Religion & Law

Many thanks to Fr. Araujo for his insightful and moving description of moral theology. I want to take the opportunity to suggest the complexity and nuance of John Paul II's personalism by expanding on one point. When John Paul II was critical of "individualism," he was not devaluing the person in any way. Quite the contrary. For him, the uniqueness of each person is tied to the imagio dei and thereby to the intrinsic dignity of the person. He used the term "individualism" to refer to what he believed to be an error in contemporary thought. By viewing the individual as essentially an autonomous consciousness, the modern conception is blind to the unique essences of individual persons.  John Paul II argued that the person must be understood as a union of being and action (suppositum). Traditional metaphysics explores objective being. But, the subjectivity of human action must also be understood. Human acts are unique when they results from the capacity to reflect on lived experience, and for this reason John Paul II argued that the unique essence of each person is a dynamic interplay of subjective and objective. Contemporary "individualism" reduces the person to an atomistic subjectivity, self-aware of its own mental objects (*intentionality"). Kenneth Schmitz calls this the "secularization of the interior." It is a distortion of human nature. Part of what is lost in the reduction are the capacity for ineffable experiences--ones that have no particular mental object (like a generalized feeling of joy), and the capacity to be aware of absences that point beyond the mundane (as when St. John of the Cross speaks of the "darkness of God"). John Paul II's moral theology sought to bring together traditional metaphysics and an account of the subjective that included the non-intentional in a complete moral anthropology. He celebrates the uniqueness of each person, while recognizing the common metaphysical structure of human nature.