John Paul II: A Thomist Rooted in

St. John of the Cross

MICHAEL WALDSTEIN

IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED in 2002 in The Latin Mass

magazine, John Galvin offers a critique of Pope Paul VI's en-
cyclical Humanae Vitae. Section 8 of the article is entitled
"Reliance on Personalist Phenomenology":

The entire argument ofHumanae Vitae rests upon the sen-

tence, "That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium,
is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God
and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, be-
tween the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive
meaning and the procreative meaning." ... We must rec-
ognize that this new formulation stands in sharp contrast
to the justification offered by traditional Catholic theol-
ogy. The substitution of the new concept "meaning" in
place of the traditional language of"end" or "purpose" rep-
resents a radical restructuring.... How did the magisterium
come to discard the natural law explanation of such a fun-
damental institution as marriage and replace it with a novel
and untried philosophy? The answer in a word is "Person-
alism." Soon after its release, Cardinal Wojtyla (now Pope
John Paul II) offered an extended testimony to the thor-
oughly personalistic nature of HV. ... It is apparent that
HV acted as a springboard by which personalism could
launch its new philosophy of marriage, displacing the tra-
ditional teaching. Since that time, it has replaced all the
customary supports of the Church such as history, tradi-
tion, authority and hierarchy with an impenetrable phi-
losophy of inter-personal relationships that has proven
disastrous in practice. 1

Faith & Reason 30:3 & 4 (2005), 195-218

 WALDSTEIN

It is interesting to compare Galvin's judgment with that

of Ronald Modras, a theologian who defends homosexual acts.

If the Pope's theology of the body is sometimes ambigu-

ous, it is because it can appear so revolutionary and origi-
nal at first. He uses the language of personalism and the
phenomenological method of description in his analyses
of sexuality. He speaks rarely about nature and often about
persons, personal dignity and responsibility, and so appears
to have broken with his Neo-Thomistic training with its
insistence upon immutable natural laws. Upon a closer
examination, however, the pope is a skillful and energetic
exponent of the neo-Thomistic natural law ethic.... Al-
though he uses words like "person" and "love" liberally,
his understanding of those words is hardly that of his read-
ers. Like his arguments, his definitions refer constantly to
nature. 2

Galvin objects to Humanae Vitae (explicitly including John

Paul II) because it replaces the order of nature with the subjec-
tive personalist order of"meaning." He sees Paul VI and John
Paul II as abandoning Thomism in favor of personalism. Galvin
opts for preserving the order of nature and for rejecting the
new personalist emphasis on "meaning" as modern subjectiv-
ism. Modras objects to John Paul II because he fails to replace
the order of nature by the personalist order. He sees the wolf of
N eo-Thomism under the sheepskin of personalism. Modras
opts for rejecting the order of static natures in favor of a per-
sonalism unencumbered by nature.
The thesis ofthe present essay, put negatively, is that both
Galvin and Modras are wrong. Put positively, it is that Pope
John Paul is faithful to the teaching of St. Thomas precisely in
the elements of his teaching that both Galvin and Modras con-
sider opposed to St. Thomas.
The following argument has two parts. In the first I argue
that Pope John Paul's teaching on marriage is indeed deeply

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rooted in a teleological conception of nature in agreement with

the natural philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas. On this
point, taken in itself, there is little that is new in John Paul II.
In the second part, I will argue that most of what is new in
John Paul's personalism is inspired, not by Scheler, but by St.
John of the Cross. St. John of the Cross had a good formation
in St. Thomas, as did John Paul II. What is new in them stands
in harmony with St. Thomas and often develops points that
are mentioned only briefly or implicitly by St. Thomas.
John Paul II writes in his book Love and Responsibility,
published two decades before he became Pope,

[t]he Church, as has been mentioned previously, teaches,

and has always taught, that the primary end of marriage is
procreatio, but that it has a secondary end, defined in Latin
terminology as mutuum adiutorium. Apart from these a ter-
tiary aim is mentioned-remedium concupiscentiae .... The
ends of marriage, in the order mentioned, are incompat-
ible with any subjectivist interpretation of the sexual urge,
and therefore demand from man, as a person, objectivity
in his thinking on sexual matters, and above all in his be-
havior. This objectivity is the foundation of conjugal mo-
rality (Love and Responsibility, 66).

Particularly problematic in Humanae Vitae, according to

Galvin, is the word "meaning" (significatio) which, Galvin
thinks, replaces the more traditional word "end." A teleologi-
cal view of nature has been replaced by subjectivist personal-
ism. Here is how Wojtyla understands the word "meaning":

By appealing to the meaning of the conjugal act, the Pope

places the whole discussion not only and not so much in
the context of the nature of the act, but also and even more
in the context of human awareness, in the con text of the aware-
ness that should correspond to this act on the part of both the
man and the woman-the persons performing this act. 3

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In order to avoid playing out the order of nature and the

order of human awareness against each other, one should read
this passage together with a text already quoted:

The ends of marriage, in the order mentioned, are incom-

patible with any subjectivist interpretation of the sexual
urge, and therefore demand from man, as a person, objectiv-
ity in his thinking on sexual matters, and above all in his
behavior. This objectivity is the foundation of conjugal
morality (Love and Responsibility, 66).

According to John Paul II, the main reason why so many

people in our time find it difficult to understand and accept
the Church's teaching on contraception is precisely the reaf-
firmation in Humanae Vitae of the traditional Catholic teach-
ing on the natural ends of marriage. Teleology is difficult to
accept, he says, because of the widespread dominance of natu-
ral science and its mechanistic picture of the world. I find the
main passage on this subject in Love and Responsibility very
penetrating.

The expressions 'the order of nature' and 'the biological

order' must not be confused or regarded as identical, the
'biological order' does indeed mean the same as the order
of nature but only in so far as this is accessible to the meth-
ods of empirical and descriptive natural science.... This
habit of confusing the order of existence with the biologi-
cal order, or rather of allowing the second to obscure the
first, is part of that universal empiricism which seems to
weigh so heavily on the mind of modern man, and particu-
larly on modern intellectuals, and makes it particularly
difficult for them to understand the principles on which
Catholic sexual morality is based. According to those prin-
ciples ... the sexual urge owes its objective importance to
its connection with the divine work of creation of which
we have been speaking, and this importance vanishes al-
most completely if our way of thinking is inspired only by
the biological order of nature. Seen in this perspective the
sexual urge is only the sum of functions undoubtedly

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 A THOMIST ROOTED IN ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

directed, from the biological point of view, towards a

biological end, that of reproduction. Now, if man is the
master of nature, should he not mould those functions-if
necessary artificially, with the help of the appropriate tech-
niques-in whatever way he considers expedient and agree-
able? The 'biological order', as a product of the human
intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality,
has man for its immediate author. The claim to autonomy
in one's ethical views is a short jump from this. It is other-
wise with the order of nature, which means the totality of
the cosmic relationships that arise among really existing
entities (Love and Responsibility, 56-7).

What I find so penetrating in this passage is that it identi-

fies a way of thinking and seeing that is deeply hammered into
the minds of children in school and that is reinforced daily in
all adults by the cultural establishment, namely, the way of
thinking and seeing defined by a mechanist form of natural
science. In that way of thinking and seeing, the world is an
elaborate machine that follows certain laws and is driven by
chance. Man can take his place as the master of nature without
any questions, except perhaps environmental questions. To this
way of thinking contraception seems the most "natural" thing
in the world. We sterilize cats. Why not men and women?
I think Pope John Paul II is right that the dominance of
natural science is the single most important obstacle to an un-
derstanding of Humanae Vitae. It is the single most important
historical circumstance of the controversy preceding and fol-
lowing the publication of Humanae Vitae.
Thus we come to my first major conclusion. Whatever
personalism precisely means in the writings ofJohn Paul II, it
is not opposed to the traditional understanding of marriage in
terms of its primary natural end, the procreation and educa-
tion of children. In Love and Responsibility John Paul II writes:

In the order of love a man can remain true to the person only
in so far as he is true to nature. If he does violence to 'nature'
he also 'violates' the person by making it an object of enjoy-
ment rather than oflove (Love and Responsibility, 229-30).

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It seems to me that the evidence I have presented is already

sufficient to argue that John Paul II stands in harmony with St.
Thomas in his teaching on marriage. Of course, I would have
to go through all other issues to confirm what this test-case
suggests. Since this is an essay and not a course, or a cycle of
courses, I will take a short-cut. What particular doctrine of St.
Thomas would you like as the most striking confirmation?
How about the doctrine of prime matter? Prime matter is the
doctrine in which Aristotle differs most clearly and deeply from
the Pre-Socratics and from Descartes and the natural science
that is indebted to his mechanist principles. Here is a passage
from John Paul II's book The Acting Person:

In its metaphysical significance, the soul is "form" and its

relation to the body is as Aristotle and St. Thomas define
the relation between form and matter. One should add that
what is at stake here is prime matter, materia prima.

These two sentences are not only important as a testi-

mony to John Paul II's agreement with a key Aristotelian
and Thomistic doctrine, but also as a testimony to the great
problem of the English edition of The Acting Person. I have
translated the two sentences from the German and Italian
translations of the Polish original. If you look for them in
the English translation they should be on page 257, but you
will not find them. Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, the editor of
the English translation, cut them out from the English text.
The sentence before and the sentence after them are both
there. In fact, Tymieniecka seems to have been rather system-
atic in eliminating or weakening most texts in which John Paul
II explicitly agrees with Aristotle and St. Thomas.
In one of his essays John Paul II refers to himself quite
naturally with the phrase, "We in the Thomistic school, the
school of 'perennial philosophy' .... " 4 These are his own
words. The evidence I have presented suggests that we
should accept his own words about himself as true. Of
course, if one restricts the label "Thomist" to those who use

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primarily scholastic terminology and reproduce primarily

scholastic arguments, then Wojtyla is certainly not a Thomist,
but the same is true of St. John of the Cross or Josef Pieper for
that matter. In fact, I am not aware of a single philosophical or
theological disagreement between John Paul II and St. Tho-
mas, except for the Immaculate Conception.

I now turn to the second part of my paper, in which I in-

tend to show that the personalism of John Paul II is rooted in
the thought of St. John of the Cross, rather than in the
phenomenologist Max Scheler.
As a habilitation thesis (which is similar to a book required
for tenure in the American academic system), John Paul II
wrote a book with the title, Evaluation of the Possibility of Con-
structing a Christian Ethics on the Assumptions of Max Scheler's
System of Philosophy. George Weigel writes in his biography,

That [Wojtyla] looked to Scheler as a possible guide, and

that he put himself through the backbreaking work of trans-
lation so that he could analyze Scheler in his own language,
suggests that Wojtyla had become convinced that the an-
swers [to the question "Why ought I be good?"] were not
to be found in the neo-scholasticism of Father Reginald
Garrigou-Lagrange. 5

It does nothing of the sort. The book is a relentless cri-

tique of Scheler that does not leave a single brick on top
of another. John Paul II writes, "It is, therefore, due to its
phenomenological principles that Scheler's system is unsuit-
able for the interpretation of Christian Ethics .... " 6 And again,
"These investigations convince us that the Christian thinker,
especially the theologian ... must not be a Phenomenologist." 7
Before I proceed further, let me define the terms "phenom-
enology" and "personalism." "Phenomenology" consists of two
Greek words: "-logy" comes from "logos" and means account.
An account of what? The answer is supplied by the other Greek
word, "phainomenon." A phenomenon is something that appears,

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something given in our conscious attention. Phenomenon

implies a contrast with what is not itself present to us in our con-
scious attention, but is merely thought and spoken about in its
absence. For example, when you look at the front of a building,
the front is a phenomenon, the back is not. When you have a
toothache, it is given in your conscious attention. You might re-
member that you had a toothache yesterday as well, but it is no
longer itself a phenomenon. You are not experiencing it. So, one
can define phenomenology as an account of what is itself present
. . . .
or gtven m our consctous awareness or expenence.
Phenomenology was defined as a method and then as a
philosophical school by Edmund Husserl in opposition to the
great systems of German idealism, especially Kant. Husserl
argued that these systems were constructions. In the vocabu-
lary of phenomenology, constructing is the mortal sin. Only
outright lying is worse. A philosopher "constructs" when he
builds up an account that is not based on what is actually ap-
parent to him. He overlooks what he sees and constructs some-
thing he doesn't see. He is a poet, not a philosopher. He makes,
he does not seek knowledge. Husserl's battle cry was "back to
things themselves" by which he meant, take a look at what is
actually present or given to you, what stands before your eyes
instead of constructing systems.
So far so good. Troubles arise when Husserl further de-
fines what can and what cannot be considered a phenomenon.
Real existence, he says, is always a matter of uncertainty, which
shows that it cannot be immediately given as a phenomenon.
Here one can see Husserl's indebtedness to Descartes and Kant.
The only thing that can be immediately given are essences as
objects of consciousness or, as Husserl says, "such-being" rather
than "that-being" or existence. On the basis of this premise,
phenomenology became an account restricted to essences as
objects of consciousness. Real being disappears and we are
locked in consciousness. This exclusion of real being is the
main point for which John Paul II criticizes phenomenol-
ogy, particularly in the form it took in Max Scheler. There
are phenomenologists who do not follow Husserl in this

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exclusion of real being, for example, Dietrich von Hildebrand

and Husserl's one-time assistant, Edith Stein.
Let us look at the other word. "Personalism" is formed by
adding the suffix -ism to "person." This suffix goes back to
the Greek suffix "-ismos" via the Latin "-ismus." St. Ignatius
of Antioch speaks of"Christianismos" (Rom. 3:3) and St. Au-
gustine of "Christianismus" (Civ. Dei, 19, 23, 1). We use an-
other Latin suffix with a similar meaning to form the word
"Christianity." In Christianismos and Christianismus Christ
plays a central role. In Thomism St. Thomas plays a central
role. In personalism the person plays a central role. The first
use of the word "personalism" I know of is in Schleiermacher's
speeches on religion published in 1799. Schleiermacher uses
the Latin "Personalismus" to characterize the traditional Chris-
tian view that God is a personal being with reason and will as
opposed to an anonymous force devoid of intelligence. 8 In 1957
Pius XII said in a speech to representatives of European cities
and counties,

In a situation in which the centralizing tendencies of mod-

ern nations aim at a far-reaching limitation of the freedom
of local communities and individual persons, you call to
mind the primacy of values of the person .... As Europe is
being born we must create a broad and reliable majority of
federalists who maintain as principles of a healthy person-
alism a concept of civil society, as we may call it, in which
individual persons find a normal possibility for develop-
ment and can serve the community in freedom. 9

It is quite clear in this text what Pius XII means by

"personalism," at least in this instance. If Pius XII is right
in saying that there is a healthy personalism, there is most
likely also an unhealthy personalism. John Paul II, in fact,
speaks of the danger of "egotistical personalisms" in reli-
gious life 10 and of "pseudo-liturgical personalisms" in li-
turgical life. 11 In one of his prayers, he turns to Mary and
says, "You are stronger than all egotistical and personalistic
ambitions." 12 He speaks of"Kant's formalistic personalism" 13

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and "Kantian personalism." 14 He calls Scheler a personalist

even though Scheler radically opposes Kant's account of the
person.
The great Thomist Charles De Koninck uses the term "per-
sonalism" in a negative sense to refer to the position that the dig-
nity of the person as individual by itself or as a whole is greater
than the dignity of the person as a part ordered to the common
good. Like John Paul II he speaks of "Kantian personalism," 15
which is indeed the supreme expression of exalting the dignity of
the individual at the expense of the common good. De Koninck
thinks that the very term "personalism" contains a vice. He urges
his Catholic readers to avoid the term altogether. I do not think
he is right. The original coining of the word was not the work of
Kant, who never uses the term, or Scheler, who uses it frequently.
It was the work of a theologian, admittedly the subjectivist Prot-
estant Schleiermacher, yet not as a way of expressing his own sub-
jectivist views, but as a way of characterizing the traditional Chris-
tian teaching about a personal God.
To conclude, "personalism" is used in many senses. What
is common to all is that the person plays a central role. What
the term "person" means differs widely and what role the per-
son plays differs widely as well. When Pius XII exhorts his
audience to adopt a healthy personalism, he means something
quite different than John Paul II when he calls Kant a person-
alist and prays to Our Lady that all personalistic ambitions
may be rooted out. What is it that personalism means to John
Paul II in particular when he uses the term positively? It means
an emphasis on the rationality of human beings, more specifi-
cally their rational life as moral agents aware of themselves.
The main opposites he has in mind are utilitarianism and Marx-
ism, both of whom eliminate the acting person. Among other
things, personalism therefore means, as you will see further
when we look at St. John of the Cross, a particular emphasis
on lived conscious experience.
Let us now turn to Scheler. According to John Paul II,
Scheler's ethics attracted the attention of Catholic thinkers for
two main reasons. First, Catholic ethics had always focused on

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the object of human acts, i.e., the good. By criticizing Kant for
his failure to do justice to the object of acts, Scheler became
attractive to Catholics. The second point of contact is more
specific.

There were also more particular theses that caused imme-

diate associations with Christian ethics, especially with the
ethical teaching of the Gospels. In his system Scheler un-
derlines that love for the person and imitating an exem-
plary person [namely, Jesus] have great importance and play
a central role in ethical life as a whole. 16

The sub-title of Scheler's main work in ethics is, "A New

Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism." 17
Scheler's attempt can rightly be called personalistic, John Paul
II explains, because he places a particular emphasis on the per-
son in moral life: the moral perfection of the person is pro-
posed as a goal; love for the person and imitation of model
persons are central. 18 The opposite of personalism in this sense
is utilitarianism, which is primarily interested in the useful
consequences of moral acts.
At the end of John Paul II's analysis of Scheler, it is clear
that Scheler disappoints the two hopes Catholics placed in him.
First, he does not give a sufficient account of the objective moral
goodness of the person. Second, he does not allow for a genu-
ine imitation of exemplary persons. His philosophy is not per-
sonalistic enough. The person, in the end, gets lost.
The point John Paul II selects to test the suitability of
Scheler's philosophy for a Christian ethics is the Gospel's teach-
ing on the imitation of Christ. Among the Gospel texts John
Paul II quotes and comments on are the following. "If anyone
wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross
and follow me" (Matt. 16:24). "If I, your Lord and teacher,
have washed your feet, you also must wash one another's feet"
(John 13:14).
The Gospel's ideal ofmoral perfection in imitation ofJesus, John
Paul II argues, has three main characteristics.19 (1) It is a real ideal,
because it aims at a real perfection of the person in imitation of a real

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perfection already found in Jesus. (2) It is a practical ideal, because it is

realized by acts which the person can actually perform in following
the exemplar. The person is the responsible cause of these acts and of
their moral goodness. (3) It is a religious ideal, both because the perfec-
tion to be imitated is that ofJesus and because moral goodness estab-
lishes the right relation with God. The idea thus has three characteris-
tics: it is formal, efficient, and final.
John Paul II devotes one chapter to each of these three
points. In the first he argues that the phenomenological method
as Scheler understands it does not allow him to give an ac-
count of moral good and evil as objectively real attributes of
the person, because he considers them only as phenomena, as
objects of consciousness.

Despite its objectivist tendencies, Scheler's ethical system

is not suitable for interpreting an ethics that has an objec-
tive character as Christian Ethics does. There is no doubt
that Scheler's insufficient objectivism springs from his phe-
nomenological principles. Because of these principles the
ethical value always remains in an intentional and-de-
spite everything-subjective position. In order to grasp
ethical value in its real and objective position, one would
have to proceed from different epistemological premises,
namely, meta-phenomenological and even metaphysical
premises. 20

In the second chapter John Paul II argues that Scheler, in

contrast to the Gospel, does not portray the person as there-
sponsible origin of moral acts:

... [D]ue to its phenomenological principles, Scheler's sys-

tem cannot directly grasp and express that the human per-
son in its acts is the origin of moral good and evil. The
whole difficulty is the result of the phenomenological pre-
mises of the system and we must assign the blame to these
principles. 21

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The third chapter deals with the religious character of the

ideal of moral perfection in the Gospels. The final question
John Paul II takes up is the question of the final end, ofbless-
edness in the beatific vision.

We see that in the teaching of revelation, all emphasis in

the doctrine of eternal blessedness falls on the object of
blessedness, namely, the divine nature, which is this ob-
ject. In Scheler's phenomenological system, of course, this
doctrine cannot be grasped and expressed.... [According
to Scheler] man draws the greatest happiness and the great-
est suffering from within himself, he himself is its source
for himself. This point of view seems to separate us com-
pletely from the Christian teaching. Given such a point of
view, can we establish any point of contact with the re-
vealed truth according to which the object of man's final
blessedness is the divine nature? 22

The answer is No. In another work he pinpoints the

reason for the loss of the final end in Scheler.

Again the analysis of the systems of Kant and Scheler shows

the conclusion that a consistent teleology ... has no room
in the philosophy of consciousness. Of course, the end is
something contained in consciousness, and the end is al-
ways some good or value, but as a [mere] content of con-
sciousness the end loses its perfective character. It possesses
such a character only in connection with real being, on the
premises of a philosophy of the real. Only on this basis can
one speak of a consistent teleology. 23

In another text he writes,

The philosophy of consciousness would have us believe

that it first discovered the human subject. The philosophy
ofbeing is prepared to demonstrate that quite the opposite
is true, that in fact an analysis of pure consciousness leads
inevitably to an annihilation ofthe subject. 24

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Let me summarize. In the form in which Husser! and

Scheler hold it, Phenomenology, according to John Paul II,
loses real being and annihilates the person. For this reason it
cannot be a rigorous form of personalism. To the degree in
which personalism is rigorously phenomenological, it is not
sufficiently personalistic.
Is there any good in the phenomenological method?
John Paul II asks himself in the final paragraphs of his book
on Scheler. He answers: What we must not do is follow
Husser! and Scheler in bracketing real being. The goal of
philosophy is to understand real being. Yet, what Husser!
and Scheler say before this erroneous point has some truth
in it. It is good to pay close attention to the phenomena,
that is, to things as we actually experience them, as we are
actually aware of them in our lived experience. Such atten-
tion to the phenomena, however, can only play a secondary
and assisting role in philosophy and theology.

[The theologian] ... should not forego the great advan-

tages which the phenomenological method offers his work.
It impresses the stamp of experience on works of ethics
and nourishes them with the life-knowledge of concrete
man by allowing an investigation of moral life from the
side of its appearance. Yet, in all this, the phenomenologi-
cal method plays only a secondary assisting role. . . . At
the same time, these investigations convince us that the
Christian thinker, especially the theologian, who makes
use of phenomenological experience in his work, must not
be a Phenomenologist. 25

Of course, given the qualified sense of "phenomenology"

that one gets when one strips away the erroneous exclusion of
real being in Husser! and Scheler, every good philosopher has
and will use the phenomenological method in a secondary as-
sisting role, Plato no less than Aristotle. The extent to which
he uses the method might differ; the degree to which he con-
ceives it clearly as a method might differ; but he will use it.

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Yet not even in this more general sense of attention to

actual experience are Husserl or Scheler the main source for
John Paul II. It is in St. John of the Cross that John Paul II
found a rigorous theological personalism that paid much at-
tention to lived awareness and experience. In 1941, one year
before he entered the underground seminary of Krakow, when
he was still a student of Polish literature, he had a profound
encounter with St. John of the Cross. Adolf Hitler played an
instrumental role. The Gestapo stripped Polish parishes of most
of their priests to break the spiritual backbone of Polish cul-
tural and religious resistance. They sent them to concentra-
tion camps where most of them were killed. As a consequence,
young Karol, then twenty-one years old, came under the spiri-
tual guidance of a layman who introduced him to St. John of
the Cross. He was so struck by the Mystical Doctor that he
immediately learned Spanish to read him in the original. This
is how he describes the event in an interview in 1994.

Before entering the seminary, I met a layman named Jan

Tyranowski, who was a true mystic. This man, whom I con-
sider a saint, introduced me to the great Spanish mystics
and in particular to Saint John of the Cross. Even before
entering the underground seminary, I read the works of
that mystic, especially his poetry. In order to read it in the
original, I studied Spanish. That was a very important stage
in my life. 26

Seven years after this first encounter, he defended his dis-

sertation on the understanding of faith in St. John, directed by
Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange at the Angelicum in Rome.
Looking back at more than forty years of familiarity with St.
John of the Cross, John Paul II said in 1982,

... [T]o him I owe so much in my spiritual formation. I

came to know him in my youth and I entered into an inti-
mate dialogue with this master of faith, with his language
and his thought, culminating in the writing of my doc-
toral dissertation on "Faith in St. John of the Cross." Ever

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since then I have found in him a friend and master who

has shown me the light that shines in the darkness for
walking always toward God. 27

The profound influence of St. John of the Cross on John

Paul II is beyond doubt. Both Galvin and Madras hold that
the terms John Paul II uses in his account oflove, particularly
of married love, are drawn from personalist phenomenology.
This is not the case. They are drawn from St.John of the Cross.
Consider the following text, which contains most of the terms
that both Galvin and Madras consider telltale signs of personal-
ist phenomenology.

Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give them-

selves to one another through the acts which are proper
and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely
biological, but concerns the innermost being of the hu-
man person as such. It is realized in a truly human way
only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and
a woman commit themselves totally to one another until
death. The total physical self-giving would be a lie if it
were not the sign and fruit of a total personal self-giving,
in which the whole person, including the temporal dimen-
sion, is present: if the person were to withhold something
or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the fu-
ture, by this very fact he or she would not be giving totally
(John Paul II, Familiaris Consortia, 11).

The only phenomenologist in whom John Paul II could

have heard this way of speaking about love is Dietrich von
Hildebrand, who published a book about marriage in 1929 that
has a similar vocabulary. Yet, long before he had a chance to
read Hildebrand and had any notion of phenomenology, John
Paul II found the same vocabulary in St. John. In stanza 3 of
The Living Flame of Love, St. John of the Cross writes,

0 lamps of fire! in whose splendors the deep caverns of

feeling, once obscure and blind, now give forth, so rarely,
so exquisitely, both warmth and light to their Beloved.

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A THOMIST ROOTED IN ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

In his commentary on this stanza, St. John writes:

Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too
the soul (possessing a will more generous and free the more
it is united with God) gives to God, God himself in God;
and this is a true and complete gift of the soul
to God.
It is conscious there that God is indeed its own and
that it possesses him by inheritance, with the right of own-
ership, as his adopted child through the grace of his gift of
himself Having him for its own, it can give him and com-
municate him to whomever it wishes. Thus it gives him to
its Beloved, who is the very God who gave himself to it. By
this donation it repays God for all it owes him, since it
willingly gives as much as it receives from him.
Because the soul in this gift to God offers him the Holy
Spirit, with voluntary surrender, as something of its own
(so that God loves himself in the Holy Spirit as he deserves),
it enjoys inestimable delight and fruition, seeing that it
gives God something of its own that is suited to him ac-
cording to his infinite being. It is true that the soul cannot
give God again to himself, since in himself he is ever him-
self. Nevertheless it does this truly and perfectly, giving all
that was given it by him in order to repay love, which is to
give as much as is given. And God, who could not be consid-
ered paid with anything less, is considered paid with that
gift of the soul; and he accepts it gratefully as something it
gives him ofits own. In this very gift he loves it anew; and in
this re-surrender of God to the soul, the soul also loves as
though again.
A reciprocal love is thus actually formed between God
and the soul, like the marriage union and surrender, in which
the goods of both (the divine essence that each possesses
freely by reason of the voluntary surrender between them)
are possessed by both together. They say to each other what
the Son of God spoke to the Father through St. John: All that is
mine is yours and yours is mine ... [Jn. 17:10].28

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 WALDSTEIN

St. John describes the soul's relation to God as a cycle of mu-

tual giving. The deep satisfaction and happiness of love is found
in this cycle as a cycle of giving, not only of receiving.
In the text I just quoted, what the bride gives is God him-
self to God, who has given himself to her. Self-gift is not ex-
plicit, but certainly implicit. In other texts St. John speaks more
directly of the bride giving herself.

There he gave me his breast; there he taught me a sweet

and living knowledge; and I gave myself to him, keeping
nothing back; there I promised to be his bride. 29

In this stanza, the promise "to be his bride" seems to ex-

press in alternate words what immediately precedes it, "I gave
myself to him, keeping nothing back." St. John comments,

In this stanza the bride tells of the mutual surrender made

in this spiritual espousal between the soul and God, saying
that in the interior wine cellar oflove they were joined by
the communication he made of himself to her.... In that
sweet drink of God, in which the soul is imbibed in him,
she most willingly and with intense delight surrenders her-
self wholly to him in the desire to be totally his and never to
possess in herself anything other than him. ... Hence, not only
in her will but also in her works she is really and totally
given to God without keeping anything back, just as God has
freely given himself entirely to her. This union is so effected
that the two wills are mutually paid, surrendered, and sat-
isfied (so that neither fails the other in anything) with the
fidelity and stability of an espousal. She therefore adds:
there I promised to be his bride. Just as one who is espoused
does not love, care, or work for any other than her bridegroom, so
the soul in this state has no affections of the will or knowl-
edge in the intellect or care or work or appetite that is not
entirely inclined toward God. She is as it were divine and
deified, in such a way that in regard to all she can under-
stand she does not even suffer the first movements con-
trary to God's will. 30

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 A THOMIST ROOTED IN ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

I have quoted these two texts at some length, because most

of the characteristic teachings ofJohn Paul II can be directly de-
rived from them. The characteristic feature of the spousal love
between human beings and God, according to St. John, is the
totality of the gift of self, which is reflected in the totality of
the orientation of affections toward the spouse. "I gave myself
to him, keeping nothing back; there I promised to be his bride."
This is the language that turns up in John Paul II's description
of spousal love in the book Love and Responsibility.

Betrothed [=spousal] love differs from all the aspects or

forms oflove analyzed hitherto. Its decisive character is
the giving of one's own person (to another). This is some-
thing different from and more than attraction, desire or
even goodwill. These are all ways by which one person
goes out toward another, but none of them can take him
as far.... The fullest, the most uncompromising form
of love consists precisely in self-giving, in making one's in-
alienable and non-transferable 'I' someone else's propertyY

The core ofJohn Paul II's teaching on love can be sum-

marized in three theses. First, love between persons can be
described as a gift of self. St. Therese of Lisieux, also an atten-
tive disciple of St. John of the Cross, offers this quasi-defini-
tion: "To love is to give everything and to give oneself" (St.
Therese of Lisieux, Pourquoi je t'aime, 6 Marie!, stanza 22). Sec-
ond, the fullest and clearest realization of this gift of self in our
experience is spousal love between man and woman. Third,
the origin and paradigm oflove and giving is the Trinity. These
same three theses can also be found in St. John of the Cross.
Another close bond between St. John and John Paul II
is the attention they both pay to the lived experience of the
person. Rocco Buttiglione claims that John Paul II " ... read
in St. John of the Cross a kind of phenomenology of mysti-
cal experience." 32 The point should be put the other way
around: John Paul II read in Phenomenology a kind of

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 WALDSTEIN

Sanjuanist sensitivity to the lived experience of the person

He came to know St. John first.
There is a certain similarity between St. John and the phi
losophers of consciousness. St. John's writings are in part l
response to Luther, a specifically modern response in whicl
the lived experience of personal subjectivity plays a pronouncec
role, yet without any polemical edge against the objective con·
tent of faith and its elaboration in scholastic theology. St. Johr
of the Cross lived from 1544 to 1591. Descartes lived from 159(
to 1650. Buttiglione is mistaken when he focuses primarily or
Descartes and the philosophers of consciousness who follow ir
his train to explain the turn to the subject, the attention to per·
sonal consciousness, awareness and experience in John Paul II.
As a student, St. John had a thorough formation in St
Thomas. Throughout his works he quotes the Angelic Doc·
tor often. Nevertheless, St. John's language is for the mos1
part not the technical language of St. Thomas. The reasor
is not that he disagrees with St. Thomas. Fr. Garrigou·
Lagrange, who directed John Paul II's thesis on John, shawl
in many of his books how deeply St. Thomas and St. Johr
agree with each other, despite these differences oflanguage
I think the same can be shown for John Paul II in relatior
to St. Thomas.
Let me give you an example of the difference between tht
way St. Thomas usually speaks and a more personalist way oJ
speaking about the same point.

When a man is admitted by divine grace to participating

in heavenly beatitude, which consists in the vision and en-
joyment of God, he becomes, as it were, a citizen and mem-
ber of that blessed society which is called the heavenly
Jerusalem, according to Ephesians 2:19: "You are citizens
with the saints and members of the household of God." A
man who is in this way counted as part of the heavenly city
must have certain freely given virtues which are the in-
fused virtues. The right exercise of these virtues requires a

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 A THOMIST ROOTED IN ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

love of the common good that belongs to the whole society,

which is the divine good as the object ofbeatitudeY

St. Thomas describes the love of the common good in very

objective terms without unfolding the experiential side of the
matter, at least not in this text. Here is a text that says the same
thing St. Thomas says, but in a more personalist language,
bringing out the lived experience of the person much along
the lines of St. John of the Cross and John Paul II. It is a char-
acteristically modern text.

In seeing God, Peter sees what is greater than anything

which could be his proper good for he knows that he is
only Peter; he sees that God is infinitely more communi-
cable than He is to Peter himself, and it is this infinity of
goodness Peter loves, because he loves God in Himself and
in that bounty which, of its very nature is diffusive of it-
self.... And if there be also John to share the vision, Peter
cannot fail to rejoice, because the superabundance of the
divine good is his joy. And if the share of John be greater
than his own, Peter will again rejoice, for the prime mea-
sure of their happiness is neither Peter nor John, but the
immeasurable liberality of the divine good. 34

The author of this beautiful passage is Charles De

Koninck, a faithful disciple of St. Thomas and author of The
Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists. Yet this
passage, taken from The Primacy of the Common Good, is deeply
personalistic in the sense in which John Paul II uses that word.
Let me close with a final word, more a kind of epilogue
than a true conclusion. There is one phrase in the text by John
Galvin quoted at the beginning of this essay that is likely to
score a point with many disciples of St. Thomas who have at-
tempted to understand John Paul II. The phrase is "an impen-
etrable philosophy of interpersonal relationships." I think it is
the attitude expressed in this phrase that has done the most
damage to a proper reception of Pope John Paul II among some
disciples of St. Thomas. It is easy to forget the experience all of

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 WALDSTEIN

us had when we first read a page of Aristotle or St. Thomas.

"Impenetrable" is the word. We kept reading, because people
we trusted told us it was worth the effort and in the end we
found out that it was indeed worth the effort. It would have
been foolish to give up halfway simply because the effort took
some pains. I have had a similar experience with Pope John
Paul II. I have spent much time in the last seven years on his
writings. Right now I am at work on a book project entitled,
Common Good and Gift of Self: The Communion of Persons in St.
Thomas and John Paul II. My studies so far have convinced me,
first, that there is a deep harmony between St. Thomas and
John Paul II, and, second, that it is worth studying John Paul
II and St. Thomas together, because they throw much light on
each other and they complement each other in throwing light
on the truth of things themselves. John Paul II unfolds and
develops many important points that are merely implicit or
briefly mentioned in St. Thomas.
One of the main reasons why faithful Catholics spend
much time on Aristotle and St. Thomas is that St. Thomas has
been proposed to us by many Popes as the common teacher of
the Church. If the reason why we accept St. Thomas is the
authority ofthe popes, should we not be interested in the writ-
ings of the most recent Pope? Undercutting his relevance as a
teacher is to undercut the authority of St. Thomas, which rests
on Papal teaching, not on private judgment.

Notes

1 John Galvin, "Humanae Vitae: Heroic, Deficient-or Both," The

Latin Massll (2002) 7-17, at 14-15.

2 Ronald Madras, "Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body," in

John Paul II and Moral Theology, edited by Charles E. Curran and

Richard A. McCormick (New York: Paulist, 1998) 149-56, at 150-1.
3 Karol Wojtyla, "The Teaching of the Encyclical Humanae

Vitae on Love: An Analysis of the Text," in Person and Community:

Selected Essays (New York: P. Lang, 1993), 301-14.
4 Karol Wojtyla, "The Human Person and Natural Law," in Per-

son and Community: Selected Essays (New York: P. Lang, 1970 [1993]),
279-99, at 181.

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 A THOMIST ROOTED IN ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

5 George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography ofPope John Paul

II (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 128.

6 Karol Wojtyla, [Evaluation ofthe Possibility of Constructing a Chris-

tian Ethics on the Assumptions of Max Scheler's System of Philosophy]

Uber die Moglichkeit eine christliche Ethik in Anlehnung an Max Scheler
zu schaffen, ed. Juliusz Stroynowski, Primat des Geistes:
Philosophische Schriften (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald, 1953
[1980]), 97. The text will be hereafter cited as Scheler.
7 Wojtyla, Scheler, 196.

8 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Uber die Religion: Reden an die

Gebildeten unter ihren Veriichtern. Edited by Rudolf Otto (6th ed.

Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 256-8.
9 Pius XII, Address to the Italian Section of the Council of Euro-

pean Communities, December 6, 1957.

10 John Paul II, Discourse to Religious, Quito (Ecuador), January

30, 1985,/nsegnamenti 8/1 (1985), 273-7, §4.

11 John Paul II, Discourse to the Center of Liturgical Action, No-

vember 30, 1984,/nsegnamenti 7/2 (1984), 1340-3.

12 John Paul II, Prayer to Mary, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, September

8, 1985, Insegnamenti 8/2 (1985), 638-40. The German translation of

the Italian prayer does not reproduce the word "personalistic" but
has the word ego instead of person, "all egotistical striving for self-
realization."
13 Karol Wojtyla,Love and Responsibility, trans. H. T. Willetts (San

Francisco: Ignatius, 1960 [1993]), 133.

14 Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki. This

definitive text of the work established in collaboration with the au-

thor by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka for publication in the Reidel book
series Analecta Husserliana (Dordrecht, Boston, London: D. Reidel,
1969 [1979]), 22, note 8 printed on page 302.
15 See Charles De Koninck, "On the Primacy of the Common Good

against the Personalists,"Aquinas Review 4 (1997), 1-71, at 68, foot-

note 72.
16 Wojtyla, Scheler, 38.

17 Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Val-

ues: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism.

Translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. 5th ed.
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1973).
18 Wojtyla, Scheler, 75-6.

19 See Wojtyla, Scheler, 74-5.

20 Wojtyla, Scheler, 109.

217
 WALDSTEIN

21 Wojtyla, Scheler, 115.

22 Wojtyla, Scheler, 183-4.
23 Karol Wojtyla, "[The Good and Value] Das Gute und der

Wert,"in Lubliner Vorlesungen, ed. Juliusz Stroynowski (Stuttgart-

Degerloch: Seewald, 1956 [1981]), 105-249,244.
24 Karol Wojtyla, "The Person: Subject and Community,"in Per-

son and Community: Selected Essays (New York: P. Lang, 1976 [1993]),
219-61, 219-20. The paragraph containing this sentence was
omitted in the first English publication of this essay in Review of
Metaphysics 33 (1979/80), 273-308, perhaps because the judgment ex-
pressed in it is so categorically negative.
25 Wojtyla, Scheler, 196.
26 Pope John Paul II and Vittorio Messori, Crossing the Threshold of

Hope (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994), 142. See also Pope John Paul II,
Gift and Mystery: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of my Priestly Ordination
(New York: Doubleday, 1996), 23-5.
27 John Paul II, Homily at Segovia, Nov. 4, 1982.
28 Living Flame of Love, B 78-80. Saint John of the Cross, The Col-

lected WOrks, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, Revised ed. (Washington: ICS

Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), 705-6, emphasis
added.
29 Spiritual Canticle, stanza B 27.

30 John of the Cross, Works, 581-2, emphasis added.

31 Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 96 and 97, emphasis added.

32 Rocco Buttiglione, Karol WOjtyla: The Thought of the Man who Be-

came Pope John Paul II (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 45.
33 St. Thomas, De Virtutibus, 2.2 c.

34 Charles De Koninck, "In Defence of St. Thomas: A Reply to

Fr. Eschmann's Attack on the Primacy of the Common Good," Aquinas

Review 4 (1997 [1945]), 171-349,305-6.

218