SOURCE: “In the Name of the Father,” in New Republic, December 26, 1994, pp. 21-5.

[In the following essay, Wildes examines the importance of phenomenology as the philosophical framework of John Paul's Christian theology and teachings. According to Wildes, “Pope John Paul II has grounded the authority of Karol Wojtyla's modern phenomenology in the ancient authority of God.”]

Since the close of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church has struggled, in public, about how it should move: forward into the modern world or backward to the austere certitude of the past. In 1979, when an obscure Polish cardinal was elected pope, it seemed as if a decision had been made in favor of the past. And in the years since, the former Karol Wojtyla has been portrayed—with some reason—as an arch-reactionary. But he is, in fact, something far more complex than that. His theology, as it emerges in his life's writings, is strikingly modern, more rooted in nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy than anything else. Indeed, it may even be the very modernism of his theology that has led him into the ecclesiastical authoritarianism for which he is more renowned.

How this happened is an interesting twentieth-century story. Wojtyla's central philosophical identity is rooted in what is known as the method of “phenomenology.” This off-putting term translates into a relatively simple idea: it is that one can come to understand the truth of something not simply by reference to the authority of science, or revelation, or dogma, but by “moving around” it, experiencing it from different perspectives and letting the reflections of each perspective communicate the truth of the object.

The central metaphor of such philosophy is “walking around.” It is in this way that Wojtyla has consistently understood the Church. Amid dramatic changes, he has led it around and around its identity, traditions, central practices and beliefs. Hence also his constant travel around the world: it is part of his attempt to circle human experience, in the belief that there is an essential core that is normative for being human. That core is, for him, what defines authentic human existence. It is not a subjective matter, but a mission of objective discovery. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul's recent encyclical on morality, he wrote, “The splendor of truth shines forth in all the works of the Creator and in a special way in man, created in the image and likeness of God.” The splendor of that truth can be found by a form of traveling, observing and circling. Theologically, in fact, Wojtyla hasn't led the Church forward or backward. He has led it in circles.

Wojtyla's philosophical interests began in his earlier priestly formation and doctoral work in theology. In his pre-seminary years, as a worker and university student in Krakow, Wojtyla came under the spell of the underground priest Jan Tyranowski, a hero of the Polish church during the Nazi occupation. It was Tyranowski who, in his bid to revive a deeper spirituality among Poland's persecuted Catholics, introduced Wojtyla to the work of Spanish mystics such as John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Carmelite monk who, with Teresa of Avila, led the Carmelite order in reform.

Steeped in this spirituality, Wojtyla presented himself in 1942 to Archbishop Sapieha of Krakow as a candidate for the seminary. Four years later, he was ordained as a priest and immediately packed off to Rome for a doctoral studies in theology. The decision by Archbishop Sapieha to send Wojtyla was part of a plan to rebuild the Polish church intellectually after so many of its priests—more than 2,000—had been killed by the Nazis. In Rome, Wojtyla studied at the Angelicum, a college now called the Pontifical University of St. Thomas, and wrote his dissertation under the direction of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. Perhaps sensing the young priest's background, Lagrange directed Wojtyla to write on the problem of faith in the writings of John of the Cross.

The problem Wojtyla dealt with was that, in John's writings, faith seemed to lack any cognitive content. It was all mystical spirituality, no hard knowledge. But Wojtyla found both categories unsatisfying. Perhaps influenced by his early years in the political turmoil of occupied Poland, Wojtyla argued that faith was, above all, rooted in experience. In the experience of faith, the human being is transformed and participates in divine life. First highlighted in this 1950 treatise, The Question of Faith in St. John of the Cross, the importance of the category of experience came to be critical in all of Wojtyla's thought.

After his return to Poland, Wojtyla worked for a time in a parish. But in 1951, Sapieha, then a cardinal, insisted he work on a second doctorate, in order to qualify as a university teacher. This time, the thesis was on a less traditional subject. Completed in 1957, the dissertation's title is An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing Christian Ethics on the Assumptions of Max Scheler's Philosophical System.

Scheler was a phenomenologist who deployed Edmund Husserl's intuitive philosophy to discover a basis for ethics. Here, Wojtyla began to pin down exactly what “experience” could really mean. Scheler argued it was possible objectively to describe “ethical” states of consciousness. He claimed that many emotions—including those of moral values—had an objective basis, and that it was the objective attraction to the good—not the imposition of an “ought”—that moves us to moral action. But Wojtyla felt that Scheler's account of moral experience was insufficient, since moral experience is more than the experience of values: it is acting upon them. For Wojtyla, it was in the choice of action that all the various aspects of the moral life came together, that internal, philosophical experience and external moral experience intersected.

This concentration on action was in turn influenced by the work of Maurice Blondel, a turn-of-the-century Catholic philosopher who was best known, in his book l'Action, for exalting the role of the will. Blondel argued that philosophy must give an account of action rather than pure thought, an idea that recurs throughout Wojtyla's later work. In linking together the observation of objective moral values (Scheler) and the centrality of action in human morality (Blondel), Wojtyla had constructed the foundation of his ethics: the authentic, acting human person. This understanding of the person suggested not only how people ought not to be treated but also how they ought to be treated.

In his new book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Wojtyla explains his development this way: “So the development of my studies centered on man—on the human person—can ultimately be explained by my pastoral concern.” But it was also affected by his political experience. His emphasis on the person is, in part, a reaction to totalitarian regimes that impoverished the mystery of the person in order to control people by the mechanisms of mass, centralized societies. In the face of first Nazi and then Soviet tyrannies, Wojtyla stressed the unique richness of each person. But he also emphasized that the person becomes a person because of community. In an address in Canada in 1984 he argued that “the human person lives in a community. … And with the community he shares hunger and thirst and sickness and malnutrition and misery. … In his own person the human being is meant to experience the needs of others.” He refused to counter totalitarianism with the liberal individualism of the West.

An account of his view of the authentic nature of personhood came in his 1960 book, Love and Responsibility, in which Wojtyla deployed his phenomenonlogical method to pastoral ends. He argued that in the matter of love there are natural sexual desires and that “the natural direction of the sexual urge is toward a human being of the other sex.” The moral order builds upon the natural order and transcends it. He writes that “the commandment to love is, as has been said, a form of the personalistic norm. We start from the existence of the person.” The personalist norm “leads to the recognition of the principle of monogamy and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.”

In defending this position, he later wrote: “I formulated the concept of a personalist principle. This principle is an attempt to translate the commandment of love into the language of philosophical ethics. The person is a being for whom the only suitable dimension is love. We are just to a person if we love him. … Love for a person excludes the possibility of treating him as an object of pleasure. …; It requires more; it requires the affirmation of the person as person.” He goes on to say, “Above all, the principle that a person has value by the simple fact that he is a person finds very clear expression: man, it is said by Vatican II, “is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for his own sake.’” “Personhood” subsequently became a fixation. Wojtyla's next book, Osoba i Czyn, written in 1969 and republished and revised ten years later as The Acting Person, is devoted to the subject.

Throughout Wojtyla's intellectual development, the phenomenological framework is clear. Wojtyla as a theologian had not responded to modernity by retreating into reactionary certitude, or by reasserting dogma or a simple elaboration of Thomist natural law. He had explored belief with all the modern philosophical tools available. He brought to his faith the mysticism of John of the Cross, but had developed this with the thought of such modern thinkers as Blondel, Scheler and Husserl. Throughout, he was responding, as the Church was, to the fundamental problem of faith in a rationalist, amoral, scientific age. And like the Second Vatican Council, he did not seek to escape these facets of modernity, but to understand more fully their unique challenges to faith.

Truth was not simply a matter of revelation, or a blind leap of faith, or a self-evident product of nature. It was, according to Wojtyla, found by observation, observation as a reflection on all experience. It could be conducted from all sorts of angles; what seemed like contradictions—say the contradiction between faith and science—were actually different ways of looking at the same thing. Take the question of science's challenge to religious belief. Wojtyla, in a 1987 letter to Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, saw science and religion forming “a community of interchange. Such a community of interchange encourages its members to expand their partial perspectives and form a unified vision.” What's more, “science can purify religion from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into the wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

But this remarkable openness had its problems, too. By relying on phenomenology, Wojtyla also suffered from some of its more obvious difficulties. What if the different appearances of something don't fit together? What if, instead of coherence and connection, we get chaos and disjunction? What if science actually contradicts faith? What, to take another example, if the Church had changed its own doctrines, contradicting itself? One strategy is to gloss over the dissonance. In Redemptor Hominis, the 1979 encyclical on changes in Church doctrine, John Paul simply asserts the continuity of the Church yesterday and today. In Dives in Misericordia, written about the mercy of God, there is no struggle between the teachings of the Old and the New Testaments, merely the statement that “Christ reveals the Father within the framework of the same perspective and on ground already prepared, as many pages of the Old Testament demonstrate.”

While Wojtyla assumes there is continuity, what happens when there is real conflict? In a world that is culturally diverse and morally pluralistic, it is not clear why men and women outside the community of believers should accept certain understandings of “authenticity” over others. Indeed, the development of practices such as free markets, limited democracies and informed consent are responses to pluralistic conceptions of authentic human experience. They are practices that convey moral authority when people hold different moral views. What did Wojtyla have in his arsenal to counter them? More important, what resources did John Paul have?

In the letter on ordination and women, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, for example, John Paul was forced to address an issue that Wojtyla the theologian had few resources to solve. Here, authenticity wasn't a good enough argument. After all, who was to say which notion of the priesthood was more authentic than another? A phenomenologist might look at priestly roles in the Church and in society, observe how other cultures and churches have found sacerdotal roles for women; or notice the correlation between some theological views of the symbolism of women and the pastoralism of the priesthood. But none of this is evident in John Paul's edict. He quotes Pope Paul VI who wrote, “The real reason [for not ordaining women] is that, in giving the Church her fundamental constitution, her theological anthropology—thereafter always followed by the Church's tradition—Christ established things in this way.” He simply lays down the law, arguing, it seems, that tradition is the primary way to decide what is authentic or inauthentic, what is true and what is false.

The truth is, phenomenology can only get you so far. A description of any phenomenon, no matter how objective, must start from somewhere. All descriptions embody certain presuppositions, biases and values of the observer. A visitor to a city may get two very different tours of the city from two separate friends. One friend may highlight the artistic centers of the city while the other may highlight the sporting attractions. Another still may notice its industry, or its architecture. The visitor is left with a question of how to determine which tour of the city reveals its authentic nature.

Wojtyla is aware of the problem, of course. His own writing provides an explanation of why there are such divergent interpretations of authenticity: human reason is limited while the phenomena of human existence are complex and rich. Without a common framework, accounts of authenticity will move in very different directions and reach very different conclusions. But who is to provide the common framework? The answer is not a surprise. When all else fails, Wojtyla appeals to the authority of revelation to pick out the normative account of humanity. And the arbiter of that authority turns out to be Wojtyla himself, in the person of the pope.

When talking to the world at large, John Paul II has simply invoked the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by himself. This is certainly the strategy in his latest book. But the strategy was clear as early as 1979 in Puebla, Mexico, on a trip to meet with the bishops of Central America. In that meeting, John Paul proclaimed: “Faced with so many other forms of humanism that are often shut in by a strictly economic, biological or psychological view of man, the Church has the right and duty to proclaim the truth about man that she has received from her Teacher, Jesus Christ.”

Of course, this assertion of authority is not an innovation. But its stridency is notable. The irony is that when the phenomenologist Karol Wojtyla became pope, he simply asserted that the papacy's “authenticity” lay in its fiats. This turned out to be particularly true when the papacy addressed the internal matters of the Church itself. In these affairs, to be sure, the papacy has always exercised considerable authority. But this always has been in the context of many different levels of authority in its magisterial teachings. There are those teachings when the pope or Church council speaks ex cathedra or infallibly. This is the extraordinary teaching authority of the Church. There is also the ordinary papal magisterium, which, in principle, is open to development, change and reform.

But John Paul II seems to have created a new category of authentic papal teaching in both Veritatis Splendor and the letter on ordination. The claims made in those letters are not said to be infallible in a technical sense. Yet they are said to be regarded as definitive for all the faith and for all time. In the letter on ordination John Paul wrote that “in some places it [the ban on women's ordination] is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or … to have merely disciplinary force.” The implications of such views is that the ban can be changed. He goes on to write:

In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.

The theologian Francis Sullivan had perhaps the most succinct response to this innovation: “I can only conclude that claims are being made which, to my knowledge, have never been made about any document of ordinary papal teaching.”

Anyone who deploys a phenomenological method must address at some point the problem of the circularity of the method. Every description is contextualized and relies on prior assumptions made by the describer. The describer must assume what is important to describe. Wojtyla's work does not escape this fundamental problem of phenomenology. It is particularly problematic for him when he encounters the pluralism and multiculturalism of many secular societies. Differences in cultures frequently signal different accounts over others. How can he break out of the circle? He does so simply by appealing to authority. And the more circular the reasoning, the cruder the authoritarianism.

In a public, pluralistic forum John Paul II has appealed to the authoritative content of God's revelation to say why some accounts are authentic and others are inauthentic. But within the Church, he has done something more radical. Throughout its life, the Church has contained a pluralism of spiritualities and interpretations of what it is to be authentically human and Christian. One has only to think of the different religious orders of the Church to find examples of different views of authenticity. In this context, John Paul II cannot rely on the authority of content since the revelation is shared by all believers. Instead he must appeal to the authority of office. It is by appeal to juridical authority that he must move to break the circle. Perhaps this is why, in what seems almost desperate fashion, the current pope has been making new and radical claims for papal authority, sometimes, it seems, each day. It is, after all, only God who enjoys the view from nowhere: the view without context or particularity. Only God escapes the circle of interpretation. In the last resort, perhaps, Pope John Paul II has grounded the authority of Karol Wojtyla's modern phenomenology in the ancient authority of God.