determinate, but not so determinate that natural individuals lose their freedom
to make themselves to be whatever they choose. The state must allow zones of
natural liberty in which the individual can enjoy his natural indeterminacy. As
the French philosopher Pierre Manent puts it, human nature becomes a
cipher, an‘efficacious indetermination’allowing a zone of liberty in which
the individual can‘affirm himself without knowing himself’.^27
This directionless self-affirmation represents the grand solution promised
by negative anthropology. The state is made a determinate person, having the
kingly predicates of rule, while individuals enjoy‘efficacious indetermination’,
which is to say pure liberty. It is the best of both worlds, at least for those who
wish to set aside the notion of man as an image bearer.
In his 1976 Lenten conferences, Wojtyla observes that modern anthropol-
ogy transplants‘the Prometheus myth into the soil of Genesis’.^28 Told by
Protagoras, this myth imagines ahumanumthat differentiates itself from the
rest of the animals only by the extrinsic addition of technological art (stolen
from Hephaestus and Athena), which is used to invent the world of culture,
but most significantly the civil measures of good and evil.^29 ‘Careful study of
human origins’, he proposes, is‘particularly important today if we are to
understand the crucial problems of anthropology and ethics.’^30 One cannot
‘understand either Sartre or Marx without havingfirst read and pondered very
deeply thefirst three chapters of Genesis’.^31 In other words, the problem of
human origins is not immediately a question of historical chronology, but
rather a way to imagine and to experimentally explore experiences which
undergird the proposition of negative anthropology that‘man is an unknown
being’;^32 or, as Cardinal Wojtyla put it, that‘man is alone, and his greatness
requires that this be so’.^33
Later, as pope, he spoke to the Roman Rota of anthropologies that regard the
‘human’, given by nature, as raw data, a prolepsis or outline of what man might
be when he is made‘specifically human’in the‘historical and cultural sphere’.^34
George Cottier, Theologian of the Papal Household, points out that on this
view we are no longer speaking of nature‘but of a“state of nature”’,of‘an
order of myth’. Although told in different ways, it is the myth of a proto-man
(^27) Pierre Manent,The City of Man, trans. Marc A. LePain, with a foreword by Jean Elshtain
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 129.
(^28) Sign of Contradiction, 32. He returns to the interpretation of Genesis via the Promethean
myth inEvangelium vitae§15.
(^29) Plato,Protagoras320d–326. Note the criticism of the fables about states of nature which
attend theflight from acknowledging oneself as an image bearer inVeritatis splendor§§30–2.
(^30) Sign of Contradiction, 56. (^31) Sign of Contradiction, 24.
(^32) Sign of Contradiction, 102. (^33) Sign of Contradiction, 35.
(^34) Address to the Roman Rota (1 Jan. 2001), in William H. Woestman, OMI (ed.),Papal
Allocutions to the Roman Rota, 1939– 2002 (Ottawa: Faculty of Canon Law, St Paul University,
2002), 261.
250 F. Russell Hittinger