In 1942, Karol Wojtyla had been accepted into the clandestine seminary being run by Archbishop Adam Stefan Sapieha of Kraków. In an extended interview with the French journalist André Frossard, John Paul II confessed, perhaps a littler sheepishly, that his first encounter with philosophy had been an unpleasant one. Revisiting that time and place may help us understand something of Wojtyla’s earlier experiences among the philosophers, which will then help us understand his walk among the philosophers as the Bishop of Rome. Before he came to the world’s attention, Wojtyla had hammered out his philosophy on the anvil of his experience as a man, a priest, and a Pole - and did so at a time, and in a place, where the stakes were high indeed.
But perhaps I can bring something else of use - a biographer’s perspective that locates Karol Wojtyla’s philosophical work within the broader context of his singular life.
#Karol wotja professional
Marx famously remarked that, while philosophers analyzed the world, he intended to change it Karol Wojtyla did both, and the changes he helped advance were the embodiment in history of the understandings he had achieved - as those understandings reflected the Truth which had seized his life and his imagination.Īs I am not a professional philosopher, I cannot bring a specialist’s perspective to the work of this conference. Wojtyla’s philosophical convictions also had a profound impact on the history of our times - “solidarity,” for Wojtyla, was a way of understanding authentic human being-in-the-world before it was a banner erected in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Yet this autodidact philosopher, who liked (as he put it) to do philosophy from the standpoint of Adam, seeing the world afresh, drew the professional respect of Thomists and phenomenologists, Catholics and agnostics, classicists, medievalists, moderns, and perhaps even a few post-moderns. His philosophical masterwork remained unfinished. He never taught as a full-time faculty member in a department of philosophy and never held a rank higher than docent, the lowest on the Polish academic ladder. He never took an undergraduate or graduate course in philosophy. His singularity extended to Karol Wojtyla’s life among the philosophers. John Paul II was the most visible man in human history, and some two billion people participated, in one way or another, in his funeral yet he had a deeply ingrained sense of privacy and his most intense experiences were ones he couldn’t describe, for they took place in a dialogue with God that was, literally, beyond words. An orphan before he reached his majority, he nevertheless came to embody paternity for millions of people in a world bereft of fatherhood. Karol Józef Wojtyla was a singular man: an intellectual with a deep respect for popular piety a mystic who was an active sportsmen for decades a celibate who wrote with great insight about human sexuality a priest and bishop who marveled for decades at the gift of his priesthood and episcopate - and whose closest and oldest friends included lay men and women he had first met when they were university students.
**On December 1, EPPC Senior Fellow George Weigel delivered the keynote address at a Duquesne University conference exploring “The Phenomenology of John Paul II.” Weigel’s address follows.**
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