moral law as something grounded in the human mind.” But in his work as a professor, Karol Wojtyla anticipated this objection and tried to respond to it. In an essay on “The Human Person and Natural Law,” he firmly rejected the opinion of Kant and the idealists, which would allow reason to impose its own categories on reality. For Wojtyla, reason discerns and affirms an objective order of reality and value that is prior to reason itself. The freedom of the human person should not be understood in an indeterminist way, as if it meant emancipation from all restraints. Although the mind must adjust to the real order, law as moral obligation is not something merely mechanical or biological. It presupposes a subject with personal conscience.
On the issue of the death penalty, although he does not hold that the death penalty is intrinsically evil, John Paul II’s profound respect for human life inclined him to reject capital punishment in practice. He admits it when there is no other way to defend society against the criminal, but he also holds that in today’s advanced societies there are alternatives more in keeping with human dignity. Previous official teachings, up to the pontificate of Pius XII, systematically supported capital punishment. Catholic moral theologians regularly cited Saint Paul to the effect that secular rulers do not carry the sword in vain, but are ministers or instruments of God to execute his wrath on evildoers (Rom 13:4). Therefore, the State’s authority to execute criminals does not conflict with the maxim that only God is the owner of life. And from those clays come these sludges: the change in the Catechism made by Pope Francis, denying legitimacy to the death penalty in any circumstance against the multisecular Catholic tradition, and one of his first monthly videos, centered on the non-Christian assertion that what was needed was to “put man at the center”.
Similar issues arise with respect to just war. John Paul II, although he denies being a pacifist, deplores military action as a failure for humanity. In the encyclical Centesimus Annus, he called attention to the success of non-violent resistance in bringing about the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe. He then eloquently advocated for a world order in which the need for war would be eliminated. “No more war,” he writes, “which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, upsets even the lives of those who kill, and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred. In his World Day of Peace message on January 1, 2002, John Paul II declared that there is no peace without justice and no justice without forgiveness. Does that mean that the pursuit of justice and forgiveness must banish all thought of war? Is he ruling out the tradition of just war in favor of what George Weigel calls “a kind of functional or de facto pacifism”? Or, worse still, are we faced with the heresy of irenicism revived? Let us remember that Saint Pius X affirmed that modernism is the synthesis of all heresies. From this issue, which could be appreciated very well in the ecumenical meeting led by Pope Leo last November, which I would like to address on another occasion in more detail.
To conclude this reflection on this omnipresent profane philosophy in the current Church, I would like to quote an article by Alonso Gracián published in InfoCatólica in 2017, in which he states: “I am convinced of this thesis: the Catholic mind needs to rid itself of the personalist paradigm in order to effectively combat modernism.”
First, to the question of whether personalism is the “philosophy” official of the Church, he responds with a resounding “no.” He states that “(personalism) is a conceptual construction that places the person at the center of its reflection. But it is not proper to traditional Catholic thought to place the person at the center of its reflection, because at the center is the Most Holy Trinity and its glory. Therefore, personalism, contrary to what is commonly believed in Catholic academic circles, is not the philosophy proper to Catholicism—nor is it the “overcoming” of Saint Thomas, as is taught today.
The entire personalist framework in the Catholic Church comes from a humanist utopianism that considers Christianity as an immanent social liberation project apart from moral law: a new man in an earthly paradise, against the ONLY order of grace, which is the order of the Church. It is the old ambition of the Renaissance humanists, which resurges with Catholic progressivism.
In relation to this, Gracián wonders if the social doctrine of the Church is leftist, as it appears in practice when one looks at each pronouncement of the Spanish bishops. But, again, Gracián’s answer is “no.” However, he states that “from the beginnings of personalism comes that naive commonplace, by which the social doctrine of the Church is leftist. Doesn’t this give the prestige that progressive theologians have had throughout the post-conciliar period? Let us not forget that Bernhard Häring (1912-1998), whose theology is latent in Amoris laetitia, is an ultra-personalist, and that from the Pandora’s box of his ecologist moralism evils emerged that smoke to this day. Situational ethics is an ethics that wants to be leftist, because in the end it begs from Marxism. But it also wants to be right-wing, because it does not dare self-destruction, and becomes liberal. In conclusion, nothing more than antimetaphysical existentialism, whose prophet is Heidegger (1889-1976), omnipresent in the New Theology.
For Gracián, personalism does not even reach the level of philosophy, since phenomena are not essences, and reality cannot be known by renouncing knowledge of essences to build on phenomena, as if these were more essential than essences. Wouldn’t this be condemning oneself to mere existentialism? It is not philosophy, but a paradigm: “As the RAE teaches – he states – paradigm is a theory or set of theories whose central core is accepted without question and which provides the basis and model for solving problems and advancing knowledge. If the definition is applied to personalism, it can be defined the personalist paradigm as topics or set of topics whose central core is accepted without question, and which supplies unnecessary philosophies and theologies to solve pastoral problems and advance in the teaching of the Deposit.
Gracián’s clear conclusion on this is that “personalist phenomenology is clearly anti-scientific and subjectivist, against traditional Scholastic thought, which is scientific and objective. That is why it is necessary to resolve dissonances and return to traditional Catholic thought. The Catholic mind needs to rid itself of the personalist paradigm in order to effectively combat modernism, to be able to tread paths that have been muddied: the path of objectivity, the path of Tradition and of traditions, the path of Catholic identity. It is not possible to overcome the crisis, therefore, without a strong, clear, precise Catholic thought like a sword.”