rule. Justice without mercy, he concludes, cannot restore man to himself.^19
Man imitates divine rule not only by making judgements concerning justice,
but also by being‘rich in mercy’. The anointed of God always announces the
reign of both justice and mercy.
InDominus et vivificantem(1986), John Paul comments on a passage in
Gaudium et spes:‘when God is forgotten the creature itself becomes unintel-
ligible’.^20 Human rule is obscured without the creator, because it is the
vocation of an image bearer to rule with God—both by created nature and
by the habilitation of grace.^21 Finally, inLaborem exercens(1981), he discusses
the acts proper to an image bearer: dominion over material creation, §4; moral
rule, precisely as a subject who acts and decides, §6; and provident for others,
collaborating to rightly order society, §§16ff.
All of these themes of image bearing, participation, and the kingly predi-
cates of self-rule were explored in his lengthy series of Wednesday audiences
(1979–84) which come to us under the title Theology of the Body.^22 And they
would be reworked yet again when John Paul moved to the much longer and
more complex encyclicals on political order, moral theology, and constitu-
tional issues surrounding the issue of human life.
NEGATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY OR PROMETHEUS
INTHESOILOFGENESISTo conclude, I shall reflect on why John Paul investigated the anthropological
problem as eroding otherwise reasonablefixes to the institutional problems of the
previous generation. From his earliest dramatic works written in Krakow under
German occupation from 1939 to 1945, to the 1976 Lenten conferences given for
Pope Paul VI shortly before his own election to the papacy, Wojtyla increasingly
came to believe that the crisis of the twentieth century is anthropological. The
(^19) Dives in misericordia§14.
(^20) Dominus et vivificantem§11, citingGaudium et spes§36.
(^21) ‘To create means to call into existence from nothing: therefore, to create means to give
existence. And if the visible world is created for man, therefore the world is given to man. And at
the same time that same man in his own humanity receives as a gift a special“image and
likeness”to God. This means not only rationality and freedom as constitutive properties of
human nature, but also, from the very beginning, the capacity of having a personal relationship
with God, as“I”and“you”, and therefore the capacity of having a covenant, which will take place
in God’s salvific communication with man. Against the background of the“image and likeness”
of God,“the gift of the Spirit”ultimately means a call to friendship, in which the transcendent
“depths of God”become in some way opened toparticipationon the part of man.’Dominus et
vivificantem§34.
(^22) Jaroslaw Kupczak OP,Gift and Communion: John Paul II’s Theology of the Body(Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014).
248 F. Russell Hittinger