“Personalism” is just a word, but like many words, it has at least one meaning and can convey truth, or else falsehood. But as elements in doctrine, mere words must be carefully qualified. What can be expressed in language cannot encapsulate the whole, infinite truth. That is why doctrine seems to “evolve” — when in actuality we find more and more judicious ways of expressing it.
Doctrines don’t “evolve” in the sense that species are said to evolve. They don’t become different from what they were. They may be, however, expressed more completely, in time.
It is not, as a former president of Harvard University said recently, speaking of “genocide,” a matter of context. (Students at Harvard must be free to advocate it, so long as they stick to advocating the extermination of Jews; or whatever she meant.)
By contrast, “Personalism,” though generally unpopular at Harvard, was advocated by Saint John Paul II, who derived it principally from the phenomenologist, Max Scheler, and many other antecedents. Though just a word, it offers a means to escape the controversy between individualism and collectivism.
Around 1960, Karol Wojtyla, the future pope, explained the term, which he associated (or knowingly placed) within the grand tradition of Thomism: “The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”
This will not take the heat off “the Jews,” but offers a defense of all persons, most signally by freeing them from membership in a detested collective. For collectivities are notoriously a problem, whether they are considered negatively (collective guilt) or positively (collective redemption).
“Racism” is, negatively, a collectivist scheme. As that Personalist Martin Luther King said, there is a Christian problem with it: for it deprives all victims of their personhood. And what begins with deprivation of personhood, ends in the Crucifixion of Christ.
Personalism offers an account of the person that is unambiguously religious, and more to the point, entirely apolitical. You cannot hate a “collective person,” but on the other hand, you cannot love one, either.
For every collectivity begins in physical illusion. No such thing can actually exist, only an abstraction — created to some purpose. The very attempt to do something, whether for or against, a collectivity must result in the confusion of sin.
At the Second Vatican Council, this idea of Personalism came into its own. It was expressed theologically: “Man is the only creature on earth that God willed for its own sake and he cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
Karol Wojtyla (as he once was) was largely behind something profound: both a clarification of the social doctrines of the Church, and a distinction between Christianity and the “enlightened humanism” that had come to replace it.
His was a way to dismiss Socialism or Collectivism permanently from the social teaching of the Church, without also surrendering to radical Individualism, or lapsing into humanist cliches.
And curiously, this was not an ambition that just happened to be fulfilled. Wojtyla was very intentionally working towards this result, and stated his goals. He was “great” long before his papal elevation.
He both contributed to the philosophical thinking behind Gaudium et Spes, and when it came into being, used it as his own “personal” guide out of the wilderness in which too many prelates were being confounded.
For Gaudium et Spes provided both an excellent account of where the Church had been, intellectually, and where it must inevitably go.
It marvelously distinguished the superficial “progress” of technology and affluence, from genuine progress towards human realization in the Kingdom of God. And in the “heuristic” between the Church and the modern world, it proclaimed the Church’s role in making this distinction. For it is the modern world that needs transforming, and it is the Church’s mission to transform.
Meanwhile, Gaudium et Spes restated, “in words of one syllable” as it were, what the Church’s position had always been on private property — the person’s right to property and its limitations. Also, it re-expounded the “signs of the times.” There are times for teaching, for learning, and for discerning the will of God; it never was to be understood as, instead, a clever game of clairvoyance.
The goals of Personalism remain timely.
In the name of “Vatican II” a later pope has moved the Church farther away from the profundities that were expressed at the Council, and from the work Pope Benedict XVI did to secure them.
For despite the quite wonderful efforts of two recent popes, we have endured sixty years of ecclesiastical decline, in which “reform” has meant only an abandonment of the liturgical inheritance, and a relaxation of ethical standards.
John Paul II was not an accommodationist. He arrived in the moment when the Soviet Communism that had afflicted his nation among others, was ripe to be thrown off, and for this project he made his appeal to Christ.
The philosophical conception of Personalism was, we may discern, the means through which Christ responded. The world — and not just the Catholic world — had to throw off what had become its governing illusions: the illusion of Collectivism, and the alternative illusion of Individualism (the “American” disease), in which it was enmired.
Men expressed these as the ideals of “equality” and “freedom,” respectively — neither being comprehensible in itself, but also, neither making sense when mixed.
For in both cases, “man does not live for bread alone.” The two extremes proceed alike from a materialist conception of human destiny, in which our modernity is starkly revealed.
However briefly, this revelation was achieved, of a truth that crawls beyond materialism. For a moment we became tired of illusions, and aware of our hunger for truth. But then the illusions began to make their befogging recovery.
We drift ever outward. We have taken ourselves to sea. We are, in effect, praying for some sight of land. “Personalism” offers at least a recollection of where the headlands were.
