Nov 6 Wed
What is more important, the person or the collective?
“Personalism” is just a word, but like many words, it has at least one meaning and can convey truth, or falsehood. But mere words cannot express the whole, infinite truth. That is why doctrine seems to “evolve” — Doctrines don’t “evolve” in the sense that species are said to evolve. They don’t become different from what they were. They may be expressed more clearly, in time.
Personalism, advocated by Saint John Paul II, offers a means to escape the controversy between individualism and collectivism: placing the person as the focus.
Around 1960, Karol Wojtyla explained: “The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”
“Racism” begins depriving all its victims of their personhood. And what begins with deprivation of personhood, ends in the Crucifixion of Christ.
Personalism offers an account of the person that is unambiguously religious: “Man is the only creature on earth that God willed for its own sake; he cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” [Second Vatican Council]
Karol Wojtyla offered both a clarification of the social doctrines of the Church, and a distinction between Christianity and the “enlightened humanism” that had come to replace it.
His was a way to remove Socialism or Collectivism (the person does not count, only the group) permanently from the social teaching of the Church, without surrendering to radical Individualism (the individual is isolated from social concerns).
It marvelously distinguished the superficial “progress” of technology and affluence, from genuine progress towards human realization in the Kingdom of God. And it is the modern world that needs transforming, and it is the Church’s mission to transform.
The goals of Personalism remain timely.
John Paul II was not an accommodationist. He made his appeal to Christ.
The conception of Personalism was, we may say, the means through which Christ responded: he talked to PERSONS. The world should throw off what has become its guidelines or governing illusions: the illusion of Collectivism, and the alternative illusion of Individualism, in which it is enmeshed.
Men express the ideals of “equality” and “freedom,” — neither being fully comprehensible in themselves, but also, neither making sense when mixed.
For in both cases, “man does not live for bread alone.” The two extremes proceed alike from a materialist conception of human destiny, from which our modernity differs and stands out.
For a moment people became tired of illusions, and aware of their hunger for truth. But then, somehow, the illusions began to make their befogging recovery.
We are drifting ever outward. We have taken ourselves to sea. We are, in effect, praying for some sight of land. “Personalism” offers at least a recollection of where the headlands were.
Excerpts from David Warren
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