Worthy Read: "The grandeur of the human person lies in that creativity which is struck from the fire of the Creator himself."

Pope (St.) John Paul II (1985) | Wikipedia/Rob Croes

Another fascinating read supplied by Mr. George Weigel. Read the entire essay at the link below.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/08/st-john-paul-ii-a-centenary-reflection

For Wojtyła, of course, the Big Questions were also religious questions. The search for answers can lead to false gods or the true God, but it will lead somewhere. In the agony of the twentieth century, which he knew from his experiences under Nazism and communism, Wojtyła saw the lethal results of worshipping false gods. Surveying the European cultural scene in the years after the Second Vatican Council, he sensed how contempt for biblical religion had led to nihilism and a diminishment of the human spirit. And like St. Paul, he wanted to turn humanity’s religious instinct toward the true God who alone is worthy of worship—the God who, being worshipped, enlarges rather than diminishes humanity.

In order to do that, Christianity had to clarify who this God is.

God is not a rival. Wojtyła’s interest in phenomenology as a philosophical method is well-known. Yet while he appreciated phenomenology’s determination to liberate philosophy from subjectivism and reconnect it to “the things themselves,” his philosophical work was grounded in the realism of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, which expressed what Athens had taught the West: There is something properly called the truth, and we can know it. The Thomistic dimension of this philosophical foundation is apparent when, in the third ­Athenian meditation, Wojtyła reminds his readers that the God of the Bible is not some super-Being in competition with the beings of this world (the mistake made by the atheistic humanists of the nineteenth century and replicated by the New ­Atheists of today). Rather, God is Being itself. The God who identified himself to Moses and Israel as “i am who am” (Exod. 3:14) is the philosophers’ ipsum esse ­subsistens: that-which-makes-all-other-being-­possible. And because this God is not in competition with “other beings,” we can know God as what Wojtyła calls “the inner mystery of every creature” and especially of the human person—as the one in whom, as St. Paul put it to the Athenian Stoics and Epicureans, “we live and move and have our being.”

Here, Wojtyła believed, was an antidote to modernity’s dumbing down of the human person. On the Areopagus, Paul subtly challenged the Athenians to think of themselves as grander than they had imagined, by encountering the “unknown God” who makes himself known in history and enters history to lead humanity to its true destiny. This Pauline conviction would be at the center of John Paul’s papal magisterium for more than a quarter-century. In numerous variations on one majestic theme, he would tell the denizens of the late modern and postmodern world, “You are far more than a bundle of twitching desires. Permit me—and the biblical tradition—to remind you that the grandeur of the human person lies in that creativity which is struck from the fire of the Creator himself.”

On the Areopagus of the postmodern world, Christianity must raise the sights and aspirations of a humanity accustomed to looking down. That, Wojtyła understood, requires a fresh consideration of the meaning of freedom.