A crisis of the human person: St John Paul II’s remedy
Yesterday, in the name of equality, many progressive voices demanded that women be permitted to act as men, regardless of how corruptly men might act. Today, in the name of equality, these voices say men must be permitted to attempt to become women.
The predominant anthropological views of those currently driving the messaging of most forms of popular media would likely shock even the German nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, amidst his imaginings of the endless possibilities of what man could become after throwing off the shackles of Christian society. He would surely be appalled that his Ubermensch, after killing the Christian God would choose to become a neurotic member of the opposite sex.
St. John Paul II died almost two decades ago. By the time he had died, it was still politically impossible for candidates for major office in the United States to advocate for so-called “gay marriage.” In those bygone halcyon days, the inability to accept one’s sex difference as manifested by one’s body was still understood to be a disorder by most. The voices of confusion about what it means to be a human person have gained the ascendency relatively quickly in last twenty years, which could be indicative of reaching an endgame. While the saint would certainly have been distressed at the extremes which we have reached, I suspect he would not have been surprised.
An expert in the human person
St. John Paul II may have been the greatest expert on the human person among those who have graced the chair of St. Peter. His profound interest in the topic of human personhood arose from a confluence of his early experiences, none so formative as the dual nightmares he lived through, which wakened him to the threat posed to civilization by the fetid fruits of mistaken notions about personhood arising from the ivory towers of academia. These two nightmares were German National Socialism and Soviet Universal Socialism, both of which effectively reduced the person to his value to the State.
The soul-shattering experience of these human meat grinders, which were the product of profound philosophical errors about the human person arising from Modern and Post-Modern philosophies, fixed St. John Paul II’s focus on restoring an authentic anthropology to intellectual discourse. He recognized the remedy to the post-Cartesian reduction of human personhood would ultimately be a compelling theological account of the human person. To overcome the reduction of human personhood to a stream of consciousness, which had no permanence from which could come the capacity for life-long commitments, responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions, or an enduring dignity beyond that which society deemed to grant him, one had to begin with an account of the person’s concrete existence and enduring essence.
Societal and personal consequences of the person cut loose and set adrift from his concrete, enduring existence and dignity continue to be grave. In the 20th century it was the short circuiting of a predominant Christian ethos that permitted the systematic annihilation of millions in Nazi concentration camps, perhaps tens of millions in communist reeducation camps, and today it results in hundreds of millions worldwide each decade through abortion. The abortion carnage continues with the CDC now estimating 73 million worldwide abortions annually. Those left to live also suffer the consequences of a corrupt reduction of the human person, which have left a society so broken that even Renate Nyborg, one of the creator’s of the hook-up app Tinder, was moved to try to fight what she sees as a public health crisis of loneliness by creating an AI-based relationship app. Unfortunately, lacking an adequate anthropology, it is unlikely this effort will prove helpful. The current relationship crisis is first a spiritual crisis. Only spiritual beings can have relationships, which are rooted in the spiritual faculties.
