Personalism as Interpersonalism: John Paul II and René

Girard
Fr. Michael Darcy

Quaestiones Disputatae, Volume 9, Number 2, Spring 2019, pp. 126-148 (Article)

Published by The Catholic University of America Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/720329

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 Personalism as Interpersonalism
John Paul II and René Girard

Fr. Michael Darcy

Duquesne University

Abstract

This essay will examine an illuminating convergence in the thoughts of Pope

John Paul II and the cultural anthropologist René Girard. It will be seen that
this convergence is a consequence of the shared concern of both to under-
stand the human person in terms of its relation to other persons. So while
not a personalist philosopher in the strict sense, René Girard’s concern for
the interpersonal brings him close to the personalism of John Paul II, who
likewise understands human subjectivity in terms of the relations by which
it is constituted. Both practice what might be called an “interpersonalist”
personalism, which this essay will argue ought to characterize the practice of
personalism in a Christian context. The essay will make this observation the
basis for further reflections on the nature of personalism and its relation to
the Christian intellectual tradition.

Introduction

The philosophy of St. John Paul II and the anthropology of René Girard
take their respective starting points from very different domains of thought:
personalist and Thomist philosophy in the case of the former and literary
criticism and cultural anthropology in the case of the latter. This essay will
seek to show that the thought of each, in spite of significant differences in
subject matter and method, seeks to understand the human person within
the context of the interpersonal dynamisms that determine the course of
human life. It will be seen that each thinker succeeds in illuminating aspects
of human nature that remain hidden or unintelligible to exclusively meta-
physical or essentialist approaches to human nature. The essay will argue
in conclusion that the sort of interpersonalism vindicated in the analysis
of these great thinkers ought to inform personalist thought in general and

© Fr. Michael Darcy, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2019)

 Fr. Michael Darcy 127

that personalism is best undertaken with a concern to reckon fully with the
­interpersonal nature of the human person.
This essay will proceed by focusing on an instance where the interper-
sonalist thoughts of John Paul II and René Girard converge in complemen-
tary descriptions of a confounding psychological and spiritual affliction that
Girard identifies with the “Underground,” an image he takes from the litera-
ture of Fyodor Dostoevsky. For reasons that will become clear in the pages
to follow, the image defies summary in a simple definition, but for the sake of
establishing a suitable starting point, perhaps we can define the Dostoevskian
Underground provisionally as a psychological or spiritual condition of self-­
deception, where the person “dwelling Underground” fails to recognize that
his attempts to achieve happiness result in an increasingly degraded and
miserable condition. What is more, the Underground displays the confound-
ing ability to turn the degradation and misery it generates into an impetus for
a more vigorous descent into its darkness and isolation. It will be seen that
it is precisely their careful attention to interpersonal dynamisms that allows
Girard and John Paul II to render intelligible the bewildering contradictions of
the Underground. The essay will begin by describing Girard’s analysis of the
image as it is found in Dostoevsky’s literature and then in a second section
show that John Paul’s description of shame as presented in his Theology of
the Body and elsewhere corroborates this analysis from a theological perspec-
tive. The essay will take John Paul II and Girard’s elucidation of the Dosto-
evskian Underground as a kind of test case demonstrating the fruitfulness of
intending the interpersonal as essential to the human person. A concluding
section will consider the philosophical vocation of personalism in light of
the essay’s analysis of the interpersonalism of these great thinkers. The essay
will argue finally that the philosophical vocation of personalism is to lead
Western thought out of the static and solipsistic conceptions of the human
person that characterize a great deal of its individualism.

René Girard and the Dostoevskian “Underground”

The Dostoevskian Underground appears explicitly in two of Dostoevsky’s

literary works. It receives a brief but important mention in Dostoevsky’s short
novel The Eternal Husband, where one of the characters is heard to exclaim,
“No more underground vileness!”1 This “underground vileness” is depicted
much more graphically and completely in the short novel Notes from

1 
Girard refers to what he calls “Underground psychology” and attributes the
term to Dostoevsky in The Eternal Husband: “Enough of underground psychology!”
I am led to believe that the actual line he means to refer to is the one given prior. See
128 Personalism as Interpersonalism

Underground, which describes the agonized inner life of the novel’s protagonist
and narrator, who is known simply as “the Underground Man.” The form
and content of the Underground come clearly into view in a letter he writes
to a military officer. The letter is occasioned by an incident that occurs
between the two in a billiard hall. In the course of walking around a billiard
table, the officer finds the puny Underground Man in his way and, without so
much as a word, lifts him up and places him to the side as though he were an
inconveniently situated piece of furniture. This humiliating slight initiates a
bitter resentment that the Underground Man stokes and stirs for two years
until, finally, he resolves to exact his revenge. He decides to write him a letter
challenging him to a duel.2
The letter purports to be an offer of a physical challenge, but we quickly
see that it is intended to be a kind of spiritual retaliation. He wishes to intim-
idate the officer with a display of his learning and culture. The Underground
Man has received some education and, in the course of it, has developed a
fascination for the heroes of the literary works he reads obsessively. Signifi-
cantly, his literary tastes incline toward the literature of romanticism, which
offers to him examples of exquisite individualism and personal autonomy,
including masters of self-­assertion such as “Manfred,” the hero of Lord
Byron’s epic poem who, in the course of Byron’s story, emerges as a kind of
self-­made superman.3 As the Underground Man recounts his letter to the offi-
cer, a strange turn occurs in his tone and message that the Underground Man
himself does not seem to notice. The letter is meant to be insulting, but as
it unfolds, it becomes an “anguished appeal.”4 The Underground Man envi-
sions the officer recognizing in the letter his spiritual greatness, his intimate
association with “the lofty and the sublime.”5 He foresees the officer bowing
before his intellectual and cultural mastery and, having been conquered in

René Girard, Resurrection from Underground, trans. James Williams (New York: Cross-
roads, 1997), 52.
2 
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (New York:
Bantam, 1992), 57–­60.
3 
Concerning the character Manfred as an icon of romantic “self-­assertion,” see
Peter L. Thorslev Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1962). Concerning the relationship of the romanticism
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the exaltation of the “self,”
see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2013), 32, 204, 241. See also Isaiah Berlin, “The Assault on the French
Enlightenment: Fichte and Romantic Self-­Assertion,” Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library,
accessed July 30, 2018, http://​berlin​.wolf​.ox​.ac​.uk/​lists/​nachlass/​assault3​.pdf.
4 
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 69.
5 
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 60.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 129

this way, seeking the Underground Man out in order to benefit from his
greatness. He imagines the two beginning a beautiful friendship: the officer
protecting the Underground Man with his “rank and stature” and the Under-
ground Man “enriching him with his, well, ideas.”6 In an aside to us, the
readers, the Underground Man recalls him fondly, fourteen years later, and
wonders out loud, “How is he doing nowadays, the good man? Whom is he
crushing now?”7
The letter displays the contradictory ambivalence of the Underground.
The Underground Man expresses his contempt for the officer and then, in
practically the next breath, imagines them friends and in each other’s arms.
In the course of detailing his contempt, the Underground Man signals the
strange fascination and admiration that he has for those who oppose him,
which, as we see, is practically everyone he meets.8 The coexistence of
these contradictory impulses is the essential feature of the Underground.
Within the Underground, all admirations are contaminated with rivalry and
contempt, and all contemptuousness has within it an obsessive fascination
for enemies and obstacles of all kinds.
Girard insists that the contradictory impulses characterizing the Under-
ground can only be understood as functions of the imitation that animates
them. He attributes to Dostoevsky the insight shared by the greatest novelists,
who agree, Girard insists, that human desire is “mimetic”—­or imitative in
nature.9 Desire is not as we first think it to be—­spontaneous and arising from
the deepest, most intimate centers of ourselves. Our desires are copies of the
desires of others. The desirability of the objects of desire is communicated or
“mediated” by the models of desire that fascinate and whose prestige endows
with desirability the objects or statuses associated with them. Desire is thus
triangular, where the terms of the triangle consist of the desiring subject, the
object of desire, and the all-­important but often unnoticed model of desire.
Girard’s notion of mimetic desire insists that every aspect of our person-
hood, even its most intimate level, the level of desire, is interpersonal in
nature. Understanding desire, as well as the “self ” in which it resides, requires

6 
Ibid.
7 
Ibid., 64–­65.
8 
Ibid., 52: “I am all alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”
9 
Girard’s first major scholarly title, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, is a work of liter-
ary criticism. There he considers the novels of Miguel de Cervantes, Stendhal, Gus-
tave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also considers Dostoevsky
more closely in a separate work earlier referred to titled Resurrection from Underground,
which is devoted exclusively to the literature of Dostoevsky.
130 Personalism as Interpersonalism

acknowledging the decisive role of the “other,” the model whose desire is
imitated.10
The prestige of the model determines his influence on the subject. The
model seems to possess a “greater plenitude of being” that fascinates and
attracts the subject.11 Imitation, then, is the means by which the desiring subject
seeks to possess this richer existence, for which reason Girard refers to the imita-
tion aroused by the model as “acquisitive mimesis.”12 The clearest example of
this kind of mimetic relationship is one that is also quite familiar—­that
of the child to his parent. The child beholds the richer existence of his
parent, who becomes the model of the child’s desire. The child imitates
the parent and comes to desire those objects that the child sees in the
parent’s possession. In most cases, the parent welcomes the imitation
of the child. Parents typically find it gratifying and flattering when their
children imitate them. But when the child shows interest in something
the parent does not wish him to have, the parent who has aroused desire
in the child must now oppose it. In this instance, the model of desire becomes
simultaneously the obstacle to desire. The sight of the parent making meals
in the kitchen, for example, may have the unintended effect of rendering the
pots and pans fascinating to the child. When he attempts to play with them and
begins making an insufferable racket, the parent will intervene, perhaps scold-
ing the child, not recognizing that the child’s behavior is a copy of his own. For
his part, the child has no way of understanding what has gone wrong; he lacks
any means by which to understand “the metamorphosis of his model into a
rival.”13 The imitation that formerly brought him close to his adored model and
provided the basis for intimacy is now rejected and punished. The child can
only understand the rejection of his imitation as a harsh banishment, “an irre-
vocable excommunication,”14 and in his attempt at recovery and restoration,
the child has recourse to only one strategy, the one he has always relied on, the
only one of which he is capable: imitation. Imitation is renewed and redoubled
in order to heal the disorienting breach that has opened between himself and
the model. The parent’s opposition to the child’s imitation paradoxically serves
to magnify the child’s zeal to imitate, which may elicit more unwanted behavior
from the child and an escalation in both imitation and punishment. The oppo-
sition to desire arouses, impels, and escalates desire, a phenomenon that Girard

10 
Girard, Deceit, Desire, 10–­13.
11 
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 146.
12 
René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Patrick Greg-
ory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 7.
13 
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 147.
14 
Ibid., 175.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 131

refers to as “the double bind.” At its heart stands the contradictory double
imperative that animates it: imitate me; do not imitate me.15
Girard notes that the effect of the imitation that fuels and is in turn
impelled by the double bind has the effect of effacing differences between
antagonists. The difference between parent and child is in some sense
guaranteed by differences in age and psychological development, but of
course not all mimetic conflicts enjoy this guarantee. Conflicts often involve
persons of greater social and psychological proximity, and in these cases,
imitation is seen to produce a more precise resemblance between subject
and model.16 In fact, imitation can proceed and escalate to such an extent
that it will eventually dissolve the difference between “subject” and “model.”
As mimetic gestures intensify according to the logic of the double bind, the
gestures of the model to defend his position of superiority with respect
to the subject will mean that he is responding to the desire of the subject no
less than the subject is imitating the desire of the model. Desire and imitation
have become symmetrical at this point; “subject” and “model” both imitate
and mediate the desire of the other. This condition, which Girard terms
double mediation, produces “mimetic doubles,” antagonists who are identical
with respect to desire and, ultimately, violence.17
As mimetic doubling advances and double mediation intensifies, mimetic
antagonists become subject to particular modes of self-­deception that serve
to obscure the true nature of the process and contribute significantly to the
specific “binding” power of the double bind, which is synonymous with
the “darkness” of the Underground. As we shall see, these self-­deceptions
active in mimetic rivalry also, in a sense, “de-­personalize” the interaction of
the subject and model as imitation renders them increasingly alike.18 The first
mode of self-­deception distorts to the point of inversion the antagonists’
understandings of their relationship to each other. While the mimetic nature
of the conflict renders the antagonists increasingly alike, the antagonists them-
selves increasingly view their relationship with each other with a kind of “Mani-
chean” clarity. Each antagonist, from within the perspective of the conflict,
regards the self as good and just, unfairly aggressed against, while the other is
an unjust usurper or a greedy opponent, spiteful and vindictive.19
A kind of corollary to the illusion of the alterity of one’s antagonist
is the illusion of the alterity of his desire. As double mediation intensifies
and fuels the process of mimetic doubling, the exchange of desire that

15 
Ibid., 147.
16 
Girard, Things Hidden, 427–­28.
17 
Girard, Deceit, Desire, 172–­73.
18 
René Girard, Evolution and Conversion (New York: Continuum, 2007), 82–­83.
19 
Girard, Deceit, Desire, 142–­43.
132 Personalism as Interpersonalism

characterizes the conflict becomes increasingly sterile. Each antagonist is not

imitating the other’s desire so much as imitating his own desire as reflected
back to him in the other.20 Desire is evacuated of any real value or meaning
as it turns back on the desiring subject. At this point, not only is desire not
a movement toward an object in a world confirmed as real by experience; it
does not even carry the desiring subject beyond the self in any meaningful
way. Desire at this point presents a world that is enigmatic and elusive,
full of objects of illusory value—­“full of sound and fury, signifying noth-
ing.”21 This sterilization of desire can only mean its frustration, but this frus-
tration makes its own contribution to the double bind’s ability to maintain
antagonists in its grip. The antagonism of the other comes to be the only
thing that seems real, the only thing capable of mobilizing the self to action,
and so it becomes increasingly fascinating. The escalation of mimetic conflict
renders antagonists increasingly obsessed with each other and increasingly
reflexive, compulsive, and mindless in their gestures of imitation.22
In the Underground Man, Dostoevsky provides a rich portrait of a person
whose life is dominated by Girard’s double bind and the self-­deception that
attends it. All the opposition he encounters, no matter how incidental, is imme-
diately and endlessly fascinating, and the psychologically dislocating effect
of the exercise of this conflictual habit is evident throughout the novel. This
and the instantaneous and nearly seamless transitions between fawning admi-
ration and bitter contempt and back again are bewildering when first encoun-
tered in Dostoevsky’s portrait, but they become intelligible when recognized as
manifestations of the reciprocity of mimetic desire.

Dostoevskian Pride

The baleful effect of the self-­deception of the Underground is underscored

in the vision of pride that Girard distills from Dostoevsky’s literature, a
vision that is as interpersonal as the imitation that structures it. Pride is often
discussed as a kind of closure of the self in self-­regard, self-­importance, self-­
worth, and so on, as a hubristic rejection of others that expresses itself in an
indifference to them. To be accused of the vice in these terms might have
pleased the Underground Man. The accusation would have confirmed for him
his kinship with his Promethean heroes of self-­creation. But Dostoevsky’s
portrait allows us to peer behind the screen that blinds the Underground Man
to the true nature of his own consciousness. The pride of the Underground

20 
Ibid., 99.
21 
Girard, Things Hidden, 327–­28.
22 
Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 82–­83.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 133

Man is not the self-­sufficient autonomy presented in the fictions of Lord

Byron or Napoleonic legend.23 According to Dostoevsky’s vision, pride
collaborates closely with envy. We see that far from being a self-­enclosed
autonomy, the pride of the Underground Man is a self-­deceived obsession
with the other, the model, who is envied desperately. Most immediately, the
Underground Man envies the heroes of his dream world, but he can enjoy
his proximity to them in his imagination for only so long. Eventually, he must
attempt to incarnate in reality the greatness he dreams of in his fantasies. He
must attempt to dominate others in the same way his heroes dominate him.
The indifference he meets with in the military officer and the countless others
who brush past him on Nevsky Prospect lacerates his pride.24 Everyone he
meets becomes an obstacle to his desire to achieve in himself the Promet-
hean glory of his heroes.25 Even the most casual encounters become humil-
iating defeats, so many galling indications of his distance from his heroes.
At the same time, each defeat adds to the luster of his heroes and elevates
them a little higher into the heavens. From the abasement of his defeats, their
dominating glory seems all the more radiant and fascinating. And so, in keep-
ing with the terrible logic of the double bind, these defeats set the stage for
even greater humiliations by impelling increasingly desperate and increasingly
doomed attempts to imitate his heroes.
Like an insidious parasite that knows not to kill its host, pride does not
allow the Underground Man to become completely discouraged by these expe-
riences. It protects itself by effecting a division within him across which he can
alienate blame for his defeats. Pride divides the self into partial and desiccated
“selves” for whom the world and the actual self become increasingly enigmat-
ic.26 The Underground Man has identified himself with his romantic heroes,
and this identification constitutes for him the “true self.” Another inadequate
“self ” that he increasingly alienates from the “true self ” is to blame for the
humiliations he is made to endure. The superior self rejoices in its kinship with
its heroes and berates the alienated inadequate self, beholding it with contempt

23 
See Thorslev, Byronic Hero, 89.
24 
Concerning his promenade along Nevsky, he remarks, “I was nothing but a fly
before all that fine society, a revolting, obscene fly—­more intelligent, more cultivat-
ed, nobler than anyone else, that went without saying, but a fly nonetheless, forever
yielding the way to everyone, why did I take this martyrdom upon myself ? Why did I
go to Nevsky? I have no idea. I was simply drawn there to every opportunity.” Dos-
toevsky, Notes from Underground, 60.
25 
Girard sees in Shakespeare’s “emulation” precisely this bitter, envious kind
of admiration. See René Girard, A Theatre of Envy (Notre Dame, IN: St. Augustine’s
Press, 2004), 160.
26 
See Girard, Things Hidden, 327–­28.
134 Personalism as Interpersonalism

and accusing it of all the misfortunes that befall it.27 These accusations are
the first acts of dominion exercised by the superior self, whose accusations
and condemnations are the principle means by which the Underground Man
preserves the “true self ” from blame and maintains its association with the
models that constitute it in spite of all his terrible failures. The dream of
autonomy and self-­sufficiency cultivated by pride obscures a reality where these
increasingly partial selves abuse and condemn one another and become for
each other sources of shame. In the interaction of these “selves,” pride
produces a parody of an interpersonal dynamic. Not only does it lack any real
interpersonalism; it thwarts all attempts to create anything like real fellowship
with other real persons by justifying a pride that continually seeks to dominate
others and isolates the increasingly sundered actual self.
All told, the Underground is the derangement of the person and the rela-
tions that sustain it in a life-­giving reciprocity. Those inhabiting the Under-
ground dwell in a subterranean darkness of self-­deception, isolated from real
communion and fellowship and isolated from true life by a spiritual “disper-
sal and division” that is both interior and exterior, that divides the self within
itself and from others.28 It recalls St. Augustine’s description of a “dying life
or a living death”29 as well as the condition Christ encounters in the Gerasene
demoniac, whom he finds beating himself with stones and running off to
live among the tombs (Mk 5:5).

John Paul II and The Theology of the Body

The Underground does not appear by name in the writings of John Paul II,
but his personalist theological anthropology describes the same complex of
phenomena. It comes into view as he elaborates his Theology of the Body, par-
ticularly within his discussion of the phenomenon of shame, which takes
place in the course of his consideration of the “man of concupiscence,”
who is referred to by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:28). This
section will provide a summary of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, paying
particular attention to his analysis of the significance of chapters 2 and 3 of
the book of Genesis, where he discusses the creation of humanity and its

The main character of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, another under-

27 

ground character, wonders at one point whether he is a “god” or a “worm.” Dos-

toevsky shows that pride in some sense renders a person both simultaneously. See
Girard, Resurrection from Underground, 17.
28 
Girard, Resurrection from Underground, 140.
29 
St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: P. F. Collier
and Son, 1909), 4.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 135

“fall.” The account of his analysis given here will serve as a basis by which to
consider the interpersonal nature of the phenomenon of shame. Subsequent
sections will further consider John Paul II’s discussion of shame and explore
the resemblance between the phenomena he associates with it and those
of the “Underground” as described by Girard.
John Paul II’s personalism inspires a reading of the two creation
accounts of Genesis that emphasizes the interpersonalism of both narra-
tives. The two accounts agree in essentials: both present humanity as situ-
ated within the material order created by God but not reducible to it. This is
indicated in the first creation account by its presentation of the creation of
humanity out of the course of “a natural succession.” Immediately prior to
this last phase of the work of creation, God pauses and recollects himself
as though undertaking something new and distinctive. He declares, “Let
us make man in our image, in our likeness,” and the creation of humanity
is accomplished (Gn 1:26). John Paul II notes that the text offers humani-
ty’s bodily existence as the only feature uniting it to the rest of the material
order, and the command to subdue creation and to exercise dominion over
it (1:28) indicates a uniquely human activity that underscores humanity’s
distinctiveness from the rest of the material order.30
All told, the first creation account bears what John Paul II refers to as
“a powerful metaphysical content.” Man is defined there in terms of “being
and existing (esse).”31 While saying nothing to indicate any disagreement or
displeasure with this long-­standing philosophical approach to understanding
human nature, we see John Paul II moving on quickly from these consider-
ations in order to treat with much closer detail the second creation account,
which begins in chapter 2 of Genesis.32 Here John Paul  II recognizes the
sacred author as presenting the subjective—­that is, personal—­nature of
humanity, which emerges in the course of the interpersonal interaction
of God, the first human persons, and the tempting spirit.33

30 
John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans.
Michael Waldstein (Boston, MA: Pauline, 2006), 135.
31 
Ibid., 136.
32 
John Paul II echoes a critique of philosophy given by Girard. Girard notes
that philosophy’s preference for conceptual descriptions of human nature tends to
obscure the role of mimesis in human life and behavior and, in particular, serves as a
kind of screen that obscures the role of mimetic conflict in the establishment of hu-
man nature and social order. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 204. See also Girard,
Things Hidden, 28, 169, 266, 268. In the course of Theology of the Body, John Paul II,
without giving a critique as strong as Girard’s, nevertheless declares the need to set
aside “metaphysics and metaphysical anthropology” for the sake of intending fully
“the aspect of human subjectivity.” See John Paul II, Man and Woman, 198.
33 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 137.
136 Personalism as Interpersonalism

As in the first creation account, the second presents man as distinct from
the physical environment in which he is placed. Adam is built up from the dust
of the earth (Gn 2:7), but he is not reducible to the material order from which
he is fashioned.34 This distinctiveness is demonstrated to Adam in an event
arranged by God. After deciding that “it is not good for the man to be alone,”
God decides to make for Adam a “helper suited to him,” then creates the
animals of the world and brings them to Adam in order that he may “name”
them (Gn 2:18–­20). This work of naming involves more than the simple
designation of verbal tags for the sake of convenient identification. This is
Adam’s exercise of his capacity to reflect upon and know the world, which
necessarily entails a reflection upon himself as in the world and knowing it.
Standing before the animals, realizing that none is a suitable “helper” because
none are like him with respect to subjectivity (2:20), Adam is led by God to
an experience of his uniqueness within the material order, an experience John
Paul II describes as “Original Solitude.”35
John Paul II’s definition of subjectivity in terms of self-­reflection reso-
nates with the subjective philosophical conceptions of the human person
that emerge from the Enlightenment and that describe human nature in
terms of an autonomous self-­enclosure. But his analysis of Adam’s naming
of the animals makes clear that human subjectivity never lacks an interper-
sonal dimension. Adam is interacting most obviously with the material order,
coming to understand himself in and through it, but this experience of the
material order alone does not provide the basis for his growth in the knowl-
edge of his solitude in subjectivity and personhood. The text makes clear that
the entire scene is orchestrated by God and that Adam’s activity as a person is
an interpersonal collaboration with him. The scene demonstrates that Adam
is a “partner of the Absolute,”36 and through this interpersonal partnership
with God, Adam comes to the knowledge of his own nature as a person. We
can say further that this scene echoes and confirms the first creation account
by presenting a dramatic rendering of humanity’s “discovery” of the “image
and likeness of God” within itself.37

34 
Ibid., 149.
35 
Ibid., 149–­50, 169. This “original” experience is the first of several original
experiences that we encounter in the course of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
Pausing to consider these “original human experiences,” he remarks that their “orig-
inality” does not refer to the time of their occurrence in the remote past but rather
to their “foundational significance.” Original experiences are experiences of human-
ity’s origin in God, which is experienced continuously in every discreet historical
experience.
36 
Ibid., 151.
37 
Ibid., 164.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 137

From the very beginning, “man enters the world as a subject of truth
and love,”38 ordered to a participation in a communio personarum (communion
of persons), which we see Adam exercise in his collaboration with God in
the naming of the animals. This partnership, however beatifying, is unequal
between God and Adam and is not sufficient to overcome Adam’s “alone-
ness” within the created order (Gn 2:18). Adam’s loneliness is resolved finally
with the creation of Eve, who is fashioned from a rib taken from Adam’s side
(2:21), which indicates the “somatic unity” of Adam and Eve, their common
physical nature, which Adam refers to in his exclamation at the first sight
of Eve: “This one at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. This one
shall be called woman, for out of man this one has been taken” (2:23).39 In
and through this perception of Eve’s physical nature, Adam perceives her
personhood. Her body communicates to Adam that she is like him, consti-
tuted in materiality but distinct from the material order for being a subject.40
With the creation of Eve in sexual complementarity, Adam’s body partic-
ipates fully in the communio personarum, and the sexual union of male and
female becomes an essential expression of it.41 And just as Adam’s naming
of the animals is an implicit collaboration with God and a discovery of the
image and likeness that he bears within himself, so too the experience of
sexuality is an implicit collaboration with God, which Eve indicates in her
declaration at the birth of Cain: “I have produced a male child with the help
of the Lord” (Gn 4:1).42 And as the sexual enactment of the communio perso-
narum is far more intimately personal than that enacted in Adam’s naming of
the animals, so too it is correspondingly more enriching for human persons,
first in the intimate union of husband and wife and then in the generation
of new persons and the interpersonal exchange of family life.43
Eve’s words of Genesis 4 are spoken within the context of the condi-
tion of sin that results from the fall as recorded in Genesis 3, which will
be discussed in greater detail in the next section. It must suffice for now to
point out that Eve’s words indicate that while humanity under the regime of
sin experiences greater difficulties participating in the communio personarum, its
possibility is not lost but “habitually threatened.”44 What is lost is the integrity
that makes Adam immediately perceptive of and receptive to Eve’s person-
hood. In Genesis 2, before the fall that occurs in Genesis 3, the mere sight of

38 
Ibid., 201.
39 
Ibid., 160, 164.
40 
Ibid., 158–­64.
41 
Ibid., 168–­69.
42 
Ibid., 212–­13.
43 
Ibid., 169.
44 
Ibid., 258.
138 Personalism as Interpersonalism

Eve’s body suffices to communicate to Adam her likeness to him and to God
in subjectivity. The interpersonal integrity that constitutes their solidarity
as persons rests on an immanent integrity, where the body of each draws
continuously “on the power of the spirit.”45 This gives to each the capacity
to embrace an appropriate ethos, a rule of conduct and relating adequated
to the reality of their personhood.46 In an earlier work, Love and Responsibility,
John Paul II places at the center of this ethos what he calls the “personalistic
norm,” whereby a person must be treated always as an “end” unto himself
and never as something to be used or treated as a means to an end.47
This integrity, which John Paul II describes with the term “Original
Justice” is fortified in Adam and Eve by the grace of an “Original Holiness,” an
integrity of personhood imparted by God that John Paul II describes as a
“communication of holiness.”48 This serves to underscore what has already
been said: the interpersonal communion between human persons is under-
taken in collaboration with the divine person. The God in whose image and
likeness humanity is made remains a continual source of inspiration to the
maintenance of the communio personarum, and none can exist apart from his
help. In this, we encounter a mimetic theme that recalls Girard’s analysis.
The human person’s bearing of the image and likeness of God means that
in order to be fully and properly human, humanity must be like God. John
Paul II’s descriptions of creation and grace emphasize that the initiative in
establishing and maintaining this likeness lies with God himself rather than
humanity. God is the initiator and continual mediator of a peaceful and life-­
giving reciprocity between human persons by establishing and maintaining
them integrally in his image and likeness. Within the state of dynamic reci-
procity made possible by the integrity of body and soul provided by God, as
well as the assurance that the human partner enjoys this integrity as well, Adam
and Eve remain secure in the knowledge that each will be treated as a person
by the other. This is underscored by the indication in Genesis that Adam and
Eve were naked before each other, “yet they felt no shame” (Gn 2:25). This
experience of freedom from shame in “Original Nakedness” is an indication
of Adam and Eve’s capacity to participate fully in the communio personarum and
the security they enjoy within it.49

Ibid., 243.
45 

Ibid., 200.
46 

47 
John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), Love and Responsibility, trans. Grzegorz Ignatik
(Boston, MA: Pauline, 2013), 41, 65.
48 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 190.
49 
Ibid., 170–­71.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 139

Sin, Shame, and the Underground

Adam and Eve’s freedom from shame is significant only to those who have
felt it. This begins for Adam and Eve when the integrity of their original con-
stitution is “shattered” by their transgression of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil (Gn 3:1–­6).50 This represents a breach of the covenant
of goodness established by God in the initial act of creation, which was
reflected in the ordered and beatifying reciprocity between divine and human
subjects as seen in Genesis 2. John Paul II insists that this destabilization of
the human relationship has its root in the destabilization of human nature
itself. The body has ceased “drawing on the power of the spirit.”51 A pas-
sion appears in the body that springs from a “carnal concupiscence” that is
not easily controlled and that threatens to “suffocate” the conscience. Adam
and Eve feel this “restlessness” within themselves and know it to belong to
the other as well, and so they retreat from each other’s presence.52 Whereas
before the body gave an unmistakable signal of the person, now it is a liabil-
ity. Adam and Eve perceive that their materiality may be the cause of each
being reduced in the estimation of the other to a mere element of the mate-
rial order, not adequately distinguished, for example, from the animals that
Adam realized were not like himself. This awareness of their new vulnera-
bility and the insecurity it generates is synonymous with the experience of
shame, which is manifested in the need Adam and Eve feel to conceal their
bodies, first from each other in the fashioning of loincloths and then from
God, from whom they hide among the trees of the garden (Gn 3:7–­8).53
Shame ultimately is a kind of guardian, a fear that one’s personal dignity
is at risk from dangers within and without.54 It signals the danger of being
instrumentalized and objectified by the concupiscence of the other, as well as
the possibility that one’s own concupiscence is liable to transgress against the
good of another. Shame impels a retreat from these dangers and demands
an “adequate response” that prepares for a rightly ordered approach to the
other.55 Shame seeks an assurance that the value of the person as such will
be protected against the passionate responses of concupiscence and, in so
doing. “paves the way to love.”56 Where the demands of shame are met,
it is no longer a source of fear and humiliation, nor does it disappear or

50 
Ibid., 247.
51 
Ibid., 243.
52 
Ibid., 283–­84.
53 
Ibid., 262.
54 
Ibid., 174.
55 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 173–­74; Love and Responsibility, 168.
56 
John Paul II, Love and Responsibility, 166.
140 Personalism as Interpersonalism

become inactive. It is “absorbed” by love, and within the context of the

erotic, it functions continually to guide persons to make sure that “sexual
values” never come to eclipse the value of persons and so disturb the loving
reciprocity of the communio personarum.57
Any bodily function that bears a clear formal resemblance to animal
behavior is liable to be taken up as a means to ridicule and degrade the dignity
of the human person and will elicit the protection by shame, but Adam and
Eve’s fashioning of loincloths points to sexuality as an area of bodily exis-
tence where a particular vulnerability is felt.58 Sexuality is that domain of
existence where persons are prone to experience a humiliating loss of self-­
control over the body. It is also the aspect of bodily existence where persons
face the greatest danger of being depersonalized, reduced to the status of an
object as they are instrumentalized for the sake of meaningless sexual gratifi-
cation. Shame’s task in guarding this dignity is all the more important because
of the intimate connection of human sexuality to the communio personarum and
the transmission of human life, which ought to be understood in terms of
spiritual love and humanity’s collaboration with the creative work of God.59
In other words, shame guards against what is always an imminent danger in
human life—­that human sexuality will serve an end entirely opposite to the
one given to it by God, where rather than occasioning the bodily enactment
of the communio personarum, it is made the means by which human beings are
reduced to objects.
This fear of objectification that animates shame is nearly synonymous
with a fear of domination—­that is, a fear of being subordinated by another
for the sake of selfish ends. For this reason, John Paul  II finds a “deeper
echo of shame” in the words spoken by God to Eve in Genesis 3:16: “Your
desire shall be for your husband, but he will dominate you.”60 God’s words
articulate the specific content of the insecurity that Eve confronts in the face
of Adam’s concupiscence—­namely, the new likelihood that he will seek to
dominate her in order to render her an object of sexual use. This union of
prideful domination and lust is already sounded within the scriptures in the
“threefold concupiscence” of 1 John 2:16—­“the concupiscence of the flesh,
the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life”61—­which is echoed in
St. Augustine’s notion of the libido dominandi, “the lust to dominate.”62 This

57 
Ibid., 166–­67.
58 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 239.
59 
John Paul II, Love and Responsibility, 38–­39.
60 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 251.
61 
Ibid., 234.
62 
Augustine refers to an instance where the term is used by Sallust to describe
the aggressions of pagan empires such as Persia, Sparta, and Athens. Marcus Dods
 Fr. Michael Darcy 141

close association of pride, domination, and lust unites the most carnal vice,
lust, with the most spiritual vice, pride, gathering the capital sins together,
as it were, in a unitary vision of vice. And inasmuch as St. Augustine’s invo-
cation of this term in City of God occurs in reference to political forms of
domination, it suggests too that the instability introduced by concupiscence
affects humanity in every existential sphere, from the intimate relation
between man and woman, the immediate context of which God addresses in
Gen 3:16, to larger cultural and political contexts.63 In all existential spheres,
the urge to dominate originates as a response, however distant, to the
problem of self-­control posed by concupiscence and the unstable relation
of the body to the spirit. But no attempt to dominate, in whatever form that
may take, will resolve this original instability, and so whatever domination is
achieved can only dissatisfy. What is more, the indulgence of pride and lust
further destabilizes the relationship of the body and the spirit and exacer-
bates the experience of disorder. This in turn arouses a greater desire for
domination that will impel yet more vigorous attempts to dominate that will
cause further destabilization.
John Paul II indicates that this dynamic manifests itself within the sexual
sphere in the “insatiability of the union”—­that is, the dissatisfying result of
attempts to resolve lust through illicit sexual activity motivated by a spirit
of domination, possession, and use.64 This failure widens the fissure
between the body and the spirit by occasioning an accusation of the body
by the spirit. This feature of John Paul  II’s analysis recalls that of Girard
where he describes a division in the self effected by pride across which the
proud, exalted “self ” transfers responsibility for all defeats by means of an
accusation directed at an alienated, inferior “self.” In John Paul II’s analysis,
the consciousness “protects” itself by placing blame on the body for its own
failure to resolve the restlessness that troubles it, taking from the body “the
simplicity and purity of the meaning connected with the original innocence
of the human being.”65 This accusation achieves two empty victories: first,
it protects the consciousness from the humiliation of its own instability and
lack of control of the body; second, it compensates, albeit temporarily, for a

translates the term as the “lust of sovereignty.” See St. Augustine, City of God, trans.
Marcus Dods (New York: Haefner, 1948), 1 III, 14, 106.
63 
See P. R. L. Brown, “St. Augustine,” in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed.
Beryl Smalley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 9–­10: “It is characteristic of
Augustine that he should regard the most basic relationship in the divine order as
one of dependence, and so the most basic symptom of the dislocation of this order,
as one of domination—­of the need to secure the dependence of others.”
64 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 251–­54.
65 
Ibid., 253.
142 Personalism as Interpersonalism

real exercise of dominion, a proper and rightly ordered control of the body
by the spirit.66 This accusatory domination of the body is a prelude to all
other compensatory attempts to dominate directed beyond one’s own self
and into larger existential spheres. The real cause of pride’s failures is contin-
ually set aside in this way, which clears the way for the further destabilization
of the human person and instigates escalating attempts to dominate the body,
whether that of the self or that of others. This self-­reinforcing downward
spiral is synonymous with Girard’s description of the Underground, but in
John Paul II’s rich analysis of the role of shame in guiding the relations of
persons, we are given a description of an interpersonal dynamic that works
against the dynamic of the Underground, one that directs persons away from
giving themselves to its terrible influence. And this points to an important
feature of John Paul II’s anthropology relative to Girard’s. Girard may be said
to intend interpersonal relations even more directly and single-­mindedly than
John Paul II and to describe the Underground with greater detail, but John
Paul II’s starting in the pre-­fall “beginning” of the book of Genesis and the
communio personarum leads him more directly to descriptions of the beatify-
ing possibilities of interpersonal reciprocity. In his description of shame, for
example, we see him illuminating a vision of fallen humanity’s contact with
its origin in interpersonal communion.

Shame and the Underground

John Paul II also considers the phenomenon of “shamelessness,” a condition,

he notes, that is reached only with difficulty.67 The durability of shame means
that it will remain a source of inspiration for humanity. Even so, the warning
provided by shame is not so forceful that it cannot be ignored, and where
it is, “the anchor of love is lost,” and “the whole order is destroyed.”68 But
rather than speaking of shamelessness, we might regard shame as coming to
play another, “Underground” role in the “shameless.” The shameless person
experiences shame but in a way that does not orient him to the proper goal of
shame, at least not directly. Shame, after all, is associated by John Paul II with
the restraint of the destabilizing experiences of pride and lust. In the absence
of the exercise of this restraint, concupiscence comes to exercise an increas-
ing and paradoxical “constraint on restraint,” a constraint on self-­mastery that
impairs the exercise of the “full dimension of personal subjectivity.”69

66 
Ibid., 244.
67 
Ibid., 170.
68 
Ibid., 171.
69 
Ibid., 259, 288, 290–­92.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 143

In the service of love, constraint has a positive value that functions to

promote personal happiness. It contributes to the defense and development
of the person, the flowering of higher gifts and values. The person of lust
likewise experiences constraint, but the constraint is not for the sake of
promoting personal qualities but for degrading them. The obsession with
sexual values obscures other aspects of the personhood of the other. The
man of lust becomes insensitive and cruel, self-­absorbed, and alienated from
the qualities of personhood in the self and the other. He is rendered incapa-
ble, in other words, of the interpersonal communion where personal values
and human happiness are experienced. The constraint of shame is active in
shamelessness, but it has a hidden and corrosive effect that is not perceived.
It operates in the darkness of the Underground.
But even in this mode, shame can serve its role of orienting the person
toward personal values. It does so by its continual alienation of the effort to
dominate from any real prospect of happiness. Had Dostoevsky not ruled
out any real hope for the Underground Man, we might otherwise look for it
in this. We hear in the Underground Man’s final conversation with Liza, the
prostitute that he has befriended, that he has come to the realization that
his desire to “dominate and possess” others is entirely at odds with his own
happiness.70 In realizations such this, he receives a glimpse, however brief, of
the vanity of his fantasies, the sterility of his conflicts, and the pointlessness
of his victories, such as they are, and they suggest to us the possibility that he
might take a new course in life, establish a new dynamic between himself and
others, and so rise up from the Underground.
This notion of “rising from the Underground” resonates powerfully with
Christian revelation, especially in light of the supreme significance of Jesus’s
experience of rising from the tomb, which he refers to in one instance as “the
belly of the earth” (Mt 12:40). For Girard, resurrection is synonymous with
Christian conversion, the essence of which is taking Jesus as the principal
mediator of one’s desire.71 Resurrection, in other words, begins in the here
and now, with a departure from the Underground that is characterized by a
restoration of psychological integrity, the reconciliation of the divided portions
of one’s self that is the prelude to a reconciliation with the rivals generated by
disordered imitation. It is noteworthy that the original French title of Girard’s
work devoted to the literature of Dostoevsky, Resurrection from Underground,
is Du double à l’unité—­literally, “From the double to unity”—­which indicates the
essential feature of the itinerary of the resurrection of conversion. Conver-
sion is the reconciliation of the partial “selves” generated by pride and the
reestablishment of a healed person capable of a life-­giving interpersonal

70 
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 146–­47.
71 
Girard, Things Hidden, 430.
144 Personalism as Interpersonalism

reciprocity. We might regard this resurrection of conversion as a kind of fore-

taste of the resurrection as presented by John Paul II, which he describes as
“the redemption of the body.”72 Here too we see a reconciliation of what were
formerly at odds. The life of discipleship seeks to harmonize a legitimate desire
to overcome obstacles and to exercise dominion, on the one hand, and the
desire for happiness, on the other. In the risen body of Jesus, we see a victory
that accomplishes these ends simultaneously. In the risen Lord, we see the flesh
completely raised over all obstacles, yielding to the benevolent dominion of the
spirit, and in a condition of perfect happiness.

Personalism as Interpersonalism

The fruitfulness of the interpersonal approach becomes clear when consid-

ered alongside attempts to understand the phenomena of the Underground
in terms of metaphysical concepts and other static approaches to human
nature. Jean-­Paul Sartre, for example, saw in the agonized masochism of the
Underground Man a person liberated from the confining strictures of “the
Good” and “the pursuit of happiness.” His self-­imposed misery was taken
to be a sign of the wild freedom of an existentialist hero.73 Girard’s read-
ing discloses what existentialist writers never notice—­that at the heart of the
“freedom” of the Underground Man is a slavish idolatry directed toward the
models of his desire.74 We encounter a similar misunderstanding in Sigmund
Freud’s assessment of human nature. After observing in his patients the
essential feature of the Underground—­“the repetition of what causes ever
more suffering”75—­Freud felt compelled to posit the “death instinct,” an urge
operating independently and contrary to the “life instinct.”76 By examining
the phenomena of the Underground in terms of the reciprocity of inter-
personal relationships, John Paul II and Girard are able to gather the para-
doxical features of the Underground together in a coherent vision of human
nature. Unlike Freud, both can recognize in masochism a frustrated sadism.
The Underground is peopled by those who would prefer to dominate others

72 
John Paul II, Man and Woman, 189. Girard himself understands his view of the
resurrection of conversion in these terms as well, as a foreshadowing of the more
comprehensive restoration of humanity’s resurrection from the dead. See Girard,
Things Hidden, 233.
73 
Girard, Deceit, Desire, 256–­57.
74 
Ibid., 257.
75 
Girard, Things Hidden, 356.
76 
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology, ed. Al-
bert Dickson (New York: Penguin, 1991), 316.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 145

but who end up drawing close to their dominators as though that were the
next best thing. There is nothing in Girard or John Paul II that contradicts the
notion that human nature is inclined to the good and the pursuit of happiness,
but both thinkers are keenly aware that when these metaphysical inclinations
encounter the world of persons, the world of “others,” they are easily diverted
by a Prometheanism that thwarts itself.
And this, perhaps, points to the particular intellectual vocation of person-
alism in the history of Western philosophy: to intend and explicate the signif-
icance of the “other” in the constitution of the “self.” And this vocation
is all the more important in light of the tendency in modern philosophy to
exclude the “other” from consideration. This tendency begins most notably
with Descartes, whose “turn to the subject” turned philosophical attention
toward the self to the exclusion of the “other” and initiated a centuries-­long
course in Western thought that proceeded to give to the human subject all
the prerogatives that medieval thought gave to the “Other,” God himself.
Beginning with the cogito of Descartes and proceeding through idealism and
on to Nietzsche’s “Overman” and twentieth-­century existentialist thought,
the subject transitions from standing as the principal perspective on all real-
ity to becoming finally the source of all being.77 Now it is the subject who
“must justify the being of the real” and ground himself in himself, taking as
his own, as it were, God’s declaration to Moses: “I am who I am.”78 Among
modern philosophers, only Nietzsche saw clearly that in this displacement of
God, humanity had taken upon itself a task that is properly superhuman, and
we have seen that Dostoevsky realized a corollary to Nietzsche’s view—­that
the attempt at self-­divinization would result in a self-­crucifixion in the dark-
ness of the Underground.79
We can regard this vocation of personalism to be a specifically Christian
vocation. After all, it is from within the Trinitarian controversies of the first
centuries of Christianity that the notion of “person” emerges. Theologians
in the earliest centuries of Christianity settled on the term to describe the
separate personal identities of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It
is worth noting that the Greek prosopon (πρόσωπον) adopted by the Church,
which comes into Latin as persona and then into English as person, had a
rather checkered past. It originated in the Greek theater, where it was used to
denote the mask worn by an actor on the stage. This use suggests an identity
that is temporary, taken on and off, for which reason the first theological use

77 
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Classics, 2017), 20–­27, 83.
78 
Girard, Resurrection from Underground, 93.
79 
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-
tage, 1974), 125. See Girard, Resurrection from Underground, 93.
146 Personalism as Interpersonalism

of prosopon was among the heretical Sabellians, who regarded God as merely
“one” rather than “three in one.” It was employed by the Sabellians for the
sake of minimizing the significance of the personal identities of Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit as temporary roles adopted and traded by the one God just
as the ancient actor traded masks and characters. For this reason, the use of
prosopon to describe God was originally condemned. The term would be reha-
bilitated by the Church Fathers and finally embraced officially at the councils
of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), which declared God to be a Trin-
ity of one divine substance and three divine persons. The term person could
be accepted by the Council Fathers when it was established as the denomina-
tion of an eternal, coequal identity associated with an eternal relation. Within
the life of Christ, his permanent, identity-­making relation is expressed in
his answer to the vocation of his Father, the eternal will he expresses in the
declaration “I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but
the will of the one who sent me” (Jn 6:38).80
Perhaps we can regard the history of Christianity’s use of the term person
as a kind of parable concerning a danger confronting the human person.
The countless “masks” worn throughout a life, the countless identifications
we make with others by way of imitation, threaten to dissipate and dissolve the
human person if they are not gathered together and stabilized into a “face.” This
occurs within the context of a vocation, in answer to the call of an “other” who
can render one’s identity coherent and permanent, an identity that gathers up
the entirety of one’s existence—­past, present, and future—­into an integrated
and coherent “I am.”81 The poet Sylvia Plath gives a tragic witness to these
issues from the perspective of one whose personhood deteriorated to the point
of self-­destruction. Her journal entries in the days leading up to her suicide give
evidence of the condition of one inadequately grounded in sound relations
to others and the other: “I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind
my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking ­nothingness. . . .
I do not know who I am, where I am going—­and I am the one who has
to decide the answers to these hideous questions.”82 Amazingly, Plath herself
longs for that which can provide her with “integration,” pull her together and

80 
See Leonard Geddes, “Person,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert
Appleton, 1911), accessed July 26, 2018, http://​www​.newadvent​.org/​cathen/​11726a​
.htm.
81 
See John Paul II’s discussion of the important relation of vocation to personal
identity in Love and Responsibility, 241–­44.
82 
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York: Ballantine, 1991), 59–­60.
I was made aware of these quotations from Plath by Gil Bailie. See Gil Bailie, “The
Vine and the Branches Discourse: The Gospel’s Psychological Apocalypse,” Conta-
gion 4 (Spring 1997): 138.
 Fr. Michael Darcy 147

back from the “mimicking nothingness” that evacuates her personhood of real
substance: “My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The centre does not hold.’ There
is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-­preservation. . . .
God, where is the integrating force going to come from?”83 As both Girard
and John Paul II demonstrate, the self is integrated by the other whose likeness
communicates the ability to live in a reciprocity with all others that is edifying
and integrates the self into a coherent “I am.”
The vocation of personalism may turn out to be to emphasize what is
neglected in Boethius’s famous and foundational definition of the person,
which he described as an “individual substance of a rational nature.”84 To
this we must add a recognition of the interpersonal that is proper to the
person as a center of substantiating relations. We might say something similar
of the “incommunicability” attributed to the human person by St. Thomas
Aquinas and later thinkers.85 Incommunicability must not be regarded in
terms of the subjective closure of subjectivism, the sort of self-­closure indi-
cated by Plath when she declared her need to decide for herself “who I am”
and “where I am going.” The incommunicability of the person is rather the
basis for the interpersonal relation.86 The incommunicability of the human
person is communicated to it by God, which makes it practically synonymous
with the “solitude” of John Paul II’s “Original Solitude.” It is an aspect of the
likeness to God communicated to the subject by God at creation and fortified
by his grace, and it requires grounding in the interpersonal for its exercise and
development. Apart from this awareness and emphasis on the significance
of the other to the person, personalism may come to be regarded as simply
another species of Western individualism.

Selected Bibliography

Bailie, Gil. “The Vine and the Branches Discourse: The Gospel’s Psycholog-
ical Apocalypse.” Contagion 4 (Spring 1997): 120–­45.
Berlin, Isaiah. “The Assault on the French Enlightenment: Fichte and Ro-
mantic Self-­Assertion.” Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. Accessed August 12,
2018. http://​berlin​.wolf​.ox​.ac​.uk/​lists/​nachlass/​assault3​.pdf.
———. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013.

83 
Plath, Journals, 61.
84 
Naturae rationalis individua substantia. See Geddes, “Person.”
85 
Ibid.
86 
See John Crosby, Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 1996), 56.
148 Personalism as Interpersonalism

Brown, P. R. L. “St. Augustine.” In Trends in Medieval Political Thought. Edited

by Beryl Smalley. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.
Crosby, John. Selfhood of the Human Person. Washington, DC: Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1996.
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by John Cotting-
ham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Classics, 2017.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg.
New York: Bantam, 1992.
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology. Edit-
ed by Albert Dickson. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Translated by Yvonne Freccero.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
———. Evolution and Conversion. New York: Continuum, 2007.
———. Resurrection from Underground. Translated by James Williams. New
York: Crossroads, 1997.
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