By IHE Scholar Thomas Holman
Pope Saint John Paul II’s fascination with the human person began early in his life. From the beginning of his priestly ministry through the end of his storied pontificate, the relationality of the human person remained a central theme. His dogged struggles against the evils of the various forms of collectivism that gripped his home country of Poland are by no means unrelated to this preoccupation. Pope Benedict XVI, who experienced Nazi totalitarianism firsthand in Germany, also emphasized the irreducible relationality of the human person. The relationality of the human person, as shown by these two popes of the twentieth century, is crucial not only in a historical context but also in healing our fractured communities in the present day.
Insights from non-Catholic thinkers suggest that these ideas — the human person, relationality, and social life — are not limited to the realm of theology. Firsthand experience of the evils of totalitarianism has brought many to reflections largely in line with Catholic luminaries. The work of Hannah Arendt exhibits a similar concern with relationality, though she expresses it in different words. Arendt was a secular Jew who left Germany in 1933. After narrowly escaping internment in a concentration camp, she emigrated to the United States in 1941. She spent the remainder of her life attempting to theoretically unpack the crises that had defined her youth. Her celebrated book The Origins of Totalitarianism was among the first postwar attempts at a theoretical analysis of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, while her later book The Human Condition laid out a more general political theory in light of her insights on human relationality.
Arendt’s analysis in Origins of Totalitarianism turns in part on her understanding of loneliness, which might be accurately described as a breakdown of relationality. She points out that a collapse of communal life and the resulting loneliness among the masses in Europe after World War I opened millions of hearts and minds to the “ruthless logic” of the pseudo-scientific Nazi and Communist ideologies. These alternative realities offered ready-made explanations for the disorienting and often inexplicable facts of life that characterized these troubled times. Arendt draws a frightening connection between these experiences of loneliness and confusion and the advent of totalitarianism.
Although Arendt’s analysis is prescient, that offered by Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II cuts even deeper. Both Benedict and John Paul agreed with Arendt that recovering the relational aspect of our being was necessary to safeguard human life and the integrity of political and social life. Firsthand experience of totalitarianism gave all three thinkers a deeper appreciation of the relational aspect of human beings, which is essential to a truly flourishing political society. But Benedict and John Paul recognized that our relationality as persons points to the Triune God. Moreover, it is made clearer when contemplated in light of the Word Made Flesh (Gaudium et Spes 22). Our relationality is not just horizontal but also vertical — we relate not just with each other but also with God.
As Christians, our sense of community is always grounded in a personal relationship with Christ. This July provides a special opportunity to renew our relationships with Christ, as we commemorate His Precious Blood. To paraphrase Pope Benedict XVI, our point of departure ought always to be the person of Christ, rather than a political program or smartphone app. He is the one who first suffered for us, and He is the divine source of love for our neighbor. In loving others through the One who first loved us, we enter further into our irreducibly relational nature that the world so often tries to conceal.
