Everyone IS Someone If You Love Them

Wait for the song: it says what we need to know.
Everyone is someone.

Perfect Creator, Perfect Creature

There is but one perfect Creator, and though there are many creatures, there is likewise but one perfect creature: a woman, Mother of all Peoples, Mary. Consequently, to study and understand man in light of his final end - to comprehend the fullness of creation's anthropological end - one must study and must comprehend a woman, Mary.

Faith

Newman and Polanyi:

The faith that can be put into words is not the real faith. At the core of the act of faith is a personal encounter between God and the believer. Newman held that there were two luminous beings in our experience, the self and God. But the very fullness of direct apprehension of the self and God mocks all of our efforts to capture self or God in words. Even in the act of speaking as best we can, we know that the self that can be put into words is not the real self and the God that can be put into words is not the real God. No set of propositions can fully disclose who I am. Even as I try to tell a few truths about myself, my mind surveys other aspects of my interior life that run deep into the tacit dimension. When the words run out, I remain—a mystery even to myself, luminous, real, incommunicable, a small image of the inexhaustible mystery of God. In both cases, the material that resists abstraction and that cannot be communicated in words is not a negligible residue, devoid of intellectual meaning, but is instead the heart of the whole matter and the point of every proposition.

On Personalism

The term “person” comes from the Latin persona, originally meaning “mask, actor, or dramatic role,” for per-sonare (to “sound through”) describes the use of masks as a kind of megaphone to amplify the voices of actors in an open-air theater. The term gained special importance in early Christian theological controversies about the proper description of the members of the Divine Trinity and the unity of divine and human natures in Christ. Boethius devised what has become the classical definition of “person” as “an individual substance of a rational nature” in order to include within a single term divine and angelic as well as human beings. As suggested by this definition, personalists have regularly emphasized both the dignity that attaches to all persons by virtue of rationality and the status of persons as individual beings or substances.

Boethius' definition, however, is vulnerable to attack from the likes of utilitarians such as Peter Singer. The work on the selfhood of the human person developed by John F. Crosby contains within it a profound refutation of any utilitarianism - as Peter J. Colossi has recently shown - and serves as a corrective to Boethius' definition.

Looking for "Persons" in the Law

Given the close relation between a country's law and its culture, it is only to be expected that there will be considerable variation in the way legal systems conceptualize human personhood. Like a nation's art, literature, songs, and poetry, law both reflects and helps to shape the stories we tell ourselves and our children about who we are as a people, where we came from, and what we aspire to be. In some countries, law's role in these narratives is relatively minor. But there is no place where law has played a more prominent role in a nation's conception of itself than in the United States.

The early Americans' peculiar attachment to the law was one of the first things Tocqueville noticed as he traveled about the new nation. "The spirit of the law," he wrote, "born within schools and courts . . . infiltrates through society right down to the lowest ranks, till finally the whole people have contracted some of the ways and tastes of a magistrate." As the population has increased in size and diversity, the law has arguably become the principal carrier of the few values that command broad allegiance among citizens of many different cultural backgrounds.

In such a country, it was perhaps inevitable that legal images of personhood would exert a certain influence on the way we think about human nature. But concepts that may serve useful purposes within a particular discipline can be mischievous when they migrate into other contexts. Everyone understands, for example, that while "economic man" is a helpful tool for economists, a person motivated solely by rational profit maximization in real life would be a sociopath. Legal constructs need to be treated with similar caution, for as cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has pointed out, "Whatever law is after, it is not the whole story."

The predominant image of the human person in American law is of a creature who bears little resemblance to any human being that has ever lived: a free, self-determining, and self-sufficient individual. It's not that the image doesn't resonate. Comparative opinion studies tell us that Americans occupy one end of the world spectrum in the proportion who say they value freedom over equality, in the proportion who say they believe that success in life is determined by individual efforts, and in the proportion who attach more importance to freedom from state interference than to state guarantees of minimum subsistence in cases of need. According to a 2002 survey, the percentages of Americans who expressed such views were more than double the European figures. We are a gambling, profit-making, risk-taking people with a high rate of geographical, social, and marital mobility. But we also have an exceptional history of sociability, hospitality and generosity, banding together in all sorts of associations, welcoming strangers to our shores, and lending a helping hand even to our defeated enemies.

But a wholly self-sufficient person, Aristotle remarked long ago, is either a beast or a god. So how did such an incomplete concept about human nature gain such a prominent place in our legal story?

The eighteenth century was a time when revolutionaries and, later, statesmen in France and America were open to an unusual degree to the ideas of philosophers. That, perhaps, explains why the writings of the American founders contain a good deal of discussion about human nature. There are, in fact, dozens of references to "the nature of man" in the Federalist Papers. Those essays were strongly influenced by English political theorists who, in their efforts to delegitimate monarchical claims of divine right, had painted vivid pictures of man as free and solitary in an imaginary "state of nature." The state of affairs that writers like John Locke presented as "natural" bears little relation to what the social sciences tell us about human beings and simple societies. Family life and other forms of human sociability, not to mention women, are scarcely visible in their accounts. The "new science of politics" had much more to say about conflict among human beings than about cooperation.

The authors of the Federalist Papers followed Locke and his forerunner Hobbes in placing greater emphasis on the dangers human beings pose to one another than on the human capacity for cooperative living. Though acknowledging that there are "qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence," they asserted that "men are much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good." In their view, it is the dangerous propensities of human beings that give rise to the need for government and that pose a constant threat to governments once established. The U.S. Constitution was devised, accordingly, with structures to hold selfishness and ambition in check, and to channel potentially divisive energies into the pursuit of wealth, comfort, and security.

Mistrust of human nature went hand in glove with mistrust of government, which, after all, is composed of men. In the most famous passage of The Federalist, Madison wrote:

It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices [as checks and balances] should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, no external or internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A careful reading of the Federalist Papers, however, discloses something puzzling about its vision of personhood. On the one hand, the authors took an exceedingly dim view of human nature, saying things like: "If impulse and opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control." Yet, at the same time, they recognized that the success of the democratic experiment would be crucially dependent on the support of virtuous and public-spirited citizens and statesmen. (Indeed, James Madison specifically acknowledged that republican government required a higher degree of civic virtue than did any other form.)

So how can one explain the framers' apparent unconcern about where they would find citizens with the qualities of character their innovative design for self-government demanded? The simplest and most probable explanation is that they relied on the small structures of civil society — families and tight-knit communities — to inculcate the republican virtues of self-restraint and care for the common good. The Founding Fathers had good reason to assume they could take the necessary cultural conditions for granted. The non-slave population of the thirteen states (about three million people) was mainly composed of farmers, merchants, and artisans who lived in self-governing townships bound together by widely shared moral and religious beliefs. Biblical religion was pervasive, as were habits of associating for all sorts of cooperative ventures, from building a neighbor's barn to keeping the town roads and fences in repair.

The apparent contradiction between the ideas about man informing the Constitution and the sociable reality of life in the colonies diminishes when one recalls that the Constitution was constructed as a framework for a federal government. It specifically provides that all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. The laws of the states, at the time of the founding and until the mid-twentieth century, were informed by more capacious notions of personhood, influenced in countless ways by biblical and classical understandings of human nature. Those local arrangements (which in some states even included established churches) were promoted and protected by the Constitution's federal structure. So, even though "fraternity" (or, as we would say today, "solidarity") was absent from the political vocabulary of the founders, habits of cooperative living were fostered in numerous ways by local laws and customs.

As the population expanded, however, common understandings grew fewer and national law assumed more importance as a carrier of values. The stage was set for ideas that had served well enough for the purpose of establishing limited government to migrate from political theory into law. One of the first legal commentators to remark critically on the unusual degree of individualism in American law seems to have been the twentieth-century legal philosopher and comparatist Roscoe Pound. Pound noted that the idea of an "isolated individual was at the center of many of our most significant legal doctrines."

While all modern legal systems could be said to be individualistic in comparison to premodern law, Pound regarded American legal thought as distinguished by "an ultra-individualism, an uncompromising insistence upon individual interests and individual property as a focal point of jurisprudence." He speculated that this was due to a unique fusion of Puritanism with the pioneer spirit and with eighteenth-century ideas of natural right. These factors combined, he wrote, to give an "added emphasis to individualist ideas in the formative period of our legal system that served to stamp them upon our theory and practice and keep them alive and active," even after English legal thought had taken a different direction.

Thus did political ideas originating in English power struggles between Crown and Parliament acquire the status of myth and symbol in the former English colony. The view of man as naturally independent, together with the idea of government as involving a necessary but regrettable sacrifice of some, but not all, of our natural liberty, fueled the mistrust of government that has long been characteristic of American constitutionalism. Even after the United States established its social security system in the 1930s, and even though the power of the federal government has vastly expanded, the legal system has never accepted the positive vision of an affirmatively acting state that informs many constitutions in the Romano-Germanic tradition. The American rights tradition has long emphasized political and civil liberties, framed as "negative rights" (restraints on government), but has not incorporated the post-World War II trend in many other liberal democracies to accord constitutional status to certain programmatic obligations on the part of the state toward citizens.

The American legal system thus displays several distinctive features when compared with continental European systems. The American rights tradition confers its highest priority on individual freedom from governmental constraints. Rights tend to be formulated without explicit mention of their limits or of their relation to responsibilities or to other rights. Personal freedom is protected by procedures but lacks an explicit normative structure.

A more complex dialect of freedom and responsibility characterizes the dignitarian rights language that one finds in several post-World War II documents — such as the German 1949 Basic Law and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in the social teachings of the Catholic Church as elaborated by Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. In these documents, specific rights are typically formulated so as to make clear that they are related to one another, that certain groups as well as individuals have rights, and that political entities, as well as citizens, have responsibilities. Rights are envisioned not only as protected by fair procedures but also as grounded and situated in a normative framework based on human dignity. The first article of the postwar German Constitution, for example, provides this: "The dignity of man shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the highest duty of the State."

Underlying these divergent concepts of rights are somewhat different notions about the person who is endowed with rights. While the rights-bearer in the U.S. constitutional tradition tends to be imagined as an independent, highly autonomous, self-determining being, the dignitarian systems tend to make explicit that each person is constituted in important ways by and through his relations with others. For example, American judges and lawyers frequently quote former justice Louis Brandeis' dictum that the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men" is "the right to be let alone" (an idea that would sound rather strange in many parts of the world). The German Constitutional Court, by contrast, takes a more relational view of personhood, as expressed in its often-cited 1954 decision stating: "The image of man in the Basic Law is not that of an isolated, sovereign individual. The tension between the individual and society is resolved in favor of coordination and interdependence with the community without touching the intrinsic value of the person."

A postmodern touch was added to the legal portrait of the lone rights-bearer in 1992 when a plurality of U.S. Supreme Court justices advanced a vision of the self as invented and reinvented through the exercise of the individual's will, limited by nothing but subjective preference. Ruling on the constitutionality of a state abortion law in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the justices shifted the ground for abortion rights from privacy to liberty. To require a married woman to notify her husband of her intent to have an abortion, they held, would violate a woman's liberty. In so holding, they announced a theory that endows human personhood with the freedom "to define one's own concept of existence, of the meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." That freedom, they said, "lies at the heart of liberty" because "beliefs in these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State." Despite criticisms that such an unbounded definition of liberty, if taken seriously, would undermine the basis of all law, a majority of the Court reaffirmed it in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, the decision invalidating penalties for homosexual sodomy.

The Court majority's current notion of freedom is thus quite distant from understandings of freedom that stress the dignity of the person as actualized through relations with others and through the development of one's ability to exercise freedom wisely and well. Compare, for example, the German Constitutional Court's statement in a 1977 case that "freedom within the meaning of the Basic Law is not that of an isolated and self-regarding individual but rather that of a person related to and bound by the community."

Conspicuously missing from both the American and the German courts' formulations is attention to how the exercise of our freedoms affects the kinds of persons we become, and the way in which the choices of citizens collectively affect the kind of society that we are bringing into being. Perhaps that is too much to expect. But in a legalistic, pluralistic society like that of the United States, the silences of the law can speak.

The highly individualistic concept of personhood advanced by Supreme Court majorities in the late twentieth century both reflected and legitimated attitudes that were then gaining ground in American culture — especially elite and media culture. A latter-day Tocqueville might observe that the sturdy self-reliance and independence of mind he so admired have been eroded in many quarters by understandings of liberty as individual freedom from all forms of social and legal constraint.

There are, of course, social and legal forces that serve as countercurrents to excessive individualism in American law. Nevertheless, many citizens in our legalistic and heterogeneous society tend to regard the Supreme Court's pronouncements not merely as legal rulings but also as moral teachings grounded in the country's most sacred civic document. Thus, when nine justices in black robes (or even a majority of them) solemnly announce that something is legally permissible — or constitutionally required — many people take such decisions as assurance that the behavior in question is morally acceptable as well.

Manifestations of an increasingly "ultra-individualistic" anthropology can be traced in numerous laws and policies relating to the family, schools, religion, and voluntary associations. American church-state law since the 1940s, for example, has been so influenced by the notion of religion as a private affair "between an individual and his God" that it has often failed to protect the associational and institutional dimensions of religious freedom. In private law, the influence of the myth of the self-sufficient individual connected to others only by choice is strikingly illustrated by two doctrines that are quite widely at variance with common sense, one in family law and the other in tort law.

Modern, gender-neutral American divorce law has accepted the principle that economic self-sufficiency should be the goal for both spouses after marriage comes to an end. This unrealistic principle leaves one large class of women, namely mothers, with fewer legal protections than they would have in most other countries at comparable levels of economic development. The United States is more lax than France and Germany in requiring former providers to fulfill their support obligations and less generous than the Nordic countries where public assistance to single mothers is concerned.

A second example concerns the American tort-law doctrine that a person has no legal duty to come to the aid of another person in peril, even if he can do so without harm to himself. The doctrine, as it exists in all but a handful of states, is so profoundly at odds with ordinary moral intuitions that it comes as a shock to most law students. Yet, unless persons have entered into a legally recognized relationship with one another, our tort law treats them as "strangers" having no duty to one another except to avoid the active infliction of harm. The terminology is telling: The drowning man and I are "strangers" rather than fellow citizens or fellow members of the human family. I have no legal obligation to toss him a lifeline.

The Romano-Germanic legal systems, by contrast, impose both civil and criminal penalties for a failure to rescue where the deed could have been accomplished without undue risk to the rescuer. The practical significance of this difference is small, for actual cases of failure to rescue rarely arise. But as a leading French scholar has pointed out, the chief importance of the legal duty to rescue is pedagogical: It is "to serve as a reminder that we are members of society and ought to act responsibly." By the same token, one might speculate that the chief importance of legal silence on this point in the United States is that it represents a lost opportunity to reinforce the sense of being part of a community for which all share a common responsibility.

In public law, there is a precise parallel to the absence of a duty to rescue, as illustrated in the 1989 case of DeShaney v. Winnebago County, where a little boy and his mother sued a state social-services department for the brain damage he suffered after state agents failed to remove him from the home of his violent father in whose custody they had placed him. The Supreme Court affirmed the denial of liability in that case, saying that the Constitution imposes no duty on government to protect the health and welfare of its citizens, "even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty or property interests of which the government itself may not deprive the individual."

In another such case, where police negligently failed to remove a man from a burning automobile, lawyers argued that the constitutional right not to be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law" included the right to receive basic services from the state. But that claim of a positive right was shot down by judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in no uncertain terms: "The problem with this argument is that the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties . . . The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that government might do too little for the people, but that it might do too much to them."

The most significant countervailing example to the individualistic themes I have emphasized is probably that of our country's social-assistance programs. Yet even in the social-welfare area, an ingrained ideal of self-sufficiency shows its power by fostering a certain institutionalized disdain for persons who cannot be self-sufficient. That disdain for dependency may well explain why social assistance is so often offered grudgingly and administered disrespectfully.

In recent years, proposals have emerged that are more consistent with our traditions of generosity. Various initiatives would test the proposition that many social services could be delivered more efficiently, effectively, and humanely through the intermediate institutions of civil society, including faith-based institutions, than by the government. But the prospects for such programs are uncertain. In many places, hyper-individualistic understandings of religious freedom have blocked these experiments or impeded their progress. Moreover, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, there is a risk that the religious institutions participating in such programs will relinquish or be forced to relinquish their distinctive character.

Happily, in the United States, our practice is often better than our theory. But theoretical concepts can wreak havoc on good practices when they migrate from their proper context into everyday life. The American framers' concept of the human person, though incomplete from a philosophical or anthropological point of view, was not inappropriate for the limited purpose of designing a federal framework within which civic life could flourish under conditions of ordered liberty. What needs to be kept in sight (but unfortunately is too often forgotten) is that the liberal principles enshrined in the United States' founding documents were political principles that were never meant to serve as moral guides for all of social and private life. Those principles, with their encoded image of the free, self-determining individual, grounded important and lasting political achievements: the establishment of a republic with democratic elements, the protection of liberty, and the promotion of individual initiative. Moreover, I believe a convincing case can be made that the Constitution contains implicit principles of subsidiarity that could have fostered the development of stronger moral and juridical foundations for the American version of the democratic experiment. But the concept of subsidiarity is little understood in the United States, whereas the tendency to think in terms of individual, state, and market without intermediaries is very strong.

The framers understood perfectly well that the success of the democratic experiment would depend on the habits and attitudes of the citizenry, but they relied on social, rather than legal, norms and institutions to inculcate the necessary qualities. Their vision for America was that of a people "free by the laws, and restrained by the manners" (as Montesquieu once described the English). But, as the population expanded and became more diverse and mobile, common understandings grew thinner, and national law assumed more importance as a repository of common values.

With the expansion of federal power in the twentieth century and the corresponding limitation of the power of state and local governments, the ability of citizens to have a say in shaping those values has diminished. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court removed a great many issues from ordinary local democratic political processes. Initially, this was done to protect racial minorities. But, in later cases, such as those involving abortion, education, and religion, courts drastically restricted the rights of citizens in general, and parents in particular, to help establish, through legislation, the conditions under which they live, work, and raise their children. This experience in the United States should serve as a cautionary example for other nations.

With the growing influence of legal — as distinct from social — norms, the flaws in legal concepts of personhood began to be more problematic, as did the founders' silence regarding matters they had taken for granted or left up to the states (the family, the common good, the responsibilities that are correlative with rights). Ideas that had been useful for the purpose of establishing limited government began to pervade social discourse, to the detriment of the cultural supports on which a liberal democratic regime depends. Decreasingly tempered by social norms, legal structures designed to channel human energy into the pursuit of private satisfactions may have fostered materialism and personal alienation, discouraging active citizenship.

By embracing the notion of individual autonomy as fully as it has, and by ignoring or downgrading healthy forms of interdependence, the U.S. legal system may have rendered our society less hospitable to the weak, the vulnerable, and the dependent — as well as to those who care for them. Certainly it has distanced legal norms from the lives that many Americans are struggling to live. There is often, as Charles Taylor has observed, "a lack of fit between what people officially and consciously believe, even pride themselves on believing, on the one hand, and what they need in order to make sense of some of their moral reactions, on the other."

I would not wish to be understood as devaluing the sturdy self-reliance and freedom-loving individualism that is so much a part of American culture. The concern I have expressed here is that the ascendancy of law as a carrier of common values has promoted the spread of hyper-libertarian, ultra-individualist ideas that can undermine the very conditions that are essential for the maintenance of a free republic.

The best hope for an eventual correction, I would suggest, resides in that aspect of human personhood to which John Paul II referred in the conclusion to his great encyclical Fides et Ratio: "I ask everyone to look more deeply at man, whom Christ has saved in the mystery of his love, and at the human being's unceasing search for truth and meaning. Different philosophical systems have lured people into believing that they are their own absolute master, able to decide their own destiny and future in complete autonomy, trusting only in themselves and their own powers. But this can never be the grandeur of the human being."

The authors of the Federalist Papers, for all their misgivings about human nature, would not have written those essays explaining the new Constitution to the public if they did not believe that human beings are engaged in an "unceasing search for truth and meaning." They would not have appealed to reason if they did not believe their fellow citizens were capable of making reasoned judgments. The ability of men and women to reflect on their existence, to make judgments concerning the good life, to review those judgments in the light of reason and experience, and to take responsibility for their decisions is one on which all successful legal systems depend. That human capacity for reflection and responsible choice is what makes the difference between being carried along by events and being able to shift probabilities in a more favorable direction. It is what enables us to use legal, economic, sociological, and political concepts for what they are worth without becoming their slaves.

Mary Ann Glendon is Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A classic.

The Mystery of "Fair Love"

by John F. Crosby

Cardinal Newman once said, surveying the history of the Church, that the popes have usually not taken the initiative in theological inquiry—that it has usually been others who have given the impetus for doctrinal development. The genius of the Church of Rome shows itself mainly in a negative way, namely by critically testing what others propose. Though Newman was able to produce much historical evidence in support of this generalization, he would have surely admitted that the pontificate of John Paul II represents a great exception. He would have seen in John Paul a pope who has taken the initiative in theological and philosophical inquiry: one who has rethought traditional teachings with great originality, and broken much new ground with his Christian personalism.

John Paul leads the Church, not only as the guardian of the deposit of the faith, but also as one who has inspired some of the most fruitful developments in the understanding of the faith. This rare dimension of papal leadership is nowhere so clearly in evidence as in John Paul’s teaching on man and woman. Here we have one of the richest legacies of his pontificate.

And yet this is a legacy that is not easy to understand fully. On the one hand, the critics of John Paul denounce him as an obstinate old man who only knows how to say no; they think that in all sexual and marital matters he is only holding the line in a rigid and pastorally insensitive way. They are completely innocent of the originality of his personalist vision of man and woman. On the other hand, the friends and supporters of John Paul—while they do indeed listen respectfully to him and notice the boldness of his teaching on man and woman—are often taken aback and in some cases even slightly scandalized, as they were when John Paul announced his commitment a few years ago to a "new feminism." The hostile critics need to be challenged to listen to the Pope, and his supporters need to be helped in understanding him. In this essay I hope to offer something of the needed challenge to the one group as well as something of the needed help to the other.

Karol Wojtyla has had a special affinity for the love between man and woman from the very first days of his priestly ministry. In his Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he writes:

As a young priest I learned to love human love [that is, the love between man and woman]. This has been one of the fundamental themes of my priesthood. . . . If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of "fair love," because love is fair, it is beautiful.

And the young Father Wojtyla not only possessed this special affinity for the love between man and woman; early on he also showed an unusual ability to reflect on man and woman and the love between them. His first book, Love and Responsibility, born of his pastoral experience with young couples, is a deep and original study of "fair love." As bishop of Krakow he set up an institute for marriage and family, as he did later in Rome in the first years of his pontificate. He had hardly been elected pope when he began his famous five-year cycle of Wednesday addresses on man and woman. While he himself was personally called to the celibate life of a priest, which required the sacrifice of renouncing "fair love" in his own life for the sake of the kingdom of God, he was given a rare gift for understanding this love and even for becoming a kind of prophet of it.

The personalism of John Paul II

Personalism is the only possible point of departure for understanding his thought on man and woman. His personalism underlies and informs all his teaching on "fair love," as it underlies and informs all the other areas of his teaching. When John Paul speaks of the "anthropological basis" for his teachings, he is referring to this underlying personalism. Much that seems puzzling in John Paul’s teaching on man and woman becomes intelligible as soon as it is traced back to its personalist foundations.

His own way of introducing his personalism is to quote the following sentence from the Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 24: although man is "the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake," it is nevertheless true that man "can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself." This passage expresses a fundamental polarity of self-possession and self-donation in the makeup of the human person.

On the one hand, God wills each human being for his own sake—which means that God recognizes each human person as a being of his own, existing in self-possession, as one who cannot exist as a mere part of some whole, or as a mere instrumental means of achieving some result. This is why God would never use persons in a merely instrumental way, as we can see from the way in which he appeals to and respects our freedom. When we respect each other as persons, giving each other the "space" in which each can be his own end, and abstaining from all "using" in our relations to each other, then, the Pope says, we share in God’s vision of human persons.

On the other hand, each human person is made for self-donation, for communion with other persons; this is why he can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself. We are not only beings of our own, belonging to ourselves, as if we were in the end completely closed in upon ourselves, but we are also beings for others, made to exist not only with but for others, as John Paul puts it. Since God exists as a community of three divine persons, he cannot create an image of himself in a person who can thrive in solitude; he can only create persons who thrive living in the communion of love with one another.

John Paul adds that there is a genuine polarity here: the self-possession of persons does not interfere with their vocation to interpersonal communion, but rather makes it possible. If persons did not belong to themselves, then their union would be sub-personal. Persons are empowered precisely by their self-possession to enter into communion with others. Not only that, but they are never so much themselves as beings of their own as when they share their lives by self-donation.

Equality of man and woman

Now that I have introduced John Paul’s personalism, I can proceed to introduce his teaching on man and woman. I begin with the equality of man and woman as persons, which follows directly from his personalism. Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy had denied this equality, teaching that the standard case of a human being was the man, and that the woman was a "deformed male." Aristotle explained himself in terms of his metaphysics of matter and form, saying that at the conception of a man, form dominates matter in the right way, whereas when matter interferes with the due dominance of form the deficient result is the conception of a woman.

John Paul disagrees with Aristotle, not only because he knows more about the biology of conception than Aristotle could have known, but above all because he thinks of man and woman in terms of a category unknown to Aristotle: the category of the person. He says that man and woman are both equally persons; the formula of the person used by the Second Vatican Council, which brings together self-possession and self-donation, applies no less to woman than to man. In fact, John Paul has gone so far in this direction as to say that the relation of man and woman in marriage is one of "mutual submission." He has even raised some eyebrows among his supporters by speaking not only of a submission performed by the wife towards her husband, but rather of a mutual submission of husband and wife to each other.

Some critics charge that John Paul has betrayed the equality of man and woman by solemnly teaching that the Church has no authorization to ordain women to the priesthood. He responds that the reservation of the priesthood for men is in no way based on any supposed superiority of man over woman, as in Aristotle. We have here a diversity of roles, which does not imply an inequality of personhood. The fact that God entrusts the conceiving, gestating, and nurturing of a new human being to women rather than to men does not imply that men are inferior as persons. And so if he chooses to entrust a certain sacerdotal function to man rather than to woman, he does not thereby cast woman into a position of inferiority.

This truth about the equality of man and woman has to be balanced by the truth about the complementarity of man and woman. The very principle of their equality, namely their personhood, is decisively modified by their gender, so that we have masculine and feminine persons. Each gender has its own "genius." As a result, man and woman, for all their equality, are called to complete each other in a unique kind of unity. Nothing could be farther from the mind of John Paul than to affirm equality at the expense of this difference and the complementarity that is based on it. (We return below to this theme of complementarity.)

Respecting man and woman as persons

Let us now apply to man and woman the first part of the conciliar statement about the polar structure of the person: the idea that each person exists in a sense for his own sake and is therefore willed by God for his own sake. What violates this "selfhood" of the person is any and every instrumental attempt to "use" a person. Thus whenever John Paul asks whether this or that form of man-woman relation involves any using of the one by the other, he is basing his argument on this article of his personalism.

One may recall the firestorm of ridicule leveled at John Paul in the international press in 1980 when he said in an address that the "adultery in the heart" condemned by Christ can be committed even within marriage. From the point of view of his personalism this is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. The fact that a man and a woman are married to each other is no guarantee at all that in their marital intimacy the one will not use the other as a mere object of gratification. If one does use his spouse in this way, he violates her as a person; if their using is mutual then they violate each other. The fact that they are married, and even open to the procreation of children, does not necessarily make this violation impossible. Sexual intimacy is not personalized until in and through it each person affirms and loves the other for his own sake.

This much-reviled address of John Paul is closely akin to his personalist rethinking of the old idea that one of the purposes of marriage is the remedium concupiscentiae, or the relief of concupiscence. This phrase was all too often interpreted to suggest that marriage provides the only setting in which selfish sexual concupiscence can be "legally" lived out, or burned off and in some way "relieved." It is not too much to say that John Paul abhors any such interpretation. Given his personalism, he cannot abide the idea that marriage exists in part to legalize lust. The true "relief of concupiscence," he says, is something altogether different. It is a work of love whereby the sexual energy of a man or woman is deprived of its selfish sting and made to express and serve spousal love. Only in this way is sexual love personalized, formed in such a way that man and woman do not sin against the respect due to each other as persons.

I could offer many other examples of John Paul explaining in this personalist way the rights and wrongs of sexual behavior. But instead I would like to consider the other part of the conciliar definition of the human person: the part dealing with our vocation to self-donation.

John Paul thinks that the call to self-donation is in scribed in our very being by the fact that we are divided into man and woman. There is a complementarity of man and woman that predestines them to a unique kind of love: spousal or conjugal love. In fact, the man-woman difference is for John Paul so intimately connected with the capacity of each human being to love, that he is led to make a bold theological move. He sees the image of the triune God in the man-woman difference. Previously theologians had looked for this image in the soul of each individual human being, commonly following St. Augustine in looking at various triads within each individual soul. It is an entirely new idea to look for the image of God in interpersonal relation, and not just in the most spiritual forms of interpersonal relation, but in the man-woman relation. As far as I know, no pope before John Paul ever spoke of the image of God in this way: "Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion"—and especially in the communion based on the complementarity of man and woman.

The human body and pagan detractors

When I cited the Council as teaching that each human person—while being his own—is called to self-donation, I made no mention of the human body. Now in the personalism of John Paul it is vitally important to understand and to affirm the embodiment of each person. In his view the modern world is not only afflicted by a materialism that reduces man to the body, recognizing nothing else in man but the body; it is also afflicted by a certain aversion to the body—John Paul speaks of a widespread "neo-Manichaean culture"—that conceives of persons as estranged from their bodies, and merely using their bodies in an instrumental way. This may be a new idea for many Christians, who perhaps take it for granted that the only real enemy is materialism, but in his great encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, John Paul traces much of the disorder in present-day moral theology back to the failure to do justice to the embodiment of persons.

Too many of our contemporaries think of the body as raw material available for instrumental use and manipulation by persons. They think that man is at liberty to impose on the body, or abolish from it, whatever meaning he wants. One can see what results when they apply this disparagement of the body to our subject of man and woman. They can think of the gender difference only as an evolutionary product which just happened to come out as it did; compared with the fact that all human beings are persons, the gender difference sinks to the level of the accidental. Man and woman are properly studied in an empirical way by the natural and social sciences, they believe, so that all that can be known about man and woman is of a neutral, factual nature; there is no metaphysical nature expressed in man and woman, nor any intrinsic value. We persons can make of man and woman whatever we like; we can take the physical givens of male and female and can construct masculine and feminine any way we like.

While no Catholic teacher could accept such an account of man and woman, John Paul is distinguished by the depth at which he has overcome it and by the originality with which he has unfolded the truth: that our personhood is embodied, and embodied as man and woman, so that all kinds of personal meanings are inscribed in our sexuality. He has given a personalist rereading of the truth that the body is not just something physical but something sacramental—a sign, an expression of the person—and that from the beginning the body in all its masculinity and femininity participates in the life of the person. Indeed the body is a dimension of the being of each human person. With this I come to the heart of my essay.

John Paul’s theology of the body

In his rich "theology of the body," presented in the first years of his pontificate (although the material was written before his election), John Paul unfolds the idea that the vocation of persons to self-donation, as discussed above, is expressed in the bodies of man and of woman. The truth that it is not good for us to be alone—that we can find ourselves only through a sincere gift of ourselves—has its fundamental bodily expression in our existing as man and woman, and in fact cannot really be understood apart from the difference and complementarity of the sexes. It is as man and woman that we are first raised out of our solitude, and ordered one to another, and called to self-donation. The capacity of the masculine body and of the feminine body to serve self-donation is called by John Paul the "nuptial meaning" of the human body. This is a concept that stands at the center of his theology of the body. Through this nuptial meaning the body is more than biological, more than an object of biological science; it is rather inserted with all its maleness and femaleness into the life of the person and so made to be something as truly personal as it is biological.

It follows that John Paul’s approach to the image of God in man is even more original than we have indicated above. Traditionally one not only looked for this image in each individual person, but in the soul or spirit of each; John Paul finds it not only in interpersonal communion, but also in the bodily masculinity and femininity of men and women. Even the human body images the triune God, and does so through its nuptial meaning. Only a God who exists as a communion of divine persons would create embodied persons who are turned toward each other as man and woman.

John Paul unfolds the self-donation for which man and woman are made by the masculinity and femininity of their bodies. He says that this love, which he calls spousal or conjugal love, is distinguished from all other human love, including even maternal love, by the gesture of self-surrender that belongs to it. In spousal love self-donation takes the form of self-surrender—that is, of abandoning oneself in love to the other and willing to make oneself belong to the other. Hence spousal love is exclusive; there is no room in the human heart for living this self-surrender toward more than one person at the same time. The nuptial meaning of the body stands in the service of this mutual self-surrender. It also stands in the service of non-spousal love, according to John Paul, conditioning as it does all interpersonal communion; but in a unique way it serves spousal love. This is why we can say, in arguing against the Manichaean personalism mentioned above, that the body is not something merely biological, merely factual and value-free; it is also made for personal love. Its spousal meaning has not been constructed by us, but has been established by God at the creation of man and woman.

Conjugal union

With this recognition we are led to the sexual intimacy of man and woman. It is in their sexual intimacy that they live and enact, in an incomparable way, their spousal self-surrender. Indeed one can hardly understand just what this self-surrender is without referring to the sexual union of man and woman. It is not that spousal self-surrender is nothing more than its sexual enactment; it is rather that this self-surrender, in itself something properly personal, finds an irreplaceable expression when man and woman be come one flesh. Anyone who abstracts from the bodily being of man and woman and from their bodily union is in no position adequately to understand what spousal self-surrender is, so intimately do the bodily and the spiritual, the biological and the personal, interpenetrate here.

Notice that John Paul speaks here of a meaning of the marital act that is altogether distinct from procreation. For centuries Catholic teachers explained the meaning of the marital act almost exclusively in terms of procreation; only in this century did they begin to explain it in terms of the enactment of spousal love as well. Pope Pius XII was, as far as I can determine, the first pope who strongly affirmed the love dimension, or as Paul VI called it, the unitive dimension, of the marital act. John Paul has gone well beyond his great predecessors in explaining how this dimension is grounded in the nuptial meaning of the body. Of course, John Paul also rethinks the procreative meaning of the marital act in his theology of the body, as we shall soon have occasion to note.

John Paul has not only explored the nuptial meaning of the body, but also, and with great realism, the way in which this meaning gets lost in man-woman relations. As a result of the fall, the body can so thoroughly obscure the person that it becomes an impediment to interpersonal communion. With extraordinary depth and originality John Paul analyzes the way in which a man looks lustfully at a woman, seeing her body without experiencing its nuptial meaning and without seeing the feminine person who should be revealed in it. The body of the woman ceases to be expressive of that woman as person and so ceases to invite the man to self-donation. In this lustful perception, men see women—and in an analogous way women see men—as an object of selfish consumption rather than as a person to be loved; their look violates the personal selfhood of the other and ignores the fact that each other person is "an enclosed garden," and "a fountain sealed"—to use a pair of expressions taken by John Paul from the Song of Songs, 4:12, and applied to men and women as persons.

Inspired by Max Scheler’s study of shame, John Paul goes on to show that there is a noble sexual shame which is a kind of "personalist instinct," whereby women protect themselves from the lustful concupiscent look of men. His idea is that when a woman realizes that she is an object of male lust, she naturally tries to subdue all that could be sexually provocative about her appearance—not because she fears or despises her sexuality, but because she wants to defuse the male concupiscence which she feels threatening her. The same woman who knows how to feel this sexual shame, will have no such reserve about revealing herself to the man who loves her, for she can trust him to look at her so as to see her as person. Of course, the man can also feel shame in this way, but for obvious reasons John Paul gives particular attention to the shame felt by the woman.

In order to retrieve the nuptial meaning of the body for fallen, concupiscent men and women, John Paul in his theology of the body goes back "to the beginning," back to man and woman as they lived their bodily being before the fall. This leads him to his profound analyses of the "original innocence" and the "original nakedness" of man and woman. He says that the first man and woman did not experience any shame in their nakedness because each could see in the body of the other another person, and because the attraction of masculinity and femininity stood completely in the service of love. It is not merely that they mastered this attraction by strong self-control and made a right use of it by their will; this would express for John Paul an unduly extrinsic dominion of soul over body. Rather, the person dwelt so intimately in the body that the body expressed to the other nothing but the worth and splendor of the person; bodily sexuality was completely absorbed in the energy of spousal love. But with the sin of our first parents a rupture appeared in the body-soul unity; the body now acquired the capacity to obscure the person as well as to reveal him; it could now awaken the selfish desire to consume as well as the desire to give oneself in spousal love; the freedom of original nakedness gave way to the anxiety of feeling shame.

The "redemption of the body," about which John Paul has much to say in his theology of the body, refers to the restoration of the lost integrity of our being. It refers to the re-integration of bodily sexuality and personhood, to the radical "personalization" of masculinity and femininity. The redemption of the body, although it will be consummated in eternity, begins already now in time. Man and woman as they existed in the beginning, and as they will exist in the end, constitute a fundamental norm for men and women now living on earth.

John Paul gives much thought to the eschatological aspects of the theology of the body. In reflecting on the fact that there will be no marriage in the world to come, he asks whether the masculinity and femininity of the body will also be abolished. He answers that it will not; the glorified human bodies will retain their masculinity and femininity and they will retain their nuptial meaning, even if this meaning will not be lived out in the form of marriage. And here we have one of the keys to John Paul’s thought on consecrated virginity. He affirms emphatically that the consecrated virgin does not turn away from his or her body with all its nuptial meaning. The renunciation of marriage does not lead to a "neutering" of human beings, for the masculinity and femininity of the body, and its nuptial meaning, are more fundamental than marriage, and can serve love in other than marital ways. If space permitted I might illustrate this with reference to John Paul himself; we could explore the very convincing fatherhood that he radiates.

Studying the person through personal subjectivity

In explaining the nuptial meaning of the body and other aspects of man and woman, John Paul is constantly speaking of the "subjectivity" of persons. I doubt that any previous pope ever spoke of "subjectivity." With this John Paul is referring to the self-experience of persons. But you may ask, why does he make this turn towards self-experience? Why should he make concessions to the culture of experience, when the task before us is to restore a sense of objective reality, as he has himself stressed in the encyclical, Fides et Ratio? We have to answer these questions if we are to understand the thought of John Paul regarding man and woman.

In one of his pre-papal studies Karol Wojtyla distinguishes between what he calls a predominantly cosmological understanding of man and a predominantly personalist understanding. In the former, man is considered from the outside; one stresses the analogies between man and subhuman beings, and tries to understand man in terms of categories that are taken from nature and comprise man along with all kinds of other beings. In the personalist approach, by contrast, one takes man as irreducible to all other beings and explores his identity through those categories that are appropriate precisely to man but not to other beings. Now John Paul teaches that in order to get at that which distinguishes man from everything else—and this is, of course, for him the personhood of man—one must stop looking at man from without and consider how he reveals himself to us from within—how he lives his own being from his own inner center. But this means that we adequately understand man as person only in understanding him in terms of his self-experience, or in other words his interiority.

We can render his thought more concrete by connecting it with our present theme of man and woman. Considered cosmologically the meaning of the marital act is primarily procreation; from this point of view one will be struck by its likeness to subhuman sexual union. Only if we enter into the subjectivity of the marital act do we notice something that has no counterpart in the subhuman animals, namely the enactment of spousal love. This love dimension of the marital act is not a cosmological fact but a personalist fact; it is found in the self-experience of spouses, in their spousal subjectivity, and it reveals the deep personalist significance of the two in one flesh. Even the procreative meaning of the marital act reveals new and specifically personal dimensions of itself when considered from the point of view of spousal subjectivity.

We find John Paul doing this again and again in his teaching on man and woman. He brings out the personal by consulting the evidence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Thus in his magnificent commentary on the Genesis accounts of the creation of man and woman, he notices that one of the two accounts in Genesis 2 is more subjective than the other; it explains man and woman, for instance, in terms of the solitude of man before the creation of woman, or in terms of the shame they felt before each other after sinning. John Paul centers his commentary primarily on this subjective account; he finds it more congenial to his personalist reading of man and woman. Or recall his analysis of depersonalized sexuality in terms of a certain kind of lustful looking; John Paul is here exploring the subjectivity of fallen sexuality as it expresses itself in this way of looking.

We see, then, that in turning to personal subjectivity John Paul does not fall into subjectivism, but rather finds an all-important resource for developing his profound Christian personalism.

Contraception and the "new feminism"

I cannot omit mentioning John Paul’s approach to contraception, since he tells us that one main incentive for him in developing the theology of the body was the desire to understand more deeply and to give a more convincing account of the Church’s controverted teaching about the wrong of contraception. John Paul teaches that the consummation of spousal love in the sexual intimacy of the spouses, while in itself distinct from procreation, is intrinsically connected with openness to procreation. The fertility of man and woman is also not merely biological; it too is situated in the realm of their personal love. He proceeds to explain exactly how it is connected with the personal.

The bodily expression of spousal love is so intimately united with possible procreation that whenever the marital act is deliberately sterilized it suffers as an expression of spousal love, and it begins to be replaced with selfish using. The original insight of John Paul is that openness to new life is not only important for the sake of new life, it is also indispensable for the integrity of the spousal self-donation. Critics of the Church’s teaching on contraception typically say that this teaching, when lived, cramps the expression of spousal self-surrender; John Paul responds that this teaching in fact guarantees the personalist character of spousal self-surrender.

Some Catholic teachers have been suspicious of the growing recognition of not one but two meanings of the marital act, fearing that the door is opened to contraception if the marital act has some meaning over and above its procreative meaning. They also say that if we must have two meanings of the marital act, then at the very least the procreative meaning must be clearly ranked above the unitive meaning, and they are very worried that John Paul does not even do this—that he simply speaks of them as two equally fundamental meanings. John Paul responds to their concern by saying that the unitive meaning is so thoroughly interrelated with the procreative meaning that union is compromised if the spouses do not remain open to procreation; spouses have to remain open to new life, not only for the sake of new life itself, but also for the sake of the integrity of their union. This is why his teaching on the unitive meaning of the marital act does not undermine, but rather supports, the Church’s teaching on contraception.

The Holy Father thinks that people have such a hard time understanding this because, being so accustomed to treating the body as raw material that can be instrumentally manipulated for human purposes, they cannot help treating bodily fertility in the same way. If only they can recover a sense of their embodied personhood, and hence of their masculine and feminine personhood, and hence of their paternal and maternal personhood, they will learn to see their fertility in a new personalist light.

Just when his followers thought they had caught up with John Paul and his many original insights into man and woman, he leapt out ahead of them again a few years ago when he announced his commitment to a "new feminism." This important new theme of his teaching should not pass unmentioned in this essay, especially since many women fear that his teaching on contraception undermines the legitimate concerns of a real Christian feminism.

In his feminism the Pope calls attention to and celebrates what he calls "the genius of woman." He ex plains this genius in personalist terms, just as we would expect. He says that woman is gifted with a special sense for the concrete person; she is less inclined than man to think of people in terms of stereotypes or of achievements. By nature woman is more sensitive to the being rather than the having of persons. John Paul makes his own the idea that modern technological civilization is unilaterally masculine and needs nothing so much as the "genius of woman" to protect it from becoming ever more depersonalized.

John Paul thinks that it is the maternal vocation of woman, whereby she can receive a new human being into herself, that disposes her to see the person in others. He says that men need to learn this sensitivity to persons from women. He thinks that all the regions of human life, including the life of the Church, will be vastly enriched when the "genius of woman" makes itself much more strongly felt within them. This is why he encourages women to become more present with their femininity in society and in the Church. Of course, in accordance with the whole Catholic tradition, he reminds women that their contributions to society and the Church should not be made at the expense of their vocation to maternity. Yet he brings something new out of this tradition by saying that the maternal vocation should not be lived at the expense of these contributions. He wants Catholic women to be first of all wives and mothers, but then also to be bearers of the "genius of woman" in the contemporary world.

John Paul has gone so far as to apologize to women for the complicity of many Catholics in the neglect and disparagement of the genius of woman over the centuries. In the great ecclesial self-examination that he has initiated as a preparation for the new millennium, he has found something to repent in the way members of the Church have conducted themselves toward women. He thinks that people in the Church have to be converted from certain patterns of thinking and evaluating, if they are going to do justice to the equality of man and woman and to the genius of woman. He speaks of the immeasurable gain that he expects for the Church from a greater presence of woman with her genius.

We see, then, that the pope’s teaching on contraception has nothing to do with confining women to childbearing and child-rearing, as if they had no other meaningful task.

Now the reader can see for himself why I said at the outset that John Paul has exercised a kind of leadership that the popes have rarely exercised. He has led the people of God in deepening their understanding of man and woman and in bringing to light aspects of man and woman that have not yet received their due. His critics often caricature him as insensitive and inflexible simply because he does not grant them all the sexual license that they want. Too many of them are like ill-mannered children, clamoring for some permission from their parents; they have ears only for the Yes or No and are incapable of hearing anything, however thoughtful, that the parents might be saying in explanation of their No.

If these critics could only bring themselves really to listen to John Paul on man and woman, they would marvel at the freshness and originality of his personalist rereading of sexual and marital morality. They would be astonished at how positive and winning the traditional teachings, reread in John Paul’s personalist vein, can become. They had thought that personalism led away from these teachings; now they have to deal with the challenging fact that in the hands of John Paul personalism leads back to these teachings. The critics of whom I speak, if they were once really to take this Pope seriously, would be forced to admit that he really does understand some of their own deepest concerns and that, as a result of this shared understanding, he convincingly challenges some of their dearest sexual freedoms. They may still not agree with all of his teaching, but they will have to admit that he has done for sexual and marital morality exactly what Vatican II wanted to do for the whole Church: to let her enter into closer relation with the "joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time" (Gaudium et Spes, 1). They may even begin to understand those of us who venerate him as a prophet of the mystery of "fair love."

Dr. John F. Crosby is a professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville and author ofThe Selfhood of the Human Person (Catholic University of America Press).

Why I Do Not Treat My Wife With Justice

I would like just to say: because I love her, but I suspect that that will not satisfy. Perhaps it is worth reflecting that treating my wife with justice would be corrosively unnatural, for justice is the least she may claim from me. If justice is giving to one exactly what one deserves and no more (generally, commutative justice), then it is what we offer to those we cannot - or, perhaps, will not - love. In short, this kind of justice is for strangers. In such an intimate and personal sphere as marriage, then, to long for justice is to long inexpressibly for the second rate. Love rightly demands of me more than giving to my wife what she is due: it rightly demands of me that I give all that I have; it demands I make a pure and complete gift to her of my very self.