John Paul II on the natural purity of women

From Love and Responsibility, pp. 176-177:

Since sensuality, which is oriented towards 'the body as an object of enjoyment' is in general stronger and more importunate in men, modesty and shame - the tendency to conceal sexual values specifically connected with the body - must be more pronounced in girls and women.  At the same time they are less aware of sensuality and its natural orientation in men, because in them emotion is usually stronger than sensuality, and sensuality tends to be latent in emotion.  This is why woman is often said to be 'purer' than man.  This tells us nothing about the virtue of chastity.  Woman is purer in as much as she experiences more powerfully the value of 'a human being of the other sex', the value of a sort of psychological 'masculinity'.

Too true - that sums up the psychological difference between men and women right there.  Bless the Lord for creating women!

(Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility,  San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1993, pp. 176-177)

An Eschatological Romance, or The Jeweler's Shop Part IV: Its Theological Conclusion

In this post, I shall show how the scene discussed in the previous post - where the Jeweler weighs the rings - discloses the true nature of Wojtyla's play as an eschatological romance, and thereby uncovers an otherwise hidden narrative structure - the narrative of all of salvation history - demonstrating that even this play sub specie aeternitatis conveys and reveals the Word like a natural sacrament because it is centered around a narrative.

The scene takes place not just that particular moment when a piece of metal is being measured. The play is not about just the lives of its characters. Time and eternity meet in the eyes of the jeweler, and The Jeweler’s Shop is an eschatological romance. The wedding feast which is always anticipated but never mentioned is the Masque of the Seven Days; it is the ball of the winged season, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the feast for which Wisdom hath built herself a house.

Yet the text of play indicates that this beatific feast is already present now, though not in its consummation. It is present, of course, in sanctifying grace; but also by virtue of the elevation of matrimony to a sacrament, it is present in love. In the chorus’ song about nuptial union, wine - the Biblical symbol of the Heavenly feast - becomes a symbol of love, and of the very being of the lovers.

Wine also sparkles. Wine is a thing.
Let it live in the other man,
man - is love. Teresa and Andrew
wine, wine -
radiate mutually into each other’s lives.　

The entire married life is, in fact, nothing but a symbol of the spiritual life, and by the grace of the sacrament of matrimony, the married life converges into the spiritual life and becomes a means of sanctification. Wojtyla devotes all of Act II - “The Bridegroom” - into exploring the spiritual life of a woman, Anna, in an unhappy marriage. It is not her marriage that is at the root of her unhappiness, however, but the state of her soul. Her unhappiness is ontological, not just emotional; that is, it permeates her entire being -

Bitterness is a taste of food and drink,
it is also an inner taste - a taste of the soul
when it has suffered disappointment or disillusionment.
That taste permeates everything we happen
to say, think or do; it permeates even our smile.

“It was as if Stefan [her husband] had ceased to be in me,” she later says. Her situation is analogous to one who was baptized but then lost sanctifying grace. Anna became married, yet in her marriage the two are no longer one flesh. The result is a profound loneliness and alienation. Having separated herself from him who is united to her ontologically and indissolubly, Anna has “disinherited her self”. The divorcee is no longer even single.

For Anna to be healed, she must return to the Bridegroom. The bridegroom is both her husband, in the literal sense of interpretation, but also at a deeper level the divine Bridegroom. Her unhappy marriage is not simply an event in life of one of six billion individuals; it is the eschaton of a soul. “The Bridegroom will come shortly” - yet Anna remains a foolish virgin. She waits for a perfect bridegroom to come along, while neglecting her true Bridegroom - her husband. The man in the street identified as the “bridegroom” is not actually her husband, but looks very similar, bringing Anna to the realization that she must see Christ in her husband, and even to see her husband in Christ. She sees the Bridegroom, Christ - but He reveals Himself as her husband.

Anna, a lost soul, cannot save herself or even recognize the cosmological significance of her situation without divine grace. The man who guides her back to salvation calls himself Adam or “man”. He is not the Jeweler, but seems faintly reminiscent of him; he appears out of nowhere as a “chance interlocutor”, but knows Anna’s name - and the state of her soul. He remains throughout the rest of the play serving as a spiritual guide to all the characters, yet we never find out who he really is. He performs the function of divine grace, leading the soul back to God, and opening her eyes to the meaning of the world. “The Bridegroom is coming. This is his precise hour…” By rejecting her husband, Anna rejected the divine wedding feast, the feast of Cana, in which water was turned into wine; and now she is a foolish virgin with no oil in her lamp, for “it is not with oil that the flame is fed, but with rain water” - Christ has not turned her water into wine. When she sees the Bridegroom, she can only see Stefan’s face - and she can only see it with horror and repulsion. The state of her soul at the moment is a sign or signal of the final eschaton. Anna is, in a way, all of us, and through this play, Wojtyla is asking,

“Andrew, do you believe in signals?”

The Jeweler's Shop, Part III - The Jeweler Himself

In a previous post, I spoke of the possibility of characters "who come close to this Christ-like status by identifying with the context of the play and being the condition that makes the play possible", and in this post I shall explore one such figure, the Jeweler of John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop, exploring his demiurgic resemblance to Christ but also the manner in which he, as a character in a play, cannot be fully Christ-like and thereby raise the theatre up to a supernatural "religion of transcendence".

The Jeweler is a bit of an enigmatic figure. He is not God, exactly; on the surface meaning of the text (from which all deeper levels are uncovered), he is simply an old man with a philosophical bent. I wish to propose that the best description of him is perhaps the revelation or intimation within the created realm of the apophatic and transcendent meaning of our existence. In his soliloquy on “the proper weight of man”, he hints at man’s transcendent origin without actually telling it to us outright or even seemingly being capable of telling us. The best parallel in other literature is the unstated but implicit sense of God’s presence - what C. S. Lewis experienced as holiness, and what I experienced more as a sense of transcendent meaning - in George Macdonald’s Phantastes. More tangible but less adequate parallels include the Master in Novalis’ The Apprentices at Sais, who in guiding his students along the path to wisdom reveals himself to be the ultimate mystery. Another is Chesterton’s Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday, a seemingly diabolical figure who turns out to be Nature, the mask - or back-side - of God; yet again we see the quasi-divine yet quite finite mysterious bride in C. S. Lewis’ Dymer, and the archetypal sacerdotal figure of Prester John in Charles Williams’ War in Heaven. The Jeweler is a bit like all of these - a spokesman for God, divine in a sense but without actually being God per se.

Not being God in an exact sense, the Jeweler does not reveal to us the mysteries of God’s Providence; and yet through his soliloquy the mystery is made perfectly clear, leaving nothing to be asked. A mystery when seen does not leave any questions to be asked; it is seen in a simple insight, and even amidst this insight remains totally incomprehensible. Thus the saints in Heaven will have no questions to ask about the essence of God; they will see Him, face to face. The situation is probably analogous to the Zen experience of satori, though involving divine and lofty mysteries rather than simple natural (and quite often banal) ones. The ultimate answer to the mystery of man’s existence is not a statement; it is rather an act of humility and awe.

“The weight of these golden rings,”
he said, “is not the weight of metal,
but the proper weight of man,
each of you separately
and both together.
Ah, man’s own weight,
the proper weight of man!
Can it be at once heavier,
and more intangible?
It is the weight of constant gravity,
riveted to a short flight.
The flight has the shape of a spiral, an ellipse - and the
shape of the heart…
Ah, the proper weight of man!
This rift, this tangle, this ultimate depth -
this clinging, when it is so hard
to unstuck heart and thought.
And in all this - freedom,
a freedom, and sometimes frenzy,
the frenzy of freedom trapped in this tangle.
And in all this - love,
which springs from freedom,
as water springs from an oblique rift in the earth.
This is man! He is not transparent,
not monumental,
not simple,
in fact he is poor.
This is one man - and what about two people,
four, a hundred, a million -
multiply all this
(multiply all the greatness by the weakness),
and you have the product of humanity,
the product of human life.”　

The Jeweler does not tell us anything outright, because it is He who is the questioner, not us; the Jeweler is the Hound of Heaven. Nor does He question us with words; He questions us with his eyes, the icons of the soul. “At one point,” Andrew says, “my eyes once more met the gaze of the old jeweler. I felt just then that His gaze was not only sounding in our hearts, but also trying to impart something to us. We found ourselves not only on the level of His gaze, but also on the level of His life. Our whole existence stood before Him. His eyes were flashing signals which we were not able to receive fully just then, as once we had been unable to receive fully the signals in the mountains - and yet, they reached to our inner hearts. And somehow we went in their direction, and they covered the fabric of our whole lives.”

In the next post, I shall show how this scene reveals the nature of Wojtyla's play - uncovering its hidden Brechtian narrative - as an eschatological romance.

The Jeweler's Shop, Part II - The Stage and the Incarnate Logos

In this post, I shall continue the examination begun in the previous post by looking at how the notion of space is transfigured from everyday experience in John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop, in order to move our attention away from it and prepare us for experiencing without any obstacles the pure perception of the state of love.  However, in keeping with the play's context after the historical event of the Incarnation, I shall show how the stage as a sacred space takes on the function of the Logos, the condition which makes the revelation of the Word possible.

Like time, physical location also takes on an aspect of eternity within the play. There is in reality only one place in the play - the jeweler’s shop. Just as kairos is time invested with meaning, so there is such a thing as place invested with meaning, and it is these place and time which are invested with meaning which are the archetypes of which our linear “time” and “place” are reflections.

Sacred space is used in a triple manner in the play. On the one hand, the stage itself is a type of or analogy to sacred space - it is where, through an act of communion between actor and audience, the [W]ord is revealed. The sacred space itself is the silence which gives birth to the [W]ord; it is in this silence, and only through this silence, that the [W]ord can be received. In this way, and only in this way, the sacred space takes on a feminine character; giving birth both to the Word and the world of the play; the stage itself becomes a type of the Church, the Bride of Christ, and thus of Mary, Mother of God, and of the divine Sophia of Proverbs 8 and 9.

The stage is also, by virtue of its typological relationship to the Sophia, capable of becoming a sacred space in another sense, namely that it is a type of the Mass. This is obvious in one sense, in that the Mass is preeminently centered around the Word; it is also true in another, however, which Karol Wojtyla of all men was most fitted to express. The Jeweler’s Shop is a play about love. All poetry is love; in other words, the phenomenon of primal poetry (in Friedrich von Schlegel’s terminology) or pure poetry separated from all words or sensible images is the same experience as human love; both resemble sanctifying grace in a natural manner, because they are echoes (akin to Lewis’ Sehnsucht, Wordsworth’s “intimations of immortality”, and Plato’s anamnesis) of that act of divine grace which was our creation. It is not unreasonable to see that, given the inherent rootedness of poetry itself in love, that when poetry (such as The Jeweler’s Shop) is consciously meant to depict love, and therefore has both its origin and final end in love (or in that Love which is God), it becomes a form of communion with love, and using the created logos as its sacramental matter, is an echo of the “Feast of Love” in which the Logos Incarnate is adored on the altar.

There is also a sacred space within the context of the plot of The Jeweler’s Shop, and this place is the shop itself. The shop is, as stated before, the only place in the play. Being a true place, it is invested deeply with meaning and not just physical location. It is in the shop that the mysteries of the world are revealed; these mysteries are revealed by probing the depths of man, the center and meaning of the cosmos. It is in the jeweler’s shop that the rings, the ultimate symbol of unity, love, and God, are fashioned. As Andrew recalls, “The rings in the window appealed to us with a strange force. Now they are just artifacts of precious metal, but it will be so only until that moment when I put one of them on Teresa’s finger, and she puts the other on mine. From then on they will mark our fate... They are, for all time, like two last links in a chain, to unite us invisibly.” It is in the jeweler’s shop that time, the reality which is ultimately our being (Da-sein) and our love, is determined: “that was our “now”: the meeting of the past with the future… We are secretly growing into one because of these two rings.”

A second symbol of love and destiny related to the jeweler’s shop is the shop window. The window in the jeweler’s shop is a potent symbol for divine Providence, for it “has turned into a mirror of our future - it reflects its shape… it was not an ordinary flat mirror, but a lens absorbing its object. We were not only reflected but absorbed. I had an impression of being seen and recognized by someone hiding inside the shop window.” Other windows reflect the humdrum life on the streets, but anyone looking into the window on the Jeweler’s shop is contemplating his own destiny. For through this window is the mysterious Jeweler, who forges the rings that make man’s future.

It is easy, though scarcely tempting, to stop at the window; that is, to make a deity out of Providence or History or Destiny or “the Absolute” or some other impersonal and per se non-existent abstraction. Being a Catholic, and coming from the tradition of Cyprian Norwid rather than Schelling and Hegel, Wojtyla does not make this silly error. “The wedding rings did not stay in the window,” Andrew says. It is the Jeweler himself, not the window, that gives the soliloquy on the meaning of man’s existence which forms the heart of the play, and who shall be the subject of the next post.

Theology and Drama, part II

In this post, I shall continue the train of thought started in the last post, which was interrupted by the blog's space limits.

Wojtyla - following Kotlarczyk - wished the actor to minimize his own personality and any unnecessary fabrications of personality imitating that of a character so that the bare splendor of the Word could shine through. Minimizing the role of personality not only emphasized the story of the play rather than its mode of presentation, but also brought the actor out of the realm of some fictitious space and temporal sequence and into the souls of the audience. Once the actor becomes emptied of his self and identified (in the audience’s minds) only with the text or narrative of the play, eye contact between stage and audience turns the theatrical form of communication into an intensely interpersonal encounter, with direct communication between the soul of the actor (or playwright) and the beholder.

Seen in this light, Kotlarczyk believed that the theatrical act was a means of sanctification in which the actor transmits the Word of God to, and thus enters into a sort of communion with, the audience. The theatre is a liturgical act which by its artistic character renews and re-presents the mundane world. Just as secular life is a type or image of the Mass (which is the nuptial banquet of supernatural life), Kotlarczyk believed that life mirrors drama and not just vice versa; human drama transmits the divine Drama which is the ultimate meaning of the world as seen in God’s eyes. Faithful to the traditional Catholic symbol of salvation history as being a divine dance or symphony, Kotlarczyk believed that the whole of reality is structured as a drama with the crux of the plot centered around the phenomenon of man - that is, in the man who was also God.
This seemingly radical view of art as a reflection of the divine drama of salvation is in fact well within the Scholastic tradition. For the Scholastics, poetry (including drama) uses the outward form to reveal an inward form of beauty, which is a reflection of the Form of forms, God. As the Catholic philosopher Edward Ingram Watkin wrote (A Philosophy of Form, p. 358):

“We might almost call art a natural religion of immanence, prelude and antechamber of the supernatural religion of transcendence. Every natural beauty, since it is a form, is the objective praise of God, the Exemplar of which every created form is a revelation. And every beauty of art, since it is a presentation of form, is His human praise. The work of art is an objective and continual act of worship. The artist, nature’s priest, does on his lower plane what the liturgical priest does on the higher. Both are to offer a sacrifice of praise, respectively natural and supernatural. The rubric bids the priest at the opening of the Canon spread out, raise and join his ands, lifting his eyes to heaven to drop them immediately to the altar in a profound reverence. The artist also spreads out his hands to embrace the whole of nature, sub-human and human, in a generous and universal acceptance and love, then raises hands and eyes in a profound concentration of thought and feeling as though to draw the outer world into his personal experience. At the same time he lowers his eyes by a penetrating glance into his own spirit, to attain those rich creative depths whence his intuition proceeds. The minor artist no doubt does this also, but remissly and more superficially. Only the great artist carries out the operation with the power and profundity it demands. That is why he is a great, the former a minor, artist. But it is everywhere the ritual and movement of art.”

If this is a true description of art, then drama is something primarily transcendent and not human in origin, in which God transmits the Word to the soul through the playwright and the actors. The soul of such a playwright must be enlightened by sanctifying grace, because all art transmits beauty precisely by manifesting the beauty of the soul of the artist, which, in order to manifest a divine origin, must first have been deified. In the words of Frithjof Schuon (Spiritual Facts and Human Perspectives, p. 38), “Metaphysical or mystical poets such as Dante and some of the troubadours, and also the Sufi poets, expressed spiritual realities through the beauty of their souls. It is a matter of spiritual endowment far more than a question of method, for it is not given to every man sincerely to formulate truths which are beyond the range of ordinary humanity.” The word can now be deified for the same reason that the human soul can be, namely the Incarnation of the Eternal Word in a human flesh and a human soul.

Like drama, Wojtyla believed that poetry is an expression of the natural human longing for God. As such, poetry complements the “theatre of the inner word”, since it rises upward seeking transcendent beauty; it enlarges the human soul beyond its natural capacity, helping open it up to receive the bare nakedness of the Word, and the perspectives of literature qua drama and literature qua poetry are seen to be mutually implicit. In a letter written to a friend and fellow-student at the Jagiellonian University and quoted by Adam Boniecki's The Making of the Pope of the Millennium (Kalendarium of the Life of Karol Wojtyla), p. 80, Wojtyla expressed this idea by saying that poetry was “not just a longing for beauty, but a demand for it… Art does not exist merely to be a realistic truth, merely a diversion, but above, it is a superstructure, a gaze forward and upward. It is the companion of religion and a guide onto the road to God; It has the dimension of a romantic rainbow: from the earth and from the human heart towards the Infinite.”

While art may be a natural religion of immanence, a prelude and antechamber to the supernatural religion of transcendence, the fact of Christ' Incarnation now means that all purely natural religions have been fulfilled.  Human nature has been radically and irreversibly changed for ever, and this means that our artistic theory must take this fact into account.  To quote Hans Urs von Balthasar (Theo-Drama III:25, 32), "with the coming of Christ something has been done to man that continues to have an effect; man will never again be what he was before Christ... On the basis of this eschatological provocation introduced by Christ, the drama enacted between God and mankind, and between men themselves as they put forward and defend their warring systems of meaning, is already a drama 'in Christ'.  Tidings of him are destined to spread from 'Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth' (Acts 1:8); this does not mean that all nations must necessarily be converted to his message, but at least they cannot escape being confronted by it."  What is the relationship between the Word and the "inner word", when the Word itself has become a character in the divine drama?  We must be sensitive to Professor Conzelmann's complaint that "the Twelve give the impression of being stage extras" (quoted in von Balthasar, Theo-Drama III:124); Christ may be the central character, but nonetheless by virtue of His humanity just one character among others, while on the other hand He is not just an individual actor, but also "the very condition that renders the play possible" (Theo-Drama III:41); "He is, as it were, the the one who creates a 'stage' in the first place so that characters can appear on it - and here 'stage' means, paradoxically, both a 'concrete area' and an 'empty area'." (ibid)

It is impossible for any character created by an author's imagination to be at once a character and the condition that renders the play possible, so theatre is incapable of realizing the supernatural religion of transcendence, but only pointing to and hinting at it, and making it present in the manner of something beyond itself.  There are characters who come close to this Christ-like status by identifying with the context of the play and making the play possible, and these characters, who usually give a vaguely demiurgic impression, are the most properly said to be the symbols of and sacraments to Christ.  Examples of such would be Chesterton's "Thursday" and Wojtyla's Jeweler, and it is to Wojtyla's enigmatic Jeweler that I shall turn in the next post.