The present age is a time of great controversy about the human being, controversy about the very meaning of human existence, and thus about the nature and significance of the human being. We know that such situations in history have frequently led to a deeper reflection on Christian truth as a whole, as well as on particular aspects of it. That is also the case today. The truth about the human being, in turn, has a distinctly privileged place in this whole process. After nearly twenty years of ideological debate in Poland, it has become clear that at the center of this debate is not cosmology or philosophy of nature but philosophical anthropology and ethics: the great and fundamental controversy about the human being. (Karol Wojtyla, The Person: Subject and Community)
The case for peace, a real and lasting peace, can only be made on the grounds of an authentic personalism and on the moral and political edifices that are constructed from its foundation. Personalism, without the defects of individualism or the excesses of collectivism, alone takes full accounting of the nature of man, of his history and anthropology, and of the highest moral aspirations that lead to true human flourishing. Without recognition of the worth of every individual, or by denying man's integral need for community, war-making, coercion and domination will never cease to be overwhelming temptations for the powers that be.
The foundations of the modern liberal order rest upon the philosophical concept of the "individual". Much ink has been spilled over this, both pro and con, and competing systems arise to challenge its claim to rationality, such as collectivism and communitarianism. Christian thinkers find in individualism the seeds of the destruction of the family, of communities, and of the whole social order due to the fact that man is broken away from his relations and is reduced to a rootless cosmopolitan. MacIntyre regards the conception of the individual to be a modern fiction, a functional idea that does not describe reality, but rather rationalizes new social systems, such as democracy, the sciences and capitalism.
The champions of individualism, however, disregard such a dramatic reading into the idea of the individual. The real danger, says the individualist, is to disregard individuals! Once we disregard the individual, we are forced into the realm of the collective, of the aggregate, of reducing the individual to a disposable part of the all-too-important whole. Professor F.A. Hayek would contrast true and false individualism, saying:
True individualism is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society.
Catholicism and collectivism, in my estimation, are irreconcilable. Collectivist ideology is what leads states to mass genocide, communities to segregation, and families to feuds, because the dignity of the human person is not factored in the moral calculus of those with power. Collectivism predicates to the whole class, group or some other aggregate the properties of despised individuals. Such societies feel justified in destroying an individual, no matter how innocent, because doing so may be most profitable to others. It is the individualist who has no room for racism or nationalism or other such bigotry, because epistemologically he cannot and does not regard human beings as just a part of a whole, as a unit in a collective, for each individual is the whole.
Chesterton believed that the modern world is simply living off the inheritance of the intellectual fruits of the Church. It is in this light that I want to touch on the basis of a Catholic individualism that has existed for years and is wholly orthodox. This theological concept is personalism. As Pope John Paul II said in his remarks to the United Nations in 1995:
Modern totalitarianism has been, first and foremost, an assault on the dignity of the person, an assault which has gone even to the point of denying the inalienable value of the individual's life.
If individualism is the sterilized and secularized fruit of the Church's thought, then it would be the theological and philosophical understanding of the dignity of the human person that forms its richer whole. The idea of personhood transcends mere political or legal parameters, reaching an anthropological dimension that individualism or collectivism fails to reach. Personalism, in the words of Dietrich von Hildebrand when speaking about Truth, "lies not between two errors, but above them."
The human person finds himself neither a herd animal (Marx), nor a lone predator (Nietzsche), but rather each human person is created, formed, matured and perfected only through interaction with another. As Hans Urs von Balthasar would assert: "Now man exists only in dialogue with his neighbor. The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother." The babe first discovers the other, the "You" before he ever discovers the subject, the self, the "I". Therefore, it is truly interaction that opens up the realm of human flourishing to each individual.
What is a person? Aristotle would define a man metaphysically as a rational animal, his genus and specific difference. It was Boethius, a classical Christian philosopher, who would define a person as "an individual substance of a rational nature." Thus, a human person's rational nature is concretized in his belonging to the genus animal. Commenting on this, Karol Wojtyla would say,
The person is a concrete man, the individua substantia, of the classical Boethian definition. The concrete is in a way tantamount to the unique, or at any rate, to the individualized. The concept of the person is broader and more comprehensive than the concept of the "individual," just as the person is more than individualized nature. the person would be an individual whose nature is rational- according to Boethius' full definition.
We can begin to see how an individual is only a half-truth. The fuller explanation of our moral foundation for peace is personalism, not just individualism. Why? Because it acknowledges both the unique dignity of the one and the desire for solidarity with the many. A person is a being-in-relation. A person shares in the unique form of existence whereby the person is a subject, a someone, and not merely an object, not merely a something. This point was made by Karol Wojtyla in the opening chapter of his book, Love and Responsibility, and also by Pope Benedict XVI, when he said in his message on peace:
As one created in the image of God, each individual human being has the dignity of a person; he or she is not just something, but someone, capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, free self-giving and entering into communion with others. At the same time, each person is called, by grace, to a covenant with the Creator, called to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his place. (# 2, Message for the celebration World Day of Peace)
Person as Christian Concept
Personhood is a Christian concept, developed far beyond the Greek philosophers who were only concerned with understanding nature. The Church Fathers, especially of the early Ecumenical Councils, needed a concept that was full enough to explain the two most important doctrines of the Christian Faith: the Trinity and the Incarnation. How can God be Father, Son and Spirit without being three gods? How can Jesus Christ be fully God and fully Man, without being two Jesusesessss? The Church Fathers solved this dilema through furthering the notion of "nature," and through the concept of "personhood".
The theological basis of the dignity of the human person is the revelation that man, male and female, is made in the image and likeness of God (Cf. Genesis 1:26-27). Pope John Paul II structures this essential characteristic of human nature, that our personhood is relational, in delivering his landmark opus, the Theology of the Body. He demonstrates that both the glory of God and our call to loving union (communion) is expressed in the language of the body, in the physical and spiritual dimensions of our humanity. He labors at great length to demonstrate how, written in the human body, is the call to communion with another. This means the nature of humanity is the finite, even fragmented, image of the divine.
Pope Benedict, building upon this cornerstone stone of the imago Dei, applies it to the desire for peace:
A fundamental element of building peace is the recognition of the essential equality of human persons springing from their common transcendental dignity. Equality on this level is a good belonging to all, inscribed in that natural “grammar” which is deducible from the divine plan of creation; it is a good that cannot be ignored or scorned without causing serious repercussions which put peace at risk. The extremely grave deprivation afflicting many peoples, especially in Africa, lies at the root of violent reactions and thus inflicts a terrible wound on peace.
If human education and fulfillment can only come to be through interaction with other persons, and if we are truly made in God's image and likeness, then certain amazing conclusions follow about our nature and the nature of the Trinity. The focus falls upon the tension between the One and the Many, between the individual and the community, resolved ultimately in God's inner life. Summing up von Balthasar's theological project, Joel Garver reaches these conclusions about God and the nature of the human person:
First, since we exist only in interpersonal dialogue, God Himself must exist as interpersonal dialogue. Speech—the Word—is of His essence. Second, since God is truly God and in no need of the creature, He must be the true, the good, and the beautiful in Himself. So the analogous manifestation of these realities in the creature is only partial and finite. For example, for us as humans our unity as humans could either be that each of us is part of one humanity or that each of us is an individual. Only in the Trinity is such partial unity resolved since God’s unity is precisely in the individuality of the Persons.
Immanuel Kant formulated what is known as the negative phrasing of the personalistic norm. His formulation of the basic moral principle is "Persons should always be treated as their own ends and should never be merely used as an instrumental means." We should never reduce the person to a mere object for our using. Karol Wojtyla, in Love and Responsibility, would state it positively, "In its positive form the personalist norm says that the person is a good toward which the only proper and adequate attitude is love." Professor John Crosby explains the personalistic norm by saying "If we are really going to respect persons, then we must step back from them, take our heavy hands off them, and let them be, that is, live as self-determining beings... we treat persons as their own end."
This point cannot be stated more loudly! It is not permissible to coerce an individual person because God Himself has given to each and every human person the power of self-determination, of self-creation, of self-donations. We are called to not only life with others, but to live for others, but making such a gift of our selves to others is our choice to make. Love cannot be forced. It must always be free and always be true to the dignity of the human persons involved. Karol Wojtyla goes further: not even God can treat another person as a mere means to an end, for
on the part of God, indeed, it is totally out of the question, since, by giving man an intelligent and free nature, He has thereby ordained that each man alone will decide for himself the ends of his activity, and the not be a blind tool of someone else's ends. Therefore, if God intends to direct man toward certain goals, He allows him, to begin with, to know those goals, so that he may make them his own and strive toward them independently.
War ceases to identity the enemy as a human person, worthy of respect and even love, but instead reduces them to an object, a hurdle, to my or my country's prosperity. Disregard of the individual for the sake of vague rhetoric about "the greater good" has become the ideological buttress of utilitarian violence. How many people are unjustly arrested, detained and tortured during the Bush and Obama regimes for the sake of accuring potentially critical information? How many innocent non-combatants were deliberately killed, regarded as collateral damage, for the sake of this or that high valued target? Too many.
Utilitarianism, which is the systematic using of other people as instruments for my conception of what is the greater good, is always a moral failure. Utilitarianism "defines morality not in terms of what is good but of what is advantageous," says Pope John Paul II at the U.N., and it "often have devastating political consequences, because it inspires an aggressive nationalism on the basis of which the subjugation, for example, of a smaller or weaker nation is claimed to be a good thing solely because it corresponds to the national interest."
In developing the points of argument for his address on the World Day of Peace in 2007, Pope Benedict drew his audience's attention to two main obstacles to true and lasting peace: ideologies with both anthropological conceptions "that contain the seeds of hostility and violence" and theological conceptions of God "that would encourage intolerance and recourse to violence against others. This is a point which must be clearly reaffirmed: war in God's name is never acceptable!" This is when theology breaks down into ideology, when a particular conception of God "is at the origin of criminal acts."
The second obstacle to peace in the address of the Pope, is the "indifference as to what constitutes man's true nature. Many of our contemporaries actually deny the existence of a specific human nature and thus open the door to the most extravagant interpretations of what essentially constitutes a human being." If human nature is the basis of human rights, then one can see how a weak conception of man fails to support human rights and fails to protect the powerless from those with might. Such a weak conception of man "hinders authentic dialogue and opens the way to authoritarian impositions," that is, violent coercion and totalitarianism. Human rights cannot be grounded on a weak notion of the person, on a relativistic basis, for rights make absolute claims on our actions. "Only if they are grounded in the objective requirements of the nature bestowed on man by the Creator, can the rights attributed to him be affirmed without fear of contradiction."
It is thus the moral duty of every Christian to treat all people in accord with their imago Dei, leading to greater solidarity between the nations, regions, peoples, families and individuals. "Peace is thus also a task demanding of everyone a personal response consistent with God's plan." If you want peace, love and respect the individual human person.
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