SOURCE: “Surprising, Demanding, Impressive,” in Commonweal, January 13, 1995, pp. 21-2.

[In the following review, Steinfels offers positive assessment of Crossing the Threshold of Hope.]

Millions of people scarcely able to understand this book will purchase and peruse it. Other millions who could appreciate and benefit from its insights will spurn it out of hand. The reason is the same in both cases: the author is the pope.

Behind the widespread interest and best-seller status of Crossing the Threshold of Hope is the belief that it will reveal a “real pope” behind the official Vicar of Christ, a down-home Karol Wojtyla who will relax, invite us into his Vatican apartments, and tell us what he really believes, how he really prays, what really makes him tick, all in terms at once more intimate, more accessible, and yet more oracular than those of papal documents or Catholic theology generally.

The book utterly defies these expectations. In a world of precooked, nearly predigested, thought, the pope's performance is uncompromising. Although he knowingly set out to write for masses of devout or curious readers, by page 22 he is discussing “cognitive realism.” On that page and the three that follow, he cites Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Aquinas, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Mircea Eliade, Martin Buber, and the Polish archbishop and thinker, Marian Jaworski, as well as the Gospel of John, the Book of Wisdom, and Saint Paul's Letters to the Romans and to the Ephesians.

My favorite passage of this sort occurs on page 51 where John Paul explains how Descartes “inaugurated the great anthropocentric shift in philosophy” and brought the world to “the threshold of modern immanentism and subjectivism”:

The author of Meditationes de Prima Philosophia with his ontological proofs, distanced us from the philosophy of existence, and also from the traditional approaches of Saint Thomas which lead to God who is “autonomous existence,” Ipsum esse subsistens. By making subjective consciousness absolute, Descartes moves instead toward pure consciousness of the Absolute, which is pure thought.

There may be a snobbish, morally dubious glee in imagining the impact of that passage on the kind of reader who picks up the pope's book from the “inspiration” shelf at the airport bookstore, where it was grouped with The Celestine Prophecy, Robert Fulghum, and Marianne Williamson. Yet it is justiably satisfying that the current successor of Peter takes it for granted that serious answers to serious questions demand not just piety and good will but also knowledge and intellectual effort.

However, those prepared and willing to make such an effort may find other obstacles blocking their appreciation of John Paul's book. One is the temptation to read it not for itself but as a source of clues to his papacy, its successes or shortcomings. Another is the obsequious manner in which Italian journalist Vittorio Messori frequently poses the questions that John Paul II answers in each of the thirty-five brief chapters that move from discussions of God's existence, the divinity of Jesus, and the problem of evil to non-Christian religions, contemporary youth, the fall of communism, immortality, human rights, women, and other topics.

Catholics honor and respect the pope primarily because of the office he holds, one firmly anchored in accountability to the church and its tradition. Only secondarily do Catholics focus on the pope's personal holiness, which may not equal that of the widow down the street (or, in some historical periods, the pickpocket down the street).

But Messori oils every difficult question with verbal prostrations that seem more suited to addressing an Eastern potentate or Hindu holy man. Messori's notion of “Vicar of Christ” seems closer to the popular Tibetan understanding of the Dalai Lama than to the Catholic theology of the Petrine ministry. In this respect, the conservative journalist is probably representative, as is the commercial success of this volume, of a reborn “pope cult” that flourished from Pius IX to Pius XII and that John XXIII and the Vatican Council had temporarily eclipsed.

John Paul, it should be added, adroitly parries much of what is most theologically offensive about Messori's abject and ingratiating exaltation of the papacy. He steers the journalist's evocation of papal titles back to a discussion of collegiality and ultimately of the calling of all baptized Christians.

The pope of this volume is not “inspirational,” although at times his observations are inspiring. His voice is very much the one heard in his encyclicals. It is the voice of a high-strung Polish intellectual, abstract, romantic, steeped in history, tempered by modern tragedy. His view of Christianity is heroic and baroque, dwelling not on the “little way” but on the grandeur and misery of humanity, on the extremes of joy and suffering, which are never far apart from one another in his reflections.

This is not the voice of John XXIII; it lacks the peasant calm, the sweetness, the earthy, self-deprecating humor. But who is to say that this is not a voice at least equally valid for the century of gulags and genocide, of global communication and probes into space?

Obviously Crossing the Threshold of Hope is not to be read as a treatise. When John Paul II is asked, “Does God really exist?” he is not going to say no, nor is he going to close the question definitively in a few pages. This is a book to be read for insights, perspectives, connections, formulations that spark meditation and enrich our understanding.

There is no shortage of these. In reply to the question, “If God exists why is he hiding?” John Paul, after a typical circling of the issue by way of Descartes, Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, the Book of Proverbs, Ludwig Feuerbach, the Gospel of John, and First Corinthians, proposes that the real problem may not be the hiddenness but the visibility of God. In taking on humanity and revealing himself in Jesus, God

could go no further. In a certain sense, God has gone too far! Didn't Christ perhaps become “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). Precisely because he called God his Father, because he revealed him so openly in himself, he could not but elicit the impression that it was too much. … Man was no longer able to tolerate such closeness, and thus the protests began.

For me that does not close the discussion. Maybe the problem is that God is both too hidden and too visible, the divine revelation in Jesus too obscured by confusing and contradictory human witness in both the Scriptures and the historical church. But the pope's formulation altered my framework of thinking.

In some cases, the interplay of question and answer is fascinating in itself. In one of Messori's more challenging moments, with a minimum of groveling (“Taking advantage of the freedom you have granted me …”), the interviewer asks, “did a God who is a loving Father really need to sacrifice cruelly his own Son?”

John Paul opens his response with what looks like apologetic intellectualism at its worst: “Let's begin by looking at the history of European thought after Descartes.” By the time the next question is posed, it seems that the pope, like a good politician, has completely evaded what has long haunted Jewish commentary on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac as well as Christian soteriology.

Then, ten pages later, John Paul reintroduces the apparently evaded question himself in the context of the “great mystery of suffering.” His brief answer will not settle doubts, but it demonstrates his unwillingness to set aside the embarrassing and intractable paradoxes of faith.

Likewise, John Paul's comments on other religions, including animism, are at once frank and generous, highlighting both what divides and unites. One wonders, of course, whether his treatment of Buddhism and Islam would be different if it were informed by the personal contacts and experience that warms his understanding of Judaism.

He affirms many of the themes of Vatican II, of Gaudium et spes, of the Declaration on Religious Liberty, of ecumenism, of the church as a reality greater than its visible structure and organization.

John Paul's thought, whatever one may think of it, has always been profoundly Christocentric, and so is his reading of Vatican II: “The council is far from proclaiming any kind of ecclesiocentrism. Its teaching is Christocentric in all of its aspects.”

It is legitimate to ask how these views, expressed with passion, accord with the policies of John Paul's papacy. Historians may someday explore the oddity that a pope of romantic, heroic, Christocentric outlook should preside over the triumph of authoritarian, bureaucratic, and centralizing forces in the church.

But that would hardly be the greatest of ironies historians confront. Seldom in fact can one read recognized masterpieces of Christian thought without finding unpalatable opinions or recalling inconsistencies between the texts' profound sentiments and the more earthbound actions or circumstances that shadowed the lives of their authors.

It would be a shame if unhappiness with current Vatican actions, irritation at inflated claims of papal authority, suspicion of a gap between the pope's views and his policies, or simply impatience with the hoopla surrounding its publication kept readers from Crossing the Threshold of Hope.