[In the following review, Paglia offers positive evaluation of Crossing the Threshold of Hope. According to Paglia, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope comes as a stunning display not of Catholic autocracy but of the ideological flexibility and rueful insight of the modern mind.”]

The pope speaks. But Crossing the Threshold of Hope is a peculiar document. Each chapter opens with the journalist Vittorio Messori's questions, sometimes bold and querulous, sometimes obsequious and honorific in the Italian way—“Allow me to play, although respectfully, the gadfly.” The pope then replies at length, his reflections moving impressionistically from the philosophical and theological to the historical and autobiographical. The didactic structure of Catholic catechism is thus reversed. During preparation for the sacrament of confirmation, for example, the preceptor asks, and the novice answers. But in John Paul II's book, the ultimate authority figure of church hierarchy submits to interrogation, a warping of tradition typical of a man whose kissing of airport tarmacs has dramatized his conviction that the pope is the servant of humanity.

I approached the pope's book as an atheist for whom Italian Catholicism is a rich ethnic identity rather than a religion. Catholic doctrine, particularly regarding sexuality and obedience to authority, has been troublesome to many members of my generation in America, and John Paul's reputation has become increasingly conservative. Thus, Crossing the Threshold of Hope comes as a stunning display not of Catholic autocracy but of the ideological flexibility and rueful insight of the modern mind. Its complex sequence of wide-ranging meditations—on prayer and salvation, the existence of God, the uniqueness of Jesus, the permanence of suffering, the overcoming of fear through faith—establishes John Paul as an eloquent and erudite intellectual, struggling to bridge the gap between universal human longings and the bitter political realities of the twentieth century.

In literary terms, the voice of the book is intense and powerful, yet peculiarly distant and exalted. All hierarchs suffer the isolation of power. Reaching us from stone walls of the labyrinthine Vatican, Crossing the Threshold of Hope resembles prison literature, in which physical immobility and sensory deprivation seem to intensify an author's power of language and originality of imagination. John Paul's captivity by rigid, royal protocol gives this book a distinct and affecting air of loneliness.

The former Karol Wojtyla, whose name honors his predecessor, John Paul I (who fused the names of his predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI), has suffered an obliteration of personal identity in his higher function, the almost unimaginable burden of his election as pope, whom millions regard as the single living human closest to God. Hence the text oscillates between the first and third persons, sometimes in the same paragraph. “I,” who privately takes pen in hand, had a father and homeland, but “he,” the Supreme Pontiff on public view, is a nearly abstract being, the successor to Saint Peter, whose apostolic mission came from the lips of Jesus himself. It is a harrowing, mutilating privilege. Take this surreal example:

As a young priest and pastor I came to this way of looking at young people and at youth, and it has remained constant all these years. It is an outlook which allows me to meet young people wherever I go. Every parish priest in Rome knows that my visits to the parish must conclude with a meeting between the Bishop of Rome and the young people of the parish. And not only in Rome, but anywhere the Pope goes, he seeks out the young and the young seeks him out. Actually, in truth, it is not the Pope who is being sought out at all. The one being sought out is Christ who knows “that which is in every man” (cf Jn 2:25), especially in a young person, and who can give true answers to his questions!

Wojtyla, the long-ago aspiring priest, melts into John Paul, the venerable Bishop of Rome, commander of many priests, who in turn swells into the world-traversing pope. But like a ghost, the latter suddenly vanishes into the Divine Being, Christ, whose vicar he is on earth and whom like all celebrants of Mass he literally impersonates in the Communion service (hence the ban on female priests). The passage is eerily chameleonic.

After the nihilism of poststructuralism and game-playing postmodernism, it is a relief to find the history of ideas treated in so respectful, cohesive and luminous a way. Studded with emphatic italicized phrases, the pope's book radiates with passion. Its central plot line, sketched with disarming simplicity, is a “struggle for the soul of the contemporary world.” The dramatis personae in this Faustian combat are both living and dead. On one side is René Descartes and his modern progeny, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. One hundred years after Descartes, John Paul asserts, European Christianity was already defeated: the French Revolution “tossed crucifixes in the street” and introduced “the cult of the goddess Reason.” Today's Cartesians are the atheists and moral relativists of the “intellectual elite” who rule “the worlds of science, culture and media.” On the other side are the warriors for Christ, beginning with Saint Paul, whose failed missionary visit to Athens illustrated the resistance of those trained in Greek “philosophical speculation” to the faith-based rigor of Christian “mystery.” On the eternal battlefield of Western thought, Descartes' greatest opponent is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian John Paul believes to be unjustly neglected by the contemporary Church. He groups with Thomas other members of the Scholastic tradition, leading to John Henry Cardinal Newman, nineteenth-century Catholicism's most glamorous convert. With each recitation of the Nicene Creed at Mass, Catholics align themselves with this ancient lineage, for the words of the Creed are “nothing other than the reflection of Paul's doctrine.”

The young are John Paul's hope. He writes feelingly of their needs and desires, of their “searching for the meaning of life.” Remembering the “heroism” of his contemporaries, who “laid down their young lives” in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, he laments the predicament of today's young. “They live in freedom, which others have won for them, and have yielded in large part to the consumer culture.” He asks, “What is youth?”—implicitly opposing the soul-centered Christian view to the pagan one. The Hellenophile Oscar Wilde, for example, celebrated the beauty of youth quite differently. It is this carnal strain in the West, heterosexual as well as homosexual, that John Paul protests when defining as unethical, and inconsistent with true love, the use of any person as “an object of pleasure.”

And yet his own style is remarkably in tune with ‘60s sensibility. With its slow, trancelike rhythms and breathtaking vision, Crossing the Threshold of Hope is nearly psychedelic. Its floating fantasia of ideas has the hallucinatory vividness of ‘60s expanded consciousness, calm, contemplative and psychologically disassociated. Its theater is hugely multicultural: John Paul makes Jesus confront Buddha and Muhammad and celebrates African and Asian animists for their sympathy to Christianity. Reopening staid establishment theology toward superstitious “populist piety,” he accepts testimony about mystic coincidences and apparitions, particularly of Mary at Fatima and Jasna Góra. He rightly praises Mircea Eliade for showing how world anthropology has healed the break made by the Enlightenment between intellect and religion. True multiculturalism reveres the sacred.

The pope's persona is beyond sex, as conveyed by the dazzling purity of his white cassock and skull cap. He is a father-mother of shamanistic androgyny, a caring, contemplative, emanating being whose inconvenient body is merely a sensual entrapment or, as now, a living proof of human vulnerability to disease and death. As with worshipers of Plato's male-favoring Uranian Aphrodite, the pope's ancestry and affiliations are of the spirit rather than the flesh. Hence in this book he seems on charmingly intimate terms with the evangelists Luke and John and with Jesus himself, whom he calls, in a nearly Protestant way, “the only Friend” who walks beside us and will not disappoint. Real women, unfortunately, exist for John Paul only as celibate heroic saints or as dimly hallowed mothers in the obedient image of Mary. Crossing the Threshold of Hope is a book of transitions and new directions, but like much of current Catholic policy, it remains confounded by the pagan paradox of gender.