Pope John Paul II: Actor

His ambition, as a young man growing up in Wadowice, Poland, was to be an actor.

In these years, as he later described himself, he was “completely absorbed by a passion for literature, especially dramatic literature, and for the theater” (Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery, p. 6).

In his last year in high school he was asked to give an address in honor of a visit to the school by the archbishop of Kraków. Impressed by the speech, the archbishop inquired of one of the young man’s teachers if he might make a priest one day. The teacher replied that the young man was intent on his literary and theatrical ambitions. “A pity,” the archbishop replied.

When the young man entered Kraków’s Jagiellonian University in the Fall of 1939, he immediately became involved with an avant-garde student theater troupe called Studio 39.

But then, in that same Fall of 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and the young man’s life—along with the fate of the entire world—changed forever.

Not that the young man gave up his artistic ambitions. He took them underground, where they flourished in an even more intense—and unexpected—way.

With a group of like-minded friends he helped form a theater troupe, the Rhapsodic Theater, inspired by the ideas of an older friend from Wadowice, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk.

As George Wiegel writes, for Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk “the actor had a function not unlike a priest: to open up, through the materials of this world, the realm of transcendent truth. His “theater of the inner word” would make present universal truths and universal moral values, which stood in judgment on the here-and-now and offered the world the possibility of authentic transformation” (Witness to Hope, p. 37). 

The Rhapsodic Theater was a resistance movement. It devoted itself to Kotlarczyk’s vision and to keeping alive the tradition of Polish Romantic literature, determined to keep this flame of Polish culture burning in the midst of Occupation. The troupe promoted its performances in secret, and played in living rooms behind closed curtains. If caught, the members of the troupe would certainly have been arrested and no doubt killed.

The young man from Wadowice came under the spell of Kotlarczyk’s dramatic ideas. But even as his commitment to the underground theater intensified, the theater’s concentration on the “word” led him ever deeper into the mystery of the “Word.” The “universal truths” that Kotlarczyk saw as the aim of all theater led the young man to the “Universal Truth” Himself. The young man, Karol Wojtyla, began to feel the stirrings of a very different calling: to the priesthood.

But in a deeper sense, Father Wojtyla—later Pope John Paul II—did not cease to be an actor. Weigel writes: “Theater, for Wojtyla, was also an experience of community, the self-disciplined action of a group of individuals who, by blending their individual talents with the talents of others, become something more than the sum of their parts. And the intensity of the theatrical vocation, particularly according to Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, was, perhaps, the beginning of other intuitions to be pursued later. If drama could unveil the deeper dimensions of the truth of things, might there be a dramatic structure to every human life? To the whole of reality?” (Witness to Hope, p. 38).

For Pope John Paul II, the pope the Church will beatify on May 1, the answer to both of these questions is a resounding “yes.” God is the protagonist of a great drama, a romantic comedy, in which all human beings have a part to play in finding True Love in God. The glory of the arts is that they can serve as a way for human beings to enter into this drama, to become actors in the greatest story of them all. Writing of the relationship between art and faith in his 1999 Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II observed:

“With this Letter, I turn to you, the artists of the world, to assure you of my esteem and to help consolidate a more constructive partnership between art and the Church. Mine is an invitation to rediscover the depth of the spiritual and religious dimension which has been typical of art in its noblest forms in every age. It is with this in mind that I appeal to you, artists of the written and spoken word, of the theatre and music, of the plastic arts and the most recent technologies in the field of communication. I appeal especially to you, Christian artists: I wish to remind each of you that, beyond functional considerations, the close alliance that has always existed between the Gospel and art means that you are invited to use your creative intuition to enter into the heart of the mystery of the Incarnate God and at the same time into the mystery of man.”

“Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves. Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but “fully reveals man to man.” In Christ, God has reconciled the world to himself. All believers are called to bear witness to this; but it is up to you, men and women who have given your lives to art, to declare with all the wealth of your ingenuity that in Christ the world is redeemed: the human person is redeemed, the human body is redeemed, and the whole creation which, according to Saint Paul, “awaits impatiently the revelation of the children of God” (Rom 8:19), is redeemed. The creation awaits the revelation of the children of God also through art and in art. This is your task. Humanity in every age, and even today, looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny” (no. 14).

So in the end, paradoxically, it was in abandoning his original desire to be an actor that Pope John Paul II enacted the true meaning not only of drama, but also of all the arts.


Pope Blessed John Paul II, pray for us. 

* For those interested in learning more about Pope John Paul II and his youthful ambition to be an actor, see George Weigel’s magnificent biography, Witness to Hope, especially chapters 1 and 2.  

Fairy Tales and Holy Week

One of my favorites passages in Dante’s Purgatorio is when Dante finally reaches the summit of Mount Purgatory and enters the Earthly Paradise—that is, the Garden of Eden. It makes good theological sense that Dante imagines the topography of Purgatory this way. For having purged his intellect, will and passions from the ill effects of his sin, Dante is now wholly innocent again. He is like Adam and Eve before the Fall. And so it is appropriate that, before he ascends to the celestial Paradise, he be given a glimpse of heaven on earth.

In the Earthly Paradise Dante meets a beautiful lady named Matelda, who tells him that he has come to the place “fashioned to be the natural nest for man.” Matedla explains:

“The Highest Good, pleased in Itself alone,

made man good, and for Good, and gave him this

place as an earnest of eternal peace.

By his own fault, man did not dwell here long.

by his own fault, he took up grief and toil,

pawning his honest laughter and sweet play.”

The Earthly Paradise, depicted by Dante in lush, bucolic imagery, is “an earnest of eternal peace.” For all its beauty, it is still a mere forerunner of the beauty and peace that await Dante in Heaven. But in lines I especially like, Matelda adds this:

“A corollary granted as a grace.

It will, I think, be no less dear to you,

for I will walk beyond my promises.

The poets in their melodies of old

may have dreamed on Parnassus of this spot,

singing about the happy age of gold.

For here the human race was innocent;

forever spring, and fruit upon the vine.

This is the nectar which the poets meant.”

Images of a “happy age of gold” were a commonplace in ancient poetry (in Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus was home to the Muses). Matelda is saying that when ancient poets wrote of golden ages where all was Spring and innocence, they were in fact, whether they realized it or not, “dreaming” of the Garden of Eden.  

It may be a stretch, but I believe fairy tales, or many of them at any rate, fall into the category of stories that depict golden ages, and thus are dreams of Eden—as well as of that greater Paradise of which Eden itself is but a dream. J.R.R. Tolkien, the Catholic author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, wrote a famous essay entitled, “On Fairy Stories.” In the essay Tolkien argues that, at its best, the fairy story or fantasy is far from being a flight from reality; it is, rather, a flight to reality. According to my friend Professor Brad Birzer, in his book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Tolkien understands the fairy story as a pathway toward reality insofar as it

1.   illuminates the vast inheritance our ancestors have bequeathed to us;

2.   gives us a new sense of wonder about things we have taken for granted or which have become commonplace (Tolkien writes that fairy stories allow us to see “things as we are (or were) meant to see them”);

3.   and provides us with a means to escape the drabness, conformity, and mechanization of modernity.

The desire to escape the nightmare aspects of modernity, Birzer warns, is not the same thing as wanting to escape from reality—quite the opposite, in fact. In the best kind of fairy tale, writes Birzer, “[w]e still deal with life and death, comfort and discomfort. We merely escape progressivism and the progressive dream, which reduces all of complex reality to a mere shadow of creation’s true wonders.”  

The “progressive dream,” in which human beings reject God and seek to divinize themselves by mastering nature, is thus the very opposite of the “dream of an earthly paradise” that we find in the best fairy tales, such as those written by Tolkien himself. Is not a Middle-Earth after Sauron’s defeat, where the hobbits in Hobbiton can tend their gardens and eat their multiple breakfasts, where justice and peace reign in Gondor now that the rightful line of kings has been restored—is this not an image of a “happy age of gold”?

On this the holiest week in the Christian calendar, we call to mind another and far greater fairy story. Turning the above analysis on its head, the fairy story we celebrate this week is not a dream of some other, more real paradise. No, this fairy tale is the reality compared to which everything else in our lives is but a dream.

In Holy Week we celebrate the paradigm case of what Tolkien argues is the most essential element of a great fairy tale:  eucatastrophe—a word that means “a good disaster.” The great fairy tales, says Tolkien, always show us a defeat that turns out to be the source of unexpected victory. In this way, the realm of fairy gives us a “fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.” But the greatest eucatastrophe of all is of course the great defeat we recall in the coming days, a defeat that turns out to be, wondrously, the very means of Christ’s victory over death. Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection is the greatest of all fairy tales, precisely because it is the one fairy tale that happens to be true.     

It was probably from G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man that Tolkien gained the insight that allowed him to say: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis similarly affirms that in Christianity, “[t]he old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”

With the Incarnation of Christ, Tolkien further proclaims, “art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”

Our natural love of myth, of the fairy story, is a manifestation of our desire for a Reality that can only be fully satisfied in Christ. Yet this natural love of fairy tales, like every natural impulse, can fail to mature. In the same essay on fairy stories, Tolkien writes:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific veracity. On the contrary. The keener and clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

One wonders whether our popular culture’s fascination with fairy tales is settled deep into such Morbid Delusion. Today’s LA Times ran a feature story on the current spate of fairy tale-based films. Now in production are not one but two Sleeping Beauty films, a Peter Pan origins film, a Hansel and Gretel, and not one but two versions of Snow White. This is not even to mention the Red Riding Hood currently in theaters, or the recent Disney hit, Tangled, an updating of Rapunzel. My family and I rather enjoyed Tangled; a little bit of innocent updating on a classic tale is no bad thing in and of itself. But I’m more suspicious when the updating involves more dangerous features of our culture. The injection of tired and muddled feminist themes into tales of the Brothers Grimm, as the LA Times article indicates we should expect soon in the theaters, is not the sort of dream one wants one’s screenwriters dreaming on Parnassus.

On a side note: Tolkien is on record as saying that it is best to leave fantasy to the imagination and the written word. To put fairy tales on stage or on a screen via animation must result in either “silliness or morbidity.” Needless to say, Tolkien was no fan of Walt Disney.

And yet—although in one sense one shudders at the prospect of what Hollywood is doing in this resurgence of interest in fairy tales, in another sense it is promising that our culture is still fascinated by them. In the LA Times piece we find the following observation by Kate Bernheimer, professor at the University of Arizona and editor of the journal Fairy Tale Review. Bernheimer is quoted as saying  

that all sorts of zeitgeist reasons are behind the fairy-tale revival. She cites a need, in a technologically-crazed time, to reconnect with the nature of fairy-tale environments as well as the “uncanny pull that the ‘ever after’ holds in an age of extinction.”

During this Holy Week, perhaps we can also pray that the “uncanny pull” so many feel toward the “ever after” will lead to a deeper reflection on the paradises, earthly and heavenly, from which the fairy stories we enjoy get their point and purpose. For only when we realize that the myths we love have actually become fact, will our stories once again be healthy dreams of a real world where everything is “honest laughter and sweet play.”

* For quotations from and analysis of Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories," this post is deeply indebted to Brad Birzer's discussion in J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth. Also, the translation of the Purgatorio I use is that of Anthony Esolen.   

Out of the Mouth of Salon.com

I was struck by Andrew O’Hehir’s column today on Salon.com: “Why Are Christian Movies So Awful?” The target of O’Hehir’s vitriol is the recently-released Soul Surfer. Whatever the merits of his case against that movie, what struck me were the observations O'Hehir makes about Christian films in general.

For example, as I also touched upon in my series last week on faith-based filmmaking, O’Hehir sees the current Christian film phenomenon as symbolic of large-scale cultural shifts in our country:

But American cinema and the Hollywood system and the rest of our society were turned upside down in the ’60s and ’70s, and the rise of the Christian-oriented film industry, like so many other things in our cultural life, is an aftershock from that earthquake. It’s only oversimplifying a little to say that pop culture went in one direction and the evangelical population went in another, and despite a long process of reconciliation, it’s still not clear that they speak the same language. If I really had any faith in American pluralism and in my fellow human beings, I guess I would predict that someday soon Christian filmmakers will ramp up their craft and make much better movies than Soul Surfer.

Earlier in the piece, O’Hehir expresses surprise that, given the resources at their disposal, Christian filmmakers have not hitherto ramped up their craft:

On the face of it, this is a curious turn of events. Whatever you want to say about Christianity as a system of thought or a force in history, you'll have to admit that it has a pretty impressive record as a source of inspiration for artists and writers. But when we use the buzzword “Christian” in contemporary American society, we’re talking about a distinctively modern cultural and demographic phenomenon that has almost no connection to the spiritual and intellectual tradition that fueled Dante and Milton and Leonardo and Bach.

It is welcome to find such pertinent reflections coming from Salon.com. O’Hehir is absolutely right. The Christian—and I would emphasize Catholic—tradition does indeed have a “pretty impressive record” as a source of inspiration for artists and writers. This is the point I was trying to make last week in recommending Dante and the great Catholic novelists of the 20^th century as rich sources of inspiration for Christian filmmakers. We Christians shouldn’t need Salon.com to remind us that this spiritual, intellectual and artistic heritage is, for the Christian artist, about as low as low-hanging fruit can get, and should be plucked without further ado.

But we should be grateful all the same.

And for what it's worth, I would recommend that one begin with Dante.