Recovering the “both/and” of St. Pope John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor
The Church, in various periods of her history, has had to deal with the scourge of moral rigorism—a distorted emphasis on upright behavior. The prototypical rigorist movement, certainly in the modern era, was Jansenism, a warped return to Augustinian piety that began in seventeenth-century France and spread far and wide for centuries after. For Jansenist theologians, for a woman to reveal so much as her arm was a mortal sin, and a penitent confessing out of a mere shame or fear—an “imperfect” contrition—should be denied absolution.
But with the exception of some scrupulous souls, it’s safe to say that, in general, the Church today faces the opposite—and far more dangerous—trap: not moral rigorism but moral laxism. The laxist gets right what the rigorist gets wrong—that is, acceptance, understanding, and encouragement, patiently bearing with human weakness. But he does so at the expense of what the rigorist gets right—that is, the dangers of sin and the struggle for holiness.
Rigorism and laxism are, in a way, two sides of the same coin, each reacting to the other’s excess with an excess of its own. Indeed, Jansenism was, in large part, a reaction to the moral laxity that had crept into certain quarters of the Jesuit order. (See the Provincial Letters of Pascal, that able defender of the Jansenist movement, for the details.) And the upsurge of hedonism and libertinism in eighteenth-century France can be understood, at least in part, as a subsequent reaction to Jansenism.
In light of this history, Christians ought to study the brilliance balance of Pope St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). In the face of alternating rigorism and laxism—and a general collapse into the latter that risks a counterreaction of the former—John Paul the Great displays a beautiful Catholic both/and.
John Paul II was deeply attuned to this both/and principle. His favorite passage from the Second Vatican Council was Gaudium et Spes 22, which sees the Incarnation—the communion of God and man—as revealing not only God but also man: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”
In Fides et Ratio, he famously hails faith and reason as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” And in his Theology of the Body, he articulates a philosophical anthropology of the human being as a union of soul and body. God and man, faith and reason, soul and body—for John Paul II, they all go together.
