Pope John Paul II: The Secret Letters

I suspect that tonight's BBC Panorama programme will be something of a non-story. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Wanda Poltawska (along with her husband, Andrez) were among Karol Wojtyla's closest academic collaborators. The former's English translation of The Acting Person has been criticised for presenting the thought of the original of the second Polish edition in a way that reduces the metaphysical content of the person who is the subject of action in favour of a more strongly phenomenological interpretation. The collaboration also appears to have extended to include Anna-Teresa's husband, who advised Pope John Paull II on economic matters, his area of academic expertise. Wanda Poltawska collaborated in the leadership of an institute for the family in Krakow, and afterwards in consultation with Pope John Paul II in Rome.

At heart, they are professional, academic collaborations. And that offers two points of context. It is not unusual for academics, visiting an overseas country for a conference, to stay as house guests of faculty of the academic institutions who have invited them. And the academic field that was/is phenomenology is characterised by a closeness of friendships arising from these collaborations that is very particular. As I write, I have, for example, just read the text of a letter from Edith Stein to her baptismal sponsor, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, written just after Edith's entry into Cologne Carmel. It was whilst staying at the Conrad-Martius' during a vacation that Edith read St Teresa's Life; but the close personal friendship between them began through their shared academic circle. There is nothing untoward in the thought that they would spend holidays together - Edith and her friends would go out for country walks, somewhat analogous to Karol Wojytla's camping holidays with his friends and collaborators.

To characterise or headline the correspondence as being "secret letters between Pope John Paul II and a married woman" therefore contains a suggestion that is somewhat misleading. As part of the BBC's own website coverage indicates:

Carl Bernstein, the veteran investigative journalist of Watergate fame, was the first writer to get some sense of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's importance in John Paul's life. He interviewed her for the book His Holiness in the 1990s.

"We are talking about Saint John Paul. This is an extraordinary relationship," he says. "It's not illicit, nonetheless it's fascinating. It changes our perception of him."

The BBC website coverage ahead of the Panorama programme is here and here. It is interesting to note that Ed Stourton admits that his suggestion that Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka declared that she had fallen in love with Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II is speculation on his part, his reading into the latter's letters what might have been in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's side of the correspondence (not seen by the BBC). According to a Guardian report, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka denied any romantic involvement with John Paul II; and a Vatican source has observed that the forthcoming programme is "more smoke than fire". Ed Stourton is very clear that nothing that he has discovered would have been a barrier to Pope John Paul II's canonisation.

I wonder whether, more than anything else, the letters will offer a model of what constitutes friendship and communion of persons for others to follow. For a generation characterised by the "relationship" that is fluid and without anything of objective permanence, a testimony of permanent friendship (and the nature of the person, and how persons enter into communion with each other, was a key concern of the particular phenomenological circle in which Karol Wojtyla, Edith Stein and the others moved) from this earlier generation might have something to offer. There might well be a PhD for someone in that particular study. The photographs accompanying the BBC coverage are perhaps interesting in this regard, too.

Darwin's Legacy - or an atheistic prejudice

During my day out and about on Wednesday, I took the July 2009 issue of Physics World with me to read on the train. I managed to read the article Darwin's Legacy, by Leonard Susskind, of the Physics Department at Stanford University.

Professor Susskind's thesis is roughly as follows. Darwin's idea of natural selection, later combined with the discovery of DNA and the role played by DNA in reproduction of living species, "replaced the magic of creation with the laws of probability and chemistry".

It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability - and not on the hand of God.

Professor Susskind suggests that the mechanisms of mutations and natural selection (Darwin and Wallace) combined with the sheer vastness of the number of possible biological designs offered by different arrangements of base pairs within DNA structures (Crick and Watson) are sufficient to create a human being.

Professor Susskind goes on to argue that modern cosmology contains a completely analagous understanding for the origins, not of life, but of the universe itself. The "strings" of string theory are a kind of DNA of space itself, and determine the properties of the universe; but there are a vast number of possible combinations of this DNA so that, even a universe that is as unlikely in its sheer specificity as the one we experience, can be brought about by quite a number of different combinations. This is combined with a principle of mutability in the inflationary theory of the universe - which allows the creation of new bits of universe to "fill in" as the universe expands. These new bits generally have the same string theory DNA as their nearby sections - but every so often a mutation occurs, the new bit has a different DNA and so a different set of values of physical constants and is effectively a different universe. Like the human being in biological evolution, our universe is just one among a whole vast array of universes, the one that happens to work for us.

The first point to be made in response to this article is that it is an example of scientism. This is the view that it is only explanations from the physical and biological sciences that are valid. This is a quite arbitrary and un-necessary narrowing of the range of action of human reason to just one field, and neglects the possibility of there being other ways in which human reason can validly operate. It is a philosophically un-educated view.

A second point is the use of the words "existence" and "exist"; and the use of the term "create" (with regard to the emergence of human being from the process of biological evolution) or "created" (with regard to the emergence of new bits of space, and with regard to the emergence from expansion of universes capable of supporting intelligent life). These are terms full of philosophical import; they imply the question of what it means to exist or not exist, to be brought into existence or to somehow simply have existence of itself. The resulting discussion is one to which the physical and biological sciences can undoubtedly make a contribution in that they reveal something of the features of existent being (though one must identify the transcendental features therein and not limit oneself to those attaching to the particular current theory of scientific thinking). But it is not a discussion that those sciences are, taken purely in themselves, competent to undertake. Human reason must needs range wider - and be more properly and completely scientific.

As an aside, one suspects that Professor Susskind, if he were re-printing his article, would carefully remove these "offending" words, perhaps replacing "create" with "produce", though I find it more difficult to suggest a replacement for the word "exist". It is thought provoking, though, that, perhaps even by accident, these words do appear in the article, and embed within it the question of existence that opens the way towards God. Removing the words does not abolish the question, it simply hides it. One might also add that William Paley's watch and contemporary notions of "intelligent design" are not by any means the best of thinking with regard to arguing for the existence of God, so Professor Susskind has picked easy targets to shoot down.

I think that one has to recognise an atheistic prejudice (in the academic sense, rather than any moral sense) underlying Professor Susskind's article. It presents as a deliberate project to establish a "natural explanation" of the universe, starting from the presumption that a supernatural creator is already excluded. This review of an earlier publication by Susskind bears this out (his "megaverse" seems to contain as many illusions as does the theory of "intelligent design"). The justification of this from Darwin is certainly spurious now, in the 21st century, whatever the history of thought in the 19th century might suggest.

Faith Matters Lecture 3: Who is Jesus?

Fr Gerald O'Collins SJ gave the third lecture in the "Faith Matters" series at Westminster Cathedral yesterday evening. The transcript of his lecture can be found here, on the website of Wesminster Diocese. This offered an opportunity for nostalgia, as I attended lectures on fundamental theology given by Fr O'Collins when I was a student in Rome (this isn't anything that special since Father taught at the Gregorian University for some 33 years so there are many a few of us who experienced his lectures at one time or another). Dr Anthony Towey, of St Mary's University College Strawberry Hill, who chaired the lecture, is also a contact from my past.

It was one of the questions at the end of the lecture that I think really focussed on what the lecture was about. This asked about how we can actually come to a genuine personal relationship with Jesus Christ today. This question is worthy of reflection in two ways: delineating exactly what the question means, and then providing a fully Catholic answer.

The "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" referred to in the question seems to me to indicate an attachment to Christ that has a spontaneity about it. By this I mean an attachment that seems to arise from within the individual concerned, and so to have a liveliness and energy about it that would not be the case for an attachment that is in some way achieved from outside (by a form of coercion or by an adaptation to surrounding culture or norms). There may be external factors that contribute to the situation of that attachment, but the core of it arises from within. It is spontaneous in perhaps three senses: the initiative is essentially internal to the individual, it is lively and energetic, and in being both of these it is also profoundly an act of freedom. In the Catholic Church, we can look with a certain envy towards Evangelical protestants to see this spontaneity; but it is also to be seen in the Church in the commitment of Catholics who participate in the life and activities of the new movements.

To introduce a Catholic answer to how this "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" can be achieved, let me try to describe a distinction made by Edith Stein in her doctoral thesis On Empathy. She distinguishes between a physical human body that is presented through sense perception (and which could be "my" body or the body of another) and the "living body", which is how my own body is presented to my consciousness, as something that is always "here" whereas other things, including other bodies, are always "there". The "living body" is therefore to be associated with the "I", the personal consciousness. In Edith's own words, the "I" or individual is:

.. a unified object inseparably joining together the conscious unity of an"I" and a physical body in such a way that each of them takes on a new character. The physical body occurs as a living body; consciousness occurs as the soul of the unified individual.

Edith Stein then continues her analysis to interpret the physical body of others (that we can percieve through the senses) as being also, for the other, a living body united with an "I" and capable of consciousness. Acts of empathy involve our ability to place ourselves, in a kind of secondary way, into the place of the physical body of the other so that we experience it as a living body, a centre of the others "I". Such acts represent inter-personal relationship. In her habilitation thesis, Edith Stein develops this idea of one-to-one personal relationship further in a study of relationships between individuals and communities. She suggests that communities have a kind of personal character, a kind of "I" of their own; they have a "spiritual sphere" with which the members of the community form a relationship. One might think of it as empathy between an individual and a community. What is interesting, though, is that the community has a "physical body" - it has physical members who can be seen, touched, heard - but it also has a kind of "living body" that cannot just be identified with the sum total of its individual physical members but in some way exists "in them" when the community undertakes activities of its life. And this "living body" has a kind of "soul" analagous to that which Edith Stein proposes for the "living body" of the individual person.

Now, where is this going in trying to answer our question about achieving a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ"? What I want to suggest is that our personal relationship with Jesus Christ is a personal relationship with his Church, the Catholic Church. Just as our empathic relations to other persons are mediated through a physical perceivable body, so with our relationship with Jesus Christ. It was first of all the physical body of Jesus, made flesh in Palestine; but it is for us now the physical body of his Church, under its aspect as a visible, tangible institution, and most fundamentally expressed in the hierarchical nature of the Church. It is the Church as institution, represented in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar by the figure of St Peter and his successors. But the physical body reveals to us a "living body", and the term "Mystical Body of Christ" applied to the Church is profoundly significant in this regard. Our empathetic relation to the Church leads us to enter into the space of this "living body", this "mystical body", which is the love of God. For von Balthasar, this aspect of the Church is represented by the figure of St John, the disciple whom Jesus loved.

The achieving of a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is about moving from an experience of the institutional body (which is good and utterly indispensable - and what is missing for the Evangelical protestant) to an experience of the "mystical body" (which cannot be separated from the institutional body, though the Evangelical protestant undoubtedly has some experience of this through an ever abundant grace from God and through a faithfulness to Scripture).

For most Catholics, this rather lofty reflection boils down to a very practical matter. It is about coming to see Sunday Mass as the awe inspiring presence and action of the love of God (St John) through the visible and audible forms of the liturgical texts and actions (St Peter). In this context, one can talk about meeting Jesus in the Scriptures, in the witness of the community of the faithful, in the priest who is most especially "in persona Christi" at the celebration of Mass, and in reception of Holy Communion. These meetings are all expressed in the liturgical form.

All these forms of meeting with Jesus Christ need to be lived out "again", outside of the liturgy itself, so that they become part of our lives and in turn bring us back to the liturgy with the threefold spontaneity to which I referred above. We should not be surprised if a parish that has no devotional life outside of the liturgy - Scripture study or prayer groups, Eucharistic Adoration, etc - has an experience of the liturgy that is little more than formalistic.

For Hans Urs von Balthasar, the figure in the Church who joins hierarchical structure (St Peter) to charismatic love (St John) is the Mother of the Lord, the Virgin Mary. Mary is a figure who represents the whole of the Church, in both its "physical" and its "mystical" aspects. A simply pietistic Marian devotion is, I think, of limited value. I prefer the notion of a "Marian character", which should spread through every aspect of Christian life, and not be an "add-on devotion". The ecclesial nature of our relationship with Jesus Christ is in this way at once also a Marian nature.

It is very interesting to recognise features that are almost universal among the new movements in the Church, the locus in which many people are able to achieve the "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" to which the question referred: a Marian charism, Eucharistic Adoration, reflection on the Scriptures and on their application to daily living, and faithfulness to the hierarchy of the Church.

Faith Matters Lecture 1: the existence of God

I went yesterday evening to Wesminster Cathedral (the Cathedral hall, to be exact) for the first in the series of lectures entitled Faith Matters. This was quite interesting in a number of ways.

Without any deliberate foresight, I ended up sat next to a Christian Brother, from their community in Twickenham. It turned out he had attended, as a pupil, a school called St Joseph's College, Blackpool. The school does not exist any more, having been incorporated into what was known as St Mary's RC High School, but now appears to be St Mary's Catholic College. The school website shows almost no indication of the Christian Brothers at all, so I am not linking to it. I attended the school some twenty years later than him. Small world.

The lecture was by Dr Peter Vardy, of Heythrop College. Dr Vardy's slides can be found from the home page of the lecture series. Points of interest:

1. It was interesting to see modern science at the centre of the discussion of the existence of God. A problem with discussing science in this sort of context is that you can end up using a kind of watered down or "populist" science. I would have liked, for example, to have seen some advertance to the work of Stanley Jaki, who is particularly acute when it comes to looking at the significance of science for philosophy and religious belief. A thoroughly post-modern outlook would lack the faith in science that is necessary if science is to be discussed as a key component in answering the question about God, so it is quite significant that it did not seem out of place to be holding such a discussion.

2. It would be wrong to say that a reference to metaphysics (ie the philosophical study of what is means for things to be) was absent from the lecture. On the other hand, a more explicit advertance to metaphysics would have cast Dr Vardy's references to St Thomas "five ways" in a rather different light. It would also have allowed a notion of analogy some play, too.

3. Slide 51 contains the apparently contradictory statements that God's existence cannot be proven, but that God's existence provides a very persuasive ultimate explanation of the world that we know. "Not proofs, but very good pointers" is Dr Vardy's phrase with regard to proofs of the existence of God. What might have been looked for here, instead of the generalised reference to religious experience (in an individualised way) as a pointer toward's God's existence, is a reference to a rather more rigorous phenomenology of religion. It is quite right to say that a "proof" of the existence of God may not convince someone; but if a "proof" is correct, it still remains, in the order of truth or of being, a "proof". The idea of analogy has something to contribute at this point, as has a phenomenology of religious faith, in enabling us to understand how the person comes or does not come to believe in the existence of God when faced with the arguments for his existence.

4. I must admit to having been left with a latent sense of unease at the willingness of Dr Vardy to so "no" in answer to the question as to whether the existence of God can be proven. But this willingness on his part has a double aspect. One aspect refers to the substantiveness of the argument itself, while the other refers to the receptiveness of the person to the force of the argument (the proof that may be correct, but does not convince the individual), and you are never quite sure which aspect a statement like Dr Vardy's refers to most. The philosophical method of realist phenomenology, with its openness to "the things in themselves", appears to me to provide a way of understanding "proofs" in their genuine rigour as "proofs" whilst at the same time recognising in its understanding of the nature of faith itself that not all will be "convinced" by the proofs. I feel that there was a potential here that was only hinted at in the lecture (see slide 53) and which could have been developed much further.

Creationism in schools

The end of the week saw a discussion in the UK about creationism in schools, prompted by some remarks by the Director of Education at The Royal Society. The Royal Society is (I think) the oldest of the learned societies in the UK. Exactly what Professor Reiss said I have not been able to find, so I do not know whether the discussion was actually prompted by his remarks or by the media response to them.


The gist of the discussion was that creationism should be allowed to be discussed in science lessons in schools, and that science teachers should be able to manage such a discussion in their classroom. Such a discussion in the media nearly always ends up begging key questions, key questions that usually relate to defining exactly what your terms mean.


I take it that creationism is a teaching that the world was - literally - created in six days, in the form described in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, and at a time determined by the calculations of the passage of time in the Biblical accounts. This teaching is problematical in a number of ways:

(1) in its understanding of the nature of Sacred Scripture, not just as a question of how different types of Scriptural literature are to be understood, but as to how Sacred Scripture needs to be integrated into a living tradition that engages with the surrounding culture;

(2) in its understanding of the nature of human reason and the ability of that reason to come to firm knowledge of the world around it, particularly in the physical sciences but also in other spheres of knowledge;

(3) its lack of precision in understanding creation as an act of "bringing into being" and "sustaining in being", which can be distinguished from physical processes of development in the material that is thereby created (what might be referred to in a kind of shorthand as "evolution"); and

(4) in its inability to be referred to an authoritative teaching authority that can define that this is or is not a correct Christian understanding.

All of these problems arise from the origin of the idea of "creationism" in non-denominationally oriented Pentecostal/Evangelical house or community churches.


Unfortunately, creationism also causes a problem in public debate for mainstream Christian denominations such as Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. This is because their doctrine of creation - in the sense of (3) above, and which is quite compatible with "evolution" understood as development and progress in the physical world - is confused by secularist thinkers (deliberately?) with "creationism". The presence of any teaching of a doctrine of creation in schools is therefore attacked, particularly if that teaching is suggested as being compatible with the teaching of science. Secularists will apply the word "unscientific" to any teaching of a doctrine of creation - fair enough, if by that they mean that it is not something arrived at by the methods of study appropriate of the physical sciences, but quite wrong if by that they mean that it is contrary to a right use of human reason. Mainstream Christian denominations need to wise up to this problem, perhaps by teaching anew and more vividly their understanding of creation in relation to science.

So, in terms of the media discussion of recent days: Should the discussion of creationism be banned from science lessons in schools? Well, no, in the sense that any direction to "ban a topic" does not relate to the reality of the wide range of things that just come into conversations in the classroom. Should creationism be taught in science lessons in schools? Tricky ... I see no reason why the methods of study of science should not be brought to bear on the idea of creationism. I do not think that creationism can stand up to the evidence of human reason as it has developed its understanding of science ("evolution"), but I think those are the terms in which it should be addressed in the classroom, not in terms of a doctrinaire opposition to it. As in the teaching of any topic in any subject area, this needs to be done in a way that is appropriate to the level and abilities of the pupils in the class, so would need to be handled very differently in Year 7 than in Year 13. Should a more mainstream doctrine of creation be taught in the science lesson? As above, but I think in this case the scientific evidence will need to recognise that the idea of creation needs human reason to engage in a wider way than just that appropriate to the physical sciences, and scientific reasoning will need to recognise its just boundaries.

I heard a most interesting side comment during the discussions which took place on the radio. This was during an interview, I forget now whether it was Today (ie a morning current affairs programme) or PM (the early evening current affairs programme). The speaker was opposing the idea that creationism should be discussed in science lessons, and, in passing, observed that "religion was itself an outcome of evolution". Now, I found this very interesting because, rather than this being something that would belittle the import of religion for the human person which is what I think the speaker intended, it opens up the possibility of man being of his nature religious. We then have to engage in a proper study of this phenomenon that is "religion" to find out exactly what it is, unless of course an anti-religious prejudice limits us to a sociological study that puts it all down to "social construct" or stops us from undertaking any study of the question at all. The realist phenomenology in the early years of the 20th century has a literature on the religious nature of the human being which would need to be included in any honest study of this subject.

SSPX, scholasticism and phenomenology

The Sensible Bond has posted about the position of the Society of St Pius X, the society attached to the Tridentine liturgy and previously led by Archbishop Lefebvre. As someone who has not followed events involving the Society closely, this seems to be a well informed and well considered post.

The dialogue in the "comments" is also of interest. One aspect of that dialogue refers to the place of Thomist or scholastic philosophy, and asks about the insights that can be gained from phenomenology and personalism. Since St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) is my favourite saint, I do think phenomenology has a lot to offer... but there is perhaps the need to "return to the sources" of that movement in philosophy, to the realist phenomenology of people like Edith Stein. It is interesting that Edith and her friends at the time saw in this realist phenomenology a "new Thomism"; that many of them were Christian believers prompted Edith's first recognition of religion as being a subject worthy of philosophical study. A significant subject of study was the human person, and the religious nature of the person featured in that.

I feel that a realist phenomenology, as a methodology, can provide the means for the dialogue with secularists and atheists that Cardinal Murphy O'Connor was seeking in his recent lecture. It involves a "stepping back" from any previously held positions (a temporary, methodological neutrality, not a rejection); and it expects human reason to be applied to the full range of human experience (not just the physical sciences!) to determine essentially what those experiences are made up of. Seen as a search for the truth of things - and this is how the early phenomenologists saw it - this then leads to adherence to the truth that has been achieved. Or, to use a religious term, "conversion". In the early twentieth century, the context for this was an anxiety to overcome the gulf between our knowing and the truth of things that was perceived in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy; in the first years of the twenty first century, the challenge is that covered by the generic term "post-modernism" which gives a similar experience of an unbridgeable gap between our knowing and things themselves.